bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Philosopher of Nonviolence
Authors: Capitini Aldo
Published: March 2007

We are at the moment experiencing renewed interest in the life and work of Aldo Capitini, the Italian philosopher of nonviolence, who was born in Perugia in 1899 and died there in 1968. Conferences, publications, and meetings are drawing the Italian public's attention to his pure lifestyle, deeply marked first by the courageous choice to oppose fascism, then by the long period during which he was marginalized by the university world and official culture; but attention has also been drawn to his numerous writings (from his Elementi di una esperienza religiosa, published in 1937 at the height of the fascist regime, with the help of Benedetto Croce, to Religione aperta, one of the last books to be placed on the Index by the Catholic Church, and finally the essay Attraverso due terzi del secolo, which appeared posthumously in Guido Calogero's journal La Cultura), and to his tireless activity as the driving force behind movements and initiatives (it was Capitini, amongst others, who organised the first peace march from Perugia to Assisi in 1961).
New Expeditions: Itineraries, Migrations, Excursions
Authors: Rosa Nicolás
Published: March 2007

Imperialism and its aftermath set off an extraordinary wave of travel, exploration, and migrations around the globe, in which writers, or potential writers, were inevitably caught up. One consequence was that many novels of the last one hundred and fifty years, especially British novels, have had exotic settings.

David Lodge, “The Exotic”, The Art of Fiction, pp. 158-9.
Humanity, Inhumanity, and Closeness in the Look
Authors: Boni Tanella
Published: March 2007

The newborn opens its eyes when it comes into the world. We close the eyes of the dead because they are no longer part of the world of the living. It is through looking that we enter the world, that we take possession of it, and that we leave it. We open or close our eyes to the living beings and things that surround us. Of prime importance among these living beings are other humans, who may resemble or be different from us, but whose eyes also look. From this perspective, to live is to look at other people and at ourselves. Artists, particularly those who work with light and looking, such as painters, photographers, or film-makers, show us that art is above all seeing life: we look at the other who has been painted, photographed, or filmed. At the same time a photograph or painting of this other tells us who we are and what type of relationship we have with the world. For looking is never neutral. Every look, from wherever it comes, is imbued with culture. In art, looking is part of writing. But, when we look at others, how do we see them? Do we see them? The blind may have poor sight, yet, because they have bodies, sensibilities, minds, and other faculties that enable them to enter into relations with others, they have a way of looking.
Commentary
Authors: Hamant Yves
Published: March 2007

The rich text by Roberte Hamayon can be viewed from several angles. I will limit myself to one by noting that this particular case offers a very interesting illustration of the treatment of ethnic questions in Russia following the collapse of the USSR.
History Teaching in Romania
Authors: Nalin Speranta Dumitru
Published: March 2007

Relationships to time through memory or projection form a particular axis along which the post-communist space reshapes, constructs and understands its identity. Caught between a public rejection of the communist past and a need for roots in the recent past, if only for narrative reasons, and cornered by the near future in the name of transition, the postcommunist societies face a dilemma in their search for identity. The weight of this dilemma can be directly measured by the level of consensus around the passing of certain ‘reparation’ laws, such as the restitution of nationalised property or ‘lustration’, however it can also be seen in other public debates. This sheds light on the difficulties that a society may experience in adopting a collectively-accepted narrative, which then forms the basis on which it constructs its identity.
Reconstructing Regional Relationships, or the New Bases for Rebuilding Spheres of Influence
Authors: Chaour Chérifa
Published: March 2007

It is understandable that, since the fall of the Berlin wall, researchers interested in the social and political upheavals brought about by this phase of history should have concentrated their attentions on what had been the immediate sphere of influence of the Soviet centre of power. However we are within our rights today to ask why our understanding of the structural (economic and social) transformations in what is conveniently called the ‘post-communist’ period and space, and of post-bipolarisation regional relationships, should be confined to that region of the world corresponding to the ex-USSR and the Eastern countries.
In Favour of an Urban Policy in Russia
Authors: Kogan Leonid
Published: March 2007

Among the most important problems related to Russia's development, which are considered in depth in various kinds of forum and the media, both here and in the west, there is, however, an almost total absence of such a crucial strategic topic as working out an urban policy. In the meantime the crises that Russia is continually facing as it undergoes reforms are caused by the disparity between the tasks that have to be completed and the stage of civilization we are at. In order to fast forward to another level we have only the strategic role of the cities, in particular the largest of them, to guide us. Without real cities with a developed urban culture no effective solution can be found to the problems we are up against, whether they are economic, cultural, social or human rights issues.
The Post-Communist Town: An Incomparable Testing-Ground for Social Geography
Authors: Burgel Galia , Burgel Guy
Published: March 2007

The study of the post-Communist towns of East Europe and Russia does not only present the social sciences with the opening of a new field and the attraction of exoticism close at hand. They are a remarkable observatory of the complex relations which unite the material facets of urban life (extension of the built-up area, architectural forms, types of distribution of infrastructures and services) and the social structures (mode of government, nature of the economic initiative, expressions of sociability). In three-quarters of a century for Russia, in fifty years for the countries of East Europe, cities many ages old were to have two changes of system: from liberal industrial capitalism to the controlled Communist economy, from interventionist autarchy to the globalized market. To give the lie to the poet (Baudelaire), towns change no faster than the hearts of mortals but beat to the rhythm of their continuities, their aspirations and their dreams.
Commentary
Authors: Hamant Yves
Published: March 2007

I should like to consider both the relationship between the authorities and society in the theme of ecology, and its chronology.

As far as chronology is concerned, it seems to me that concern for the environment started to emerge in the USSR, at least on a large scale, mainly during the Brezhnev years (1964-1982).
Definition of Man: What is Left of the Nuremberg Code?
Authors: Guillebaud Jean-Claude
Published: March 2007

All of us share the same feeling of being torn between two equally impossible attitudes, namely the absurdity of resistance and the abjectness of renunciation, that is to say a feeling of surrender to the course of events and I think that it is true that we are all more or less filled with this feeling or to revert to other terminology which I will borrow from Jacques Ellul, we all have the feeling of being swept away in a haphazard process over which we no longer have any hold. In this respect, I tend to agree with Alain Caillé, that we are at the moment experiencing a shift, a transformation, a revolution - use whichever term you prefer - such as has only happened two or three times in western history and it is true that this great shift is probably comparable, to the Renaissance, say, or the fall of the Roman Empire or possibly the Enlightenment or even the Industrial Revolution in its extent, radicality and also what is enigmatic about it that for those who are experiencing it. There is a radicality in what we are experiencing which is the source of that feeling which sometimes assails us that all resistance would not only be useless but ridiculous. I intend to deconstruct, if I may so express it, this feeling of ridicule which is paralysing us and which indeed paralyses us all the more because it is exploited day after day by talk of flux in which all desires and all ethical or political voluntarism is in general described as some kind of residual archaism.
Man: Natural or Self-Fabricated?
Authors: Bourg Dominique
Published: March 2007

What is humanity? I do not claim to answer this question; more simply, I will seek to bring to light the now-problematic character of the very concept of humanity. I will start from a basic established fact: today we cannot conceive the notion of humanity without starting from a dual tension, between a distant past and a future which is either more or less near or very remote. In whatever direction one turns, the concept of humanity is confused. It is still more confused if we seek to embrace past and future together.
What We Have Lost with Religion
Authors: Gauchet Marcel
Published: March 2007

My title is deliberately provocative. It is intended to give pause to all those - quite a few, I imagine - who are convinced that they owe nothing at all to religion in any shape or form and who, as a result, think they have lost nothing in the recent difficulties that have stripped the Christian churches of most of the hold they still retained over European society. Because it goes without saying, in today's thinking, that religion is a question of personal choice, individual participation and private belief. This is not the kind of religion I am talking about. The thesis I should like to advance is that, whatever our beliefs, church or degree of involvement, until quite recently all of us used to owe something to religion, and that we have all lost something in the enormous change which has carried us with it over the last thirty years and which, among other things, is currently completing its liquidation of the vestiges of religious organisation that remained among us. This something is directly related to the ‘dehumanisation of the world’ with which we are now so preoccupied.
Can Democracy Survive the Disgust of Man for Man? From Social Darwinism to Eugenics
Authors: Roucloux Joël
Published: March 2007

In their major book devoted to the Herbert Spencer ‘affair’, Daniel Becquemont and Laurent Mucchielli profess themselves to be quite ready to share the opinion of Georges Guille-Escuret: the 19th-century British thinker would appear to dominate ‘discreetly our spontaneous perceptions‘. The forgotten philosopher in France appears to colour the moral atmosphere of the West. He appears to be, without our knowing it, our major contemporary. The surprising lapse of memory in which his name has found itself stuck fast appears to guarantee the triumph of his ideas. To unearth his name and resubmit his work to scrutiny takes on a certain urgent character when seen from this perspective: it would mean putting the so-called ideological evidence of our time to the test of the history of ideas. To render unto Spencer that which is Spencer's would be to remove from this so-called evidence the ‘immediate and unquestionable character’ with which it invests itself.
Nature, Norms and Democracy
Authors: Scubla Lucien
Published: March 2007

I am quite prepared to admit that modern western thought is shot through with contradictions. For example, it is not coherent to think both that the idea of human nature is an illusion and that eugenics is an out-and-out evil; or to claim to be a democrat and exclude a priori the topic of eugenics from political debate. However, I personally very much doubt that the notions of nature and democracy are themselves in crisis. In my view they simply give rise to semantic confusion and false problems that certain basic twentieth-century discoveries - in the field of physics, anthropology and political science - ought to be able to clear up, if they were better known. We shall just touch on a few thinkers whose work may give us some pointers to a clearer, calmer view of things. First a philosopher, Raymond Ruyer (1902-1987), and an economist, Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), two of whose key ideas this paper will combine: a neo-Aristotelian conception of nature, implying the existence of regulating principles and norms, to which humans and their societies, like everything else, are subject; a procedural conception of democracy that says it is not an end in itself but, under certain conditions, an appropriate means of making political decisions and settling disputes. And in addition some anthropologists, who helped either to put human beings back into a neo-Aristotelian world, or to define more accurately the essence of the political: Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose structuralism gave back its full importance to the notion of formal cause and even to the idea of final cause, and André Leroi-Gourhan, who confirmed that ‘art imitates nature’ by demonstrating that technical skill is a natural extension of life, whose processes and results it mimics; Arthur Maurice Hocart, who demonstrated the ritual origin of all institutions, particularly political ones.
The Temptation of the Undifferentiated. From the World Without Qualities to the Man Without Qualities
Authors: Dewitte Jacques
Published: March 2007

My topic will be philosophical and, more precisely still, ontological. If we wish to conceive of what is at stake in the ‘dehumanization of the world’ and if we want to oppose it, we need to widen our perspective and take in not only the destiny of the human but the status of things and beings in general.

The thesis I am going to put forward, which is still quite daring given the current stage of my thinking, is a hunch and a hypothesis that I am trying gradually to clarify. My theory is that there was a kind of originating decision, a primal ontological choice made by the Greco-Latin as well as the Judeo-Christian West about the way of viewing beings in general; a decision in favour of differentiated forms and against the representation of a real, supposed to be composed in the final analysis of a basic single substrate whose differentiated forms were merely states, pure appearances without substance. I am also putting forward the notion that this primal choice, which is or was our choice and remains my own, was not absolutely necessary; it was a contingent free opting in favour of something and against another possible option.
Is the Democratic Ideal Conceivable Without the Notion of Human Nature? On John Dewey's Democratic Humanism
Authors: Chanial Philippe
Published: March 2007

Does the existing order have any better justification than the argument that it is ‘natural’? In most of its guises the ‘nature’ argument in fact arises more often than not from an argument whose authority is questionable, since it has been used to back up many forms of tyranny, oppression and exclusion. In this sense we are quite rightly wary of this notion of human nature as used to explore the democratic ideal. If the democratic ideal is associated with the modern experience of the indeterminate and the ‘dissolution of fixed markers of certainty’ (Lefort), it seems to imply the idea of the plasticity of human nature rather more than the hypothesis of an objective human essence. As the feminist and ecology movements have taught us, the question of nature has to remain open in democracy, and open above all for democratic debate. An insistence that there are characteristics intrinsic to human nature that make humans inclined to a democratic way of life reminds us too much of Plato's ideal city or Hobbes's Leviathan. And if we criticize this type of reasoning in those who seem to us to be democracy's enemies, we can scarcely have the face to use it to justify that kind of regime.
Visual Construction of Writing in the Medieval Book
Authors: Pombo Elena Llamas
Published: March 2007

The links which connect the nature of the medium to the methods of access and to the objects of knowledge, relationships between form and content, are a broad continuum whose interlinked facts require a transdisciplinary study.

Nowadays, attempts to discern these links seem to concern two central groups of correlations, which have been analysed from the perspective of different disciplines.

In the foreground of correlations we find the relationship between the material characteristics of the mediums and the methods of access to their contents; in this field of cultural technologies, the history of verbal language is punctuated first by the ‘invention’ of writing and its different systems, then by a series of transformations of manuscripts and the printed word, and finally by electronic communication. In the study of this first relationship, the history, psychology and physiology of reading establish a relationship between several parameters: on the one hand, the system of signs and spaces in the organization of the written code, and on the other hand, the methods of appropriation of this code by the reader (both reading aloud and silent reading), linear progression or freedom of selection of the contents, degree of speed, amount of information” habits of memorization, etc.
Who were the Authors before Homer in Mesopotamia?
Authors: Glassner Jean-Jacques
Published: March 2007

Mesopotamian works are usually anonymous; at best the names of some copyists are known. Some significant exceptions, such as Saggil-kênam-ubbib, the author of Théodicée babylonienne, Kabti-ilî-Marduk, author of the ‘myth of Erra’, and Shamash-muballit, the son of Warad-Sîn, who may have been the author of a hymn to the goddess Inanna, do not make up for this lacuna.
External Memories: Hypertext, Traces and Agents
Authors: Boy Guy
Published: March 2007

‘External memories’ raise a question about context: ‘external to what?’ External memory is a technical term applied to everything that can be memorized in an individual's environment. As a general rule I have decided to retain the technical terms that characterize the area of the topic under discussion. It was Ted Nelson who coined the word hypertext in 1967 to signify non-sequential writing as well as a computer technology that allowed the user to move about freely by means of software links. I shall use the term software to mean computer programs. Electronic publishing started with the Xanadu system developed by Nelson. At the lowest level a hypertext is a system for managing databases that allows the user to connect together information screens using links. It is a collection of texts interconnected by means of interactive switches. This dynamic presentation of non-linear texts could not be printed on a conventional page. Hypertext allows the origin of a piece of information to be traced. In this article traceability is synonymous with explanation: ‘Why was this equipment designed in one way rather than another?’ It is about discovering the route of the design process that led to the eventual idea for the equipment. The necessary explanations are often required long after decisions were made, and this is why traceability is a matter of memory. The term agent is often used to mean those members of a community that act on its behalf. There are agents for a company or public department. There are biological agents. In a non-technological world traceability is ideally carried out by human agents who explain to other human agents. The term agent has been extended into the computer world to mean software to which the user delegates, sometimes unwittingly, tasks of varying complexity. These are then called software agents. In this article I refer to agent in its wider meaning, to be understood as an actor or an entity able to act in a limited context and having a quite specific role and appropriate resources.
Recent Trends in General Linguistics
Authors: Sommerfelt Alf
Published: March 2007

The importance of language for the real understanding of culture is being more and more felt by most students of civilisation. A linguistic system is an expression, though not a complete one, of the system of perception which a social group has of its surroundings and of itself. No civilisation can be fully understood by one who ignores its linguistic means of expression. Modern anthropologists cannot work any more through interpreters if they want to collect really reliable material. As Edward Sapir writes, ‘Some day the attempt to master a primitive culture without the help of the language of its society will seem as amateurish as the labors of a historian who cannot handle the original documents of the civilization which he is describing.’
Discoveries and Disputations
Authors: Gillie R. D.
Published: March 2007

Archaeological discoveries, unless of unusual beauty, are generally of less inherent interest than the conclusions to which they point. Not that they are merely evidence in the court-room sense of the word; they certainly spur the imagination, and provide tangible links with those vast, unknown areas of human knowledge which scholarship seeks to restore to us. The public interest in recovered documents of the past, however, seems mainly in the discovery of the objects themselves rather than in the interpretation of those objects. It is as if proving there was a past at a given date is of more interest than the life which made up that past.

It is evident, for example, that public interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls is fading, now that publication of some of the new texts contained in them allows a preliminary assessment of their significance. Contact with the minds of men who composed them seems to be of lesser moment to many than the physical existence of manuscripts written and made use of two thousand years ago.
Piero Della Francesca—Seurat—Gris
Authors: Venturi Lionello
Published: March 2007

The director of the National Gallery in London told me recently that the most popular pictures in his museum are Piero della Francesca's ‘Baptism of Christ’ and ‘Nativity’, and it is common knowledge that art-lovers sensitive to the present trends of taste nowadays go to Arezzo to see the frescoes in the Church of St. Francis rather than to Rome for the sake of Raphael's Loggias or Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
The Beginnings of the Medieval Empire
Authors: Fichtenau Heinrich
Published: March 2007

When we say Europe, what do we mean? Perhaps it has never been more necessary than it is today to apply not emotion but scientific method in answering this question. If we ask the politicians they will tell us of the continuity of Europe and its function in world politics. The geographer will speak of the special qualities of the soil and the flora. Might we not usefully regard the map of Europe from the point of view of the other, so much more extensive continents? From that point of view, would the continent of Europe seem to be an annex of Asia or Africa? No, certainly not. There are grounds of paramount importance which make such a view impossible: reasons, determined by the common history of the European nations and the common civilisation which was the product of their historical development.
On the Relations Between Domination and the Numbers of Men
Authors: Sauvy Alfred
Published: March 2007

Between the numbers of men (or their ‘pressure’) and the domination which is exercised upon them, various relationships exist, the knowledge of which seems to be very useful to an understanding of historical evolution. These relationships are often of so markedly reciprocal a nature that, as against the difficulty of separating cause from effect, it seems preferable to speak simply of accommodation, or even of relative harmony.
The Origin of Man
Authors: Rivet Paul
Published: March 2007

Of all the sciences pertaining to Man it is the science of prehistoric man which has made the most sensational progress during the last fifty years. With this in mind it seems possible to construct a synthesis of all the facts known at the present time, in spite of the risks incurred by such an attempt. It is surely necessary at certain times to be rash, and in science as well as in life one must be willing to dare greatly, to act dangerously.
Towards a Policy of Humanism
Authors: Gillie D. R.
Published: March 2007

Scholars’ congresses enjoy outside the circles of those who participate in them a quite unjustified reputation for dulness. They have never attracted the attention of novelists. The printed volumes of their proceedings don't look inviting. Participation, even on the fringe as an observer, completely reverses this impression. There is a natural happiness and cordiality amongst men and women who are enjoying a rare opportunity of discussing their special subjects of study with those who are equally interested and competent. There is often more than a glint of passion in argument. There is reversal of roles when great scholars return to the students’ benches to listen to one another—or instead play the truant in order to talk together in cafés. There is intellectual excitement when new views and discoveries are announced. There is the preoccupation with the common cause of enlarging and organising knowledge when pressing practical problems of the particular branch of scholarship are discussed. There is the perpetual conflict between the systematic approach devised by the organisers of the congress and the individual wishes of participants and would-be contributors of papers which fit into no general programme.
Dante and His Time
Authors: Borgese G. A.
Published: March 2007

Suppose, for the sake of easy memory, that the Middle Ages begin in A. D. 313, finish in 1313. The first date is marked by Constantine's Edict of Milan, virtually establishing Christianity as the religion of the Roman world empire. The second date emphasises the sudden death of Emperor Henry VII at Buonconvento in Tuscany during his Italian campaign, as the irreparable failure of the last attempt that could be undertaken, with a reasonable chance of success, to enact the plan of Roman-Christian unity under whose spell the Latin West and the Germanic North had dreamed and laboured all through those thousand years. Of this phase of history Dante is the witness and an actor, a victim and the judge as well.
Current Problems in the History of Art
Authors: Chastel André
Published: March 2007

Perhaps nothing is more indicative of an advanced civilisation than informed interest in the arts. There have always been connoisseurs and persons of taste; more recent, however—it goes back only two or three generations—is the academic discipline which has brought the serious historian into a domain which had long been reserved for the enthusiast, the lover of virtu, and the artist. When Nietzsche noted Burckhardt's and Taine's success in combining the history of art with that of civilisations, he wondered whether this was a symptom of decadence. Little inclined to propose, easy tasks to modern man, he perceived a mortal danger in ‘pedantic’ simplifications and did not doubt that the need for ‘scientific’ explanations in matters of art would have as its counterpart a growing paralysis of the creative faculties. To the extent that this meant hypertrophy of memory, it would gradually enervate the fecundity of talent; was it even certain that it always favoured the development of sure and keen taste?
Predicting Economic Changes in Our Time
Authors: Fourastie Jean
Published: March 2007

Some observers are surprised by the fact that economic phenomena occupy an increasing place in the average man's concerns. Has not economic life been the necessary basis for man's physical existence since the most distant times? Have not agriculture, industry, business and finance been in existence for thousands of years ? Do not the nations’ standards of living, and even their manner of life, depend necessarily on their production?
Aggressive and Co-Operative Behaviour Amongst Insects
Authors: Richards O.W.
Published: March 2007

It has sometimes been said that it is useless to try to prevent wars since man has an ineradicable combative instinct. The term instinct is very ambiguous in its application to humans, and it may be interesting to see what occurs amongst the insects, many of whose species show the highest development of instinctive behaviour.

Many insect species are predatory, but if they depend on other distinct species, the relation is analogous to hunting or to a crude form of agriculture. Aggressive behaviour to be comparable with war must concern the different members of one species. There are many laboratory experiments which illustrate the effects of competition when a population begins to exceed the capacity of its food supply. In Flour beetles, for instance, the adult beetles and the larvae eat any egg or pupae which they happen to meet in their ceaseless burrowing through the flour. There is thus a fixed population density at which eggs are eaten as fast as they are laid. In Grain weevils, the effect of crowding is to reduce the rate at which eggs are laid by the females who appear to suffer from overstimulation when crowded. Other effects, usually harmful, may be produced by the accumulation of the products of respiration or of digestion. Finally, if the food supply is too small, there will be death from starvation. If, for instance, too many blowfly eggs are added to a piece of meat, the flies produced will either be small, weak, and infertile or, if the excess has been too great, the larvae may all starve when half grown. Thus, a piece of meat which could have produced 100 normal flies may produce none at all if a tenfold excess of eggs is laid on it.
Primitive Man, State, and Society
Authors: Koppers Wilhelm
Published: March 2007

Fritz Kern, the well-known anthropologist and historian has stated in his work: ‘It is impossible to arrive at a comprehensive knowledge of mankind from any study of history that omits primitive peoples. Once this broad basis of the history of man is given due consideration, we arrive at a historia perennis of all human existence. ‘ Though the more general significance of this pronouncement cannot be denied, it becomes particularly valid with reference to the beginnings and primitive forms of man's social and community life. In the following short exposition the main emphasis will be laid on these. It is innate in man to regard the early phases of his own race as something exceptional, one might say something normative. Without doubt this holds equally true for the forms and characteristics of primitive society and of the primitive state, in short, for every aspect of community life as it was at the dawn of man's existence —so far as we can know it.
The Position of Old-World Prehistory (Conclusion)
Authors: Childe Gordon
Published: March 2007

The pioneers of European prehistory marched under a banner inscribed Ex Oriente Lux, assuming as an axiom that all the fundamental inventions and discoveries like farming and metallurgy were brought to Europe from the East. The Frenchman Salomon Reinach first challenged the dogma, branding it as le mirage orientale, and then the Germans set about inverting the roles of Europe and Asia till under Hitler it was seriously contended that conquering invaders from Europe had spread to the valleys of the Nile and of the Tigris in time to create there the Sumerian and Pharaonic civilisations! Only now is it really possible to test the conflicting claims of the opposing schools by reference to objective data.
'Diogenes' International Prize
Authors: R.C.
Published: March 2007

At the library of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, the dissertations in the Humanities are arranged in chronological order. A single glance suffices to tell us that this classification by years coincides almost exactly with a classification by bulk. As we pass along through time, year by year, the volumes grow thicker; pamphlets merge imperceptibly into modest books, these into larger books, these in turn into weighty tomes; until finally we come across works embracing several volumes, each volume imposing in its own right. The explanation is simple: every author is normally led to consider the opinions of his predecessors in the same field or in neighbouring fields; these opinions he discusses, contests, approves, or amends; and finally this leads to the growth in bulk, gradual but unlimited, so evident on the shelves at the library.
A New Theory on Art Feeling and Form
Authors: Reid Louis Arnaud
Published: March 2007

Mrs. Langer is to be warmly congratulated on this monumental work on the philosophy of aesthetics, a sequel to her Philosophy in a New Key. She brings all the equipment of her trained and firstrate philosophical mind to bear upon the fundamental problems of art and the arts. In Part I she speaks generally of aesthetics. In Part II she writes of the ways in which aesthetic symbolism works out in visual arts, in music, in song, and opera, in dance, in poetry and other forms of literature, and in drama both comic and tragic. The book concludes (Part III) with a suggestive essay on ‘The Power of the Symbol’.
Tragedy
Authors: Bell Charles G.
Published: March 2007

I remember when I was a youth and excitable, I went to a performance of Ibsen's Ghosts. The question may be asked, excitable in which direction. Certainly it was not the one Ibsen intended. The truth is, I had absorbed (second or third hand) The Decline of the West, and was all for the spiritual expression of the early cultural ages and the sweep and energy of the first secular expansion (the Renaissance), but I would have run blocks to avoid the romantic and nineteenth century, or any of the products of the conscious and disillusioned selfhood. Under these circumstances it was manifestly absurd to go to Ghosts anyway. I came away with no very amiable remembrance. Such a play I refused to call tragedy, the name was too noble. I coined another word, ‘pathody’, the story of pathetic suffering, and dubbed it so.
Geschichte der indischen Philosophie; Ramānuja on the Bhagavadgītā; The Cultural Heritage of India Vol. III: The Philosophies; History of Dharmaçāstra (Vol. iv)
Authors: Renou Louis
Published: March 2007

Treatises on Indian philosophy have multiplied in the last thirty years, in the “West as well as in India itself. And in spite of the demanding nature of this subject—it exacts, so to speak, a uniform presentation; it entails a whole succession of systems, each one of which is elaborated in a more or less independent manner—this abundance is nonetheless profitable. Each author makes his contribution in the detailed account of new views and strives to rejuvenate a somewhat refractory material, even if this involves the taking up of old views, discarded or neglected by the new generation of scholars.
New China and the Chinese Language
Authors: Étiemble
Published: March 2007

In 851, four and a half centuries before Marco Polo, the anonymous author of a famous report on China and India (Akhbar as-Sin wal-Hind), availing himself of the information brought back by Arab merchants and sailors, gave so careful and meticulous a description of China that specialists even today find few inaccuracies. Yet the same subject is treated by most contemporary scholars with a light-hearted casualness that is confusing and disturbing.
The Spirit of Paganism
Authors: Pettazzoni Raffaele
Published: March 2007

The antithesis between paganism and Christianity is usually resolved, in current opinion, into the theological antithesis between polytheism and monotheism. But a religious life means more than mere theology, and one has the right to ask oneself what is, in reality, the religious character of paganism.

Between polytheism and monotheism, the enotheism of Max Muller (and of F. W. J. Schelling) is not a mean term, and still less a moment of transition from one to the other, for the simple reason that it is situated on a different plane. In the fervour of prayer, under the impulse of devotion, the believer is so absorbed in the thought of the God he is adoring at that very moment-this is described as enotheism-that for him, at that moment, it is as if no other god existed. This will not prevent him, at another moment, from consecrating himself with equal fervour to the adoration of another god. The famous Egyptian hymn inspired by the religious ideas of Amenophis IV, and which invokes Aten, the Sun, as “sole God,” is just as far from true monotheism with its absolute negation of every divine being except the One, as are the Vedic hymns in which Indra is celebrated as the god “besides whom there are no others” (Rig-Veda, VI 21.10; cfr. I 81.5; 165.9; IV 30.1; VII 32.23).
Order in Nature and Society
Authors: Rueff Jacques
Published: March 2007

In a cloud, the imagination can cut out patterns freely. The substance which fills them is real, but the objects which they outline do not exist. To exist, they would have to be distinguishable from the continuity within which they arose; they would have to constitute within it a particular and identifiable state endowed with an egregious privilege: duration. This duration can be brief or long, that of a cake of soap or of a spiral nebula; it is always of finite dimensions. This is what makes it the opposite of the instantaneousness of the mathematical beings which differential calculus arbitrarily cuts out within the continuity of movements.

Existence is a singularity that endures. But this duration, in the domain of the realities that are offered to our cognition, is never unlimited. In the universe of men there is nothing that escapes the slow or rapid, but always active, degradation which debases everything that has risen, which attenuates every kind of diversity in order to bring about a uniform distribution that physicists call the maximum state of entropy and housekeepers, as well as sociologists, call the maximum of disorder.
Dramatic Elements in Ritual Possession
Authors: Métraux Alfred
Published: March 2007

The phenomenon of “possession” continues to elude satisfactory explanation because of the ambiguity of its nature. It belongs to one of those marginal zones where beliefs and rites are allied in the closest possible way to still obscure psychological mechanisms. We know that the phenomenon dates from antiquity, and that in numerous so-called primitive societies it is one of the means by which the faithful communicate with the supernatural. Our object is to offer a contribution to the clarification of this ambiguity by an analysis of the forms and functions of the trance in voodoo. This term, originating in Dahomey (in Fon, a voodoo is a god or spirit), denotes the ensemble of religious beliefs and practices observed on the fringes of Catholicism by the common people of Haiti. It is a syncretic religion in which elements from West Africa predominate, although other African cults have left their mark; however, this religious amalgam was impregnated from the beginning with Catholic beliefs and rites. The practice; of voodoo is not limited to Haiti. Under such names as macumba, candomblé, santeria, it is found in Brazil and in Cuba, where the Negroes, closer to the period of slavery, have conserved African traditions more completely than in Haiti. Observations made in Brazil can help to explain certain aspects of possession which, in Haiti, took an aberrant form.
The Mythical Portrayal of Evil and of the Fall of Man
Authors: Schaerer René
Published: March 2007

In one of his admirable letters to Princess Elizabeth, Descartes asserts that the best way to overcome the annoyances of life is to “divert one's imagination and one's senses away from them as much as possible and to make use merely of one's understanding in dealing with them.” This advice is not easy to follow, and one of the devil's principal tricks is to identify himself so profoundly with our intimate concerns that, in disowning him, we come to believe that we disown ourselves. It sometimes seems that man cares more for his misery than for his pleasure.

But whether easy or not to follow, the advice is good. To convert the evil which oppresses you, insofar as possible, into a knot to untie, a safety lock to take apart, a problem to resolve, is to detach it from yourself; it is no longer me, it is mine. I can censure it and perhaps even pin it down. When one can state the evil, then what remains is only half-evil.
Definitions of Man
Authors: Romero Francisco
Published: March 2007

The interpretation of man which I have defended in my book, Theory of Man, agrees with the Linnaean designation of homo sapiens, which is more exact, in my opinion, than the classical one of “rational animal.” In that work I maintain that what is peculiar to man is that he is conscious of a reality outside of himself and of his own intimate being, or, in other words, that he recognizes the independent existence of the world and is an ego. Both matters can be reduced to a unique primary function: the objectifying activity, which in normal, continuous, and accumulative operation belongs only to man, and from which all essentially human traits are derived. The peculiar characteristic of perception properly so called, that is, human perception, is the observation of things that are present, the recognition that a given thing exists. To perceive, then, is to attribute presence or existence to what is perceived, to admit it as an object existing by itself, certainly in different ways according to whether it is a question of external things, of the subjective entity, or of the processes and “states” inherent in it; let it be noted that when perceptive attention fastens upon the “states,” that is to say, on subjective, unintentional processes like those of coenesthesia which ordinarily are not perceived but are lived, enjoyed, or suffered, these become objectified without losing in themselves their condition of states. The capacity to objectify is the bedrock of human nature; animal conscience (if it deserves this name) must be imagined, save for rare exceptions, to be a succession of “states” to which objectifying attention is not applied because such attention can only come from an ego.
The Literature of Primitive Peoples
Authors: Radin Paul
Published: March 2007

To speak of oral narratives or song-poems, particularly those of primitive peoples, as constituting true literature has until recently met with the greatest suspicion not only from the general public but from students of literature and, indeed, from most ethnologists as well. Their objections are basically of two kinds. No literature is possible, they contend, without writing, and the languages spoken by primitive peoples are inadequate both in vocabulary and the range of ideas which can be expressed in them to permit the development of what we call true literature. Both of these contentions are, I feel, quite incorrect. One has only to read such studies as those of F. Boas and Edward Sapir to realize on how slight a basis of fact such statements rest. There is no need, consequently, to spend any time refuting the theories of philosophers like Lévy-Bruhl or E. Cassirer concerning the structure of primitive languages. The only thing that can be said in defense of their generalizations is that, given the manner in which many of the recorders of these languages presented their data and the many loose statements they made, it is easy to see how Lévy-Bruhl and Cassirer and those who were influenced by them arrived at their unsound generalizations. The first objection, particularly, that without writing no substantial literature can possibly develop, will, I am certain, be adequately disproved by the examples of prose and poetry which I am presenting in this essay.
Good Sense or Philosophy
Authors: Weil Eric
Published: March 2007

It would be both impudent and imprudent to speak of good sense in relation to philosophy without first of all mentioning Descartes and giving his remarks on the subject. Impudent because we would be depriving a great man of the homage which is his by right and by virtue of long possession; imprudent because we would be depriving ourselves of an opportunity to define our terms exactly. Another equally legitimate motive lies in the fact that if we were to pass over it in silence, someone would be sure to compare our text with the one we quote herewith:

“Good sense,” says Descartes—and the Discourse on Method opens with these words—”is the most equally distributed thing in the world: for everybody thinks himself so abundantly provided with it that even those most difficult to satisfy in everything else do not usually desire more of this quality than they already possess. In this it is unlikely that they are mistaken; the conviction seems rather to support the view that the power of good judgment and of distinguishing the true from the false, which is properly called good sense or reason, is by nature equal in all men; and hence the diversity of our opinions comes not from the fact that some are more rational than others, but solely from the fact that we conduct our thoughts along different channels, and do not all consider the same things. For to possess good mental powers is not enough: the prime requisite is to apply them well.”
A Study of History
Authors: Mumford Lewis
Published: March 2007

Twenty years after the first three volumes of Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History, the final four volumes have appeared: ten volumes in all, not counting two books still to come, a volume of Maps and Charts, and a book of Reconsiderations. Perhaps no work so comprehensive as this has appeared since the publication of Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy. The fact that the latter books dealt with the transformations of nature, while Toynbee's work becomes, through its own inner evolution, a study of the transfigurations of the human soul, tells much about the century that has passed and the present crisis.
The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism
Authors: Scholem Gershom
Published: March 2007

Jewish mysticism represents the totality of the attempts to interpret in terms of mystical conceptions the meaning of rabbinical Judaism as it has crystallized in the time of the Second Temple and later. Such a development, of course, could take place only after this process of crystallization had attained a certain degree of fixity. This holds good for both the type of legal Judaism which Philo of Alexandria tried to interpret, as well as for the more developed type of Talmudic Judaism which served as a frame for the spiritual efforts of the Medieval Kabbalists. It is not my purpose to discuss here the historical problems of the development of Jewish mysticism, and especially of Kabbalism; I have done so in other places, especially in my book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. On the other hand, the subject with which I propose to deal here occupies a central place in Jewish mysticism. In a religious system that is based on Divine Revelation and the acceptance of Holy Scriptures which determine its tenets, the questions connected with the essential nature of such revelation in Scripture are obviously vital ones. Moreover, in a time of crisis—andmysticism as a historical phenomenon is a child of times of crises—such questions are especially pressing. Mystics are people who, through their own experience and speculation on such experience, detect new layers of meaning in their traditional religion. If this kind of experience and speculation does not lead them to break away from the traditional institutional framework of their religion, then the first question bound to come up is how to find their own experience reflected or anticipated in their sacred texts; also how to reconcile their vision of things with that accepted by their own tradition. It is, of course, a truism that allegorical interpretation makes its appearance spontaneously whenever new ideas clash with those of a holy book, seemingly standing in contradiction to them and requiring some process of reconciliation. What is true of allegorical interpretation applies even more so to mystical interpretation in a more precise sense.