bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Bases and Lines of Force in Cybernetics
Authors: Le Lionnais François 
Published: March 2007

Cybernetics has fallen prey to snobs and journalists, who, in dealing with it, tend to mix myth with science. In this study we shall try to sift out the chaff, which a regrettable sensationalism has needlessly mixed with the good grain. Concentrating our attention on the rational bases and some of the lines of force of this new field of study, we shall try to eliminate the element of fable, but we shall not prohibit ourselves from opening windows on any perspectives that seem reasonable.The notion of “information,” cornerstone of cybernetics, sheds light on the theory of knowledge. What is science, indeed, but an interpretation, which tries to be objective, of the flood of signals with which the universe submerges us? A Protean notion, it permits us to discover a certain unity among the most disparate phenomena. But it is a dangerous notion, too, because of the multiplicity of senses one may give to it.
Water and Cane Sugar
Authors: Freyre Gilberto 
Published: March 2007

In 1929, Sir Halford Macknider gave a talk before the International Congress of Geography at Cambridge. He upheld the supremacy of water over all the elements that one must consider in the study of a region and its land. “The hydrosphere,” Sir Halford said, “should be considered as the central theme in geography.” There is nothing more important in the study of man than his relations with water—with sea water, river water, the condensed water in clouds, with rain or thaw, with subterranean water, the water that flows through plant sap or circulates in the arteries and veins of animals; even with the water content of blood, man's very life. Thus he expressed an almost mystical attitude toward water.In our country, Arthur Orlando, one of the most energetic publicists of his generation, underlined the importance of water-the water one absorbs and which has such a great influence on man's life, as well as the river and ocean waters, which play such an important role in civilizations. It is true that water appears to be the dominant factor in the life of the land, in its physical as well as its cultural existence. This does not mean, however, that we must think of it mystically, as Sir Halford does.
Workers, Proletarians, and Intellectuals
Authors: Aron Raymond 
Published: March 2007

The term proletariat became ambiguous when it no longer denoted industrial workers alone.In the writings of Marx himself, one can trace the origin of a distinction between the working class and the proletariat, between factory workers as such and the total dehumanization which the term proletariat suggests. This distinction remains a virtual one for Marx and Marxists, because neither the prophet nor his disciples questioned, officially, the coincidence of these two definitions: it is the industrial workers who possess, par excellence, the proletarian characteristics of exclusion from the community and of disintegration of all special traits. And so one does not feel the need to separate the concrete group to which the term applies from the social condition or the state of mind that it evokes.
Mr. Bell on Tragedy
Authors: Crocker Lester G. 
Published: March 2007

In his article on tragedy (Diogenes, No. 7), Mr. Charles G. Bell has offered us some provocative insights and opinions. I am compelled to question, however, some of the basic concepts he brings to the interpretation of tragedy.It would seem that Mr. Bell, despite the depth of his thinking, has embraced several of the current clichés, which perhaps have their origin in the writings of A. C. Bradley. Critics adhering to this school hold that, for one reason or another, it is not possible to write tragedy in the twentieth century and that no work ending in bleak pessimism or despair is tragic. Mr. Bell, combining literary and historical criteria, is particularly severe in his limitation of the field of tragedy and the possibilities open to it. If I read him aright, only Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and the earlier Sophocles (before he fell from grace) have ever really earned admission to the exclusive realm.
The Agrarian Revolution
Authors: Mendras Henri 
Published: March 2007

American ethnologists are currently discovering a type of man and a “culture.” Their attention had been focussed for a long while on the various Indian tribes as a favored field of investigation, and, more recently, on the inhabitants of large or middle-sized American cities. This scientific “isolationism” had, therefore, effectively hidden from them the condition of the two-thirds of humanity who are neither “primitives” nor city-dwellers but, rather, peasants.Robert Redfield, whose first inquiries took him to Mexico, there encountered what he called “folk culture.” Dispersed about the globe, his students brought back studies which led him to think that “peasant society and culture have a generic quality. This species of human organization has a certain uniformity throughout the world.” Studying the life of Polish, Chinese, European, Latin-American, and Hindu peasants, he noted what he calls “this imperturbable sameness.”
Biology of Art: Initial Formulation and Primary Orientation
Authors: Weidlé Wladimir 
Published: March 2007

For a good while, men of high intelligence have been extolling a strictly descriptive phenomenological theory of art, concerned with the work of art itself and with its effect upon the spectator or the audience. Moreover, theories exist which tend in this direction, but sometimes they are still contaminated with the methods of psychological aesthetics, and sometimes they devote too much effort to combating those methods and to defining their own theory rather than putting it to the test of application.The work of art is an object that exists solely for the human understanding, but which exists for it objectively—that is to say, outside or beyond individual variations of perception. Anyone who wishes to achieve results in this field—provisional results, to be sure, but at least concrete and capable of being verified or corrected—must describe both the common denominators and the distinctive traits of such objects.
Notes on American Popular Culture
Authors: van den Haag Ernest 
Published: March 2007

Unlike any other type of culture, popular culture—a full-fledged style of living with a distinct pattern of feeling, thinking, believing, and acting— was made possible and in the end necessary by mass production. Unless the requirements and effects of industrialization are fully grasped, popular culture does not become intelligible.In the last two centuries, machinery and specialization have immensely increased economic productivity—the amount of goods produced per manhour—in Europe and America. This process has gone farthest in America, where popular culture too has gone farthest. Although enrichment led to a vast population increase, production per head rose stupendously and is still rising. Everybody benefited materially, but the main beneficiaries were the poor. Their income rose most. Furthermore, if the income gap between poor and rich had not narrowed as it did, an expanded national income distributed in unchanged proportions still would have augmented the welfare of the poor disproportionately. If the income of poor and rich alike increases by 50 per cent, the welfare of the poor is raised far more than that of the rich. Our progressive tax system—which taxes additions to the income of the poor less than additions to the income of the rich—is based entirely on this roughly correct view.
Relations Between Man and the World
Authors: Huard Pierre , Wong Ming 
Published: March 2007

The relationship man-world is of very great importance for the primitive man who finds himself perpetually (even when deeply engaged in mechanical or technical pursuits) in a state of subjective participation with his milieu. No distinction whatsoever exists for him between the self and the world, but rather a constant and intimate liaison, made real by a mythical behavior which leads us to consider the myth as the most archaic stage of knowledge (Leenhardt).Prehistoric myths were prolonged in the cosmologies by which the civilizations of ancient Asia tried to contemplate the world under the category of totality. The procedure of their attempts was the opposite of that of contemporary science, whose attitude is extroverted. They accounted for phenomena by projecting upon them, lacking all objectivity, their own sensory, emotive, imaginative, or intellectual reactions as well as their own subjective notions, introverted in value, of hierarchy and order. Pushed on by an invincible anthropomorphic tendency, they constructed a humanized nature by means of analogical deduction.
The Vital Domain of Animals and the Religious World of Man
Authors: Ruyer Raymond 
Published: March 2007

According to Auguste Comte, whose extravagant statements are almost always meaningful, the whole of the physical and mathematical sciences, once integrated into positivist dogma, must become cosmology—or, more properly, he qualifies, geology, in the etymological sense of the word: the study of the earth, of the “human planet,” as the necessary environment “of all the higher functions, vital, social, and moral.” Even astronomy should be no more than “the heavenly study of the human planet, that is to say, the knowledge of our relations with those stars that are liable to affect and destroy our destinies by modifying the conditions of the earth.” His religion is focused on the world, not on the universe.One cannot understand religion in general, and religious truth or error, save by stressing at the start the fact that, although it goes beyond the narrow confines of Comte's positivism, it flows from the cosmos of the world, the historico-geographical domain of man, not of nature, as an ensemble of the non-temporal laws or laws of the universe, devoid of center, which interests science. Religions contradict the positivist and humanist limitations of Comte. But this contradiction, this transcendence, is intelligible only if we define that which is transcended; and, in order to understand this, we must go all the way back to animal psychology.
The Barbarians
Authors: Sinor Denis 
Published: March 2007

The aim of this paper is to try to define the concept of the Barbarian and, at the same time, to show some aspects of the role that peoples entering into this category played in the course of history. We shall use the term “barbarian” in a very loose sense and will forego altogether the study of the history of the word itself. We know that it denoted successively the non-Hellene, the non-Roman, the non-Byzantine, the non-Christian, and, finally, even the non-Italian. In spite of numerous secondary applications and even misapplications of the word, it is quite clear, and has been asserted more than once, that in its primary and principal meaning the term is the antonym of “civilized” and is, therefore, for all practical purposes synonymous with “uncivilized”; it has a distinctly pejorative flavor.The fact that in its earliest, Greek, application “barbarian” simply meant “foreigner,” together with some other considerations, would suggest that this pejorative flavor is due to chauvinism: Country A tends to regard Country B as barbarous and vice versa. Superficial proofs could easily be found to warrant such a theory: the Romans were barbarians for the Greeks; China and Europe regarded each other as barbarians. However, to accept such proofs would lead us very much astray. A closer examination of, for example, Chinese-European relations would soon reveal if not a mutual esteem at least the recognition that each civilization is what the Germans call a “Hochkultur,” a word which, for want of a better expression, we could translate “major civilization.” For the Chinese, India was never a country of barbarians, nor was Persia, oddly enough, for the Romans or the Byzantines.
The Good Shepherd Francisco Davila's Sermon To the Indians of Peru (1646)
Authors: Dumézil Georges 
Published: March 2007

à Mauritz Friisen souvenir des soiréesde Görväln et de PampachicaFrancisco was born in 1573 in the old capital of the Incas, a pretty town stretching along a high valley of the Andes 11,000 feet above sea level but close enough to the earth's breast to enjoy a gentle springtime throughout the year, even in winter. 1573: forty-two years since the first Spaniards, three of them, reached the city as emissaries of the conqueror, who was then especially occupied with the last Inca whom he held prisoner in a northern village and of whom he demanded an enormous ransom. Guided and protected by officers of the empire, they came to hasten the despoiling of temples and palaces and to collect vases and plaques of gold ordered by Atahualpa, who vainly hoped to gain his freedom. Three years later, on March 23,1534, before an astonished crowd of Indians, opening a new era in the name of the king and the pope, the founding of the new Spanish and Christian order in Cuzco solemnly took place. Then, one after another, material catastrophes occurred: in 1536 the conqueror's brother, the first governor, endured the siege of an army of twenty thousand Indians commanded by a phantom Inca, the second Manco, and the city, its thatched roofs ravaged by fire, was blown up by mines and countermines; in 1538 the newly rebuilt houses were destroyed by the rivalry of Pizarro and Almagro; in 1541, after the assassination of the former, new troubles caused new ruins.
National Character: an Old Problem Re-Examined
Authors: Brodersen Arvid 
Published: March 2007

Human groups, such as families, tribes, and nations, are often perceived as possessing mental qualities and characteristics more or less common to the group as a whole. This ancient tendency to attribute properties of personality or individuality to human aggregates is particularly strong nowadays with regard to nations, the basic units of political action in this age of nationalism and internationalism.In the recent UNESCO study by W. Buchanan and H. Cantril, How Nations See Each Other (1953), based on an eight-nation sample, few findings are more revealing than the low frequency of respondents who declare themselves unable to characterize their own nation. All but a very small proportion gave their views freely when asked to describe the character of their countrymen. When this same question was asked with regard to a series of other nationalities, the “Don't know” responses (“impossible to characterize”) were in some cases much more frequent—up to 71 per cent as in the case of the German sample in regard to the Chinese; in others again very low—down to 3 per cent as in the western European responses regarding the United States. These variations are assumed to reflect differences in the degree of familiarity of nations with each other, depending on their mutual relationships over time, their physical proximity or distance, and so on.
Some Reflections on the Philemon and Baucis Episode in Goethe's Faust
Authors: Rather L.J. 
Published: March 2007

Goethe resisted all attempts on the part of his critics and admirers to draw oversimplified and final messages from Faust—an understandable reaction, since why should anyone bother with the dramatic trappings if the meaning can be summed up in a few abstract statements? He told Eckermann that people constantly came to him asking the meaning of Faust—as if he knew! It was not in his line, he said, to try to embody anything abstract. Goethe's thought process is dialectical, and for almost every one of his aphorisms which seems to illustrate one side of a matter there is another illuminating the opposite side. Goethe carried this tendency so far, in fact, that he once remarked to Eckermann that his Philemon and Baucis had nothing to do with the traditional couple. He added, almost in the same breath, that the persons and the situation were nevertheless similar. Before examining the meaning of Goethe's verse in detail, a brief summary of the action taking place in the fifth act of the second part of Faust is necessary:A Wanderer returns to a land, now Faust's kingdom, where he had been ship wrecked long ago and had found shelter in the home of Philemon and Baucis. He learns from the old couple, who are still alive, that their house on the hill now stands in the shadow of Faust's castle. Faust wants them to move to the lowlands, which he has reclaimed from the sea with the aid of Mephistopheles, but they have so far refused to obey him. Faust's animosity toward the old couple is then depicted. In the end he assigns to Mephistopheles the task of eviction. Philemon and Baucis resist. They are killed, the Wanderer is dispatched along with them, and the house is burned down. Faust's blindness and death soon follow, but not before he attempts a final project, the construction of a canal.
The Difficulty of Reading
Authors: Ortega y Gasset José 
Published: March 2007

To read, to read a book, is, like all the other really human occupations, a Utopian task. I call “utopian” every action whose initial intention cannot be fulfilled in the development of its activity and which has to be satisfied with approximations essentially contradictory to the purpose which had started it. Thus “to read” begins by signifying the project of understanding a text fully. Now this is impossible. It is only possible with a great effort to extract a more or less important portion of what the text has tried to say, communicate, make known; but there will always remain an “illegible” residue. It is, on the other hand, probable that, while we are making this effort, we may read, at the same time, into the text; that is, we may understand things which the author has not “meant” to say, and, nevertheless, he has “said” them; he has presented them to us involuntarily—even more, against his professed purpose. This twofold condition of speech, so strange and antithetical, appears in two principles of my “Axioms for a New Philology,” which are as follows:1.Every utterance is deficient—it says less than it wishes to say.2.Every utterance is exuberant—it conveys more than it plans.
The Machiavellian Revolution
Authors: de Corte Marcel 
Published: March 2007

It is impossible to understand the significance of Machiavelli's work if one does not understand, to begin with, the concept of man and of the world which dominates it.Too frequently the image of Machiavelli is limited only to a study of the procedures, tricks, string-pulling, ropes (and even ropes around the neck) which he prescribes for the attainment and maintainance of power, all of this well embellished with a psychology which is either praised or deprecated.
Contemporary Adolescence
Authors: Tenbruck Friedrich H. 
Published: March 2007

This essay is intended to deepen our understanding of the fundamental causes of the characteristic features of contemporary adolescence, and of their significance. Since the reader will not be unfamiliar with the phenomena, his personal experience may be relied on to supplement a description which would otherwise be too concise. The description is based on data, research and summary accounts drawn from the literature of various countries, which is suggestive because of its uniformity. It suggests five conclusions which bring into focus the general condition and position of contemporary adolescence:1. While the development of the adolescent used to take place during the few years traditionally called “adolescence” (ages 15 to 18), it has steadily expanded during the last century, and recently with an ever-increasing speed. Nowadays, it reaches up to age 25, and in many cases and in many areas beyond this, and includes in the opposite direction the majority of the 13-to-14-year-olds without, however, having ceased to exert its attraction on what was traditionally called “childhood.” An enormous extension of adolescence has thus taken place, and this is already reflected to a large extent in the development of legal notions. Modern man spends a considerable portion of his life as an adolescent.
Economics, Ideology and American Politics
Authors: Adams Walter 
Published: March 2007

The ideal, my friend, is the lifebuoy. Let's say one is taking a swim, floundering around, trying as hard as possible not to sink. One might try to swim in a safe direction despite contrary currents; the essential thing is to use a classic stroke according to recognized swimming principles…Some eccentrics who try to swim faster in order to get there, come what may, splash all over everybody and always end by drowning, involving I don't know how many other poor souls who might have been able to continue splashing around tranquilly enough-in the soup. (Jean Anouilh)To the casual observer and professional analyst, to the intellectual both here and abroad, American politics have frequently appeared as an amalgam of confusion, frustration and irrationality. The political parties have seemed devoid of cohesion and unity, and innocent of a coherent political philosophy. Long ago, for example, Lord Bryce observed that our major parties have nothing to say on vital issues; that “neither party has any clean-cut principles, any distinctive tenets. Both have traditions. Both claim to have tendencies. Both have certainly war cries, organizations, interests enlisted in their support. But those interests are, in the main, the interests of getting, or keeping, the patronage of the government. Distinctive tenets and policies, points of political doctrine and points of political practice, have all but vanished. They have not been thrown away, but they have been stripped away by Time and the progress of events, fulfilling some policies, blotting out others. All has been lost except office or the hope of It.”
Regnum Hominis
Authors: Papaioannou Kostas 
Published: March 2007

The medieval view of the universe as entirely theophany, manifestation of God; and hierarchy, the ordered participation of all beings to God, could not conceive of an opposition between subject and object. Aut lux hic nata est aut capta hic libera regnat, “here the light is born, or here, captive, it freely reigns,” may be read in the vestibule of a chapel at Ravenna: that not yet created golden light enclosing heaven and earth in the selfsame unity where everything became perceptible at a single glance. From an infinite distance descended the Word, filling the void and becoming the universe; while from below, the rising wave of adoration gradually divested created beings of their terrestrial weight, introducing finiteness and multiplicity into the realm of immutable crystalline eternity. Light as the most efficacious means of sanctification, as the surest way of negating the restrictive power of thingness: this was the basis on which Robert Grosseteste formulated an entire light-cosmogony. The stained glass masters of the cathedrals of the West, and the Byzantine mosaicists held the same view. The description of Saint Sophia, made in the 6th century by Paul the Silentiaire, leads us right into the heart of this magical world of light:The apse is like a peacock, whose plumage has a hundred eyes. One's sight is blinded by the brilliant light emanating from the golden immensity of the vault. It is a Latin and barbaric display at the same time. The altar is of gold; it rests on golden columns and golden supports; other than gold there are only sparkling gems. In the evening so much light is reflected from the temple that you would think it to be a nocturnal sun. Resplendent night laughs like dawn; it too seems to have rosy feet. The navigator needs no other lighthouse; he need only gaze at the radiant temple.