The article aims to contribute to a wider knowledge of the Hilâl epic, a masterwork of popular Arabic literature that tells the story of a nomadic pastoral people from the Arabian deserts. The focus is on the ‘Taghrîba’ cycle, which relates the migration in the 11th century of these Sons of Hilâl to Ifrîqiyya, present-day Tunisia. In this context reference is made to the political act of the Fatimid power that launched the Hilalians on the conquest of Ifrîqiyya, as well (...) as to historians’ and linguists’ perception of it. But interest is centred more on the texts, which are copiously quoted, their poetic quality and their message – the expression of a tribal humanism, composed of grandeur and human dignity, particular to those desert people. (shrink)

A dramatic image of death is reflected from a cycle of folktales (Aarne-Thompson Types 505 to 508) in which a man dying in debt is refused burial, until the hero of the tale pays the ransom and fulfills the ancestral funeral ritual. Then the tale may develop into a further sequence centred on the Grateful Dead. The texts alluded to here come from both Northern Europe and the Mediterranean area, and from ancient and modern tales.

While the epic is absent from classical Arabic literature, the genre - although long ignored - plays an outstanding part in popular culture throughout the Arabo-Islamic sphere.

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Die Konzeption einer Metaphysik im Denken von Heinrich Scholz" verfügbar.

A trusted guide into the inner realm where our spirits find strength to master life and live for God. It is hard to exaggerate the significance of Innerland, either for Eberhard Arnold or his readers. It absorbed his energies off and on for most of his adult life--from World War I, when he published the first chapter under the title War: A Call to Inwardness, to 1935, the last year of his life. Packed in metal boxes and buried at (...) night for safekeeping from the Nazis, who raided the author_s study a year before his death (and again a year after it), Innerland was not openly critical of Hitler_s regime. Nevertheless, it attacked the spirits that animated German society: its murderous strains of racism and bigotry, its heady nationalistic fervor, its mindless mass hysteria, and its vulgar materialism. In this sense Innerland stands as starkly opposed to the zeitgeist of our own day as to that of the author_s. At a glance, the focus of Innerland seems to be the cultivation of the spiritual life as an end in itself. Nothing could be more misleading. In fact, to Eberhard Arnold the very thought of encouraging the sort of selfish solitude whereby people seek their own private peace by shutting out the noise and rush of public life around them is anathema. He writes in The Inner Life:_These are times of distress. We cannot retreat, willfully blind to the overwhelming urgency of the tasks pressing on society. We cannot look for inner detachment in an inner and outer isolation...The only justification for withdrawing into the inner self to escape today's confusing, hectic whirl would be that fruitfulness is enriched by it. It is a question of gaining within, through unity with eternal powers, a strength of character ready to be tested in the stream of the world._ Innerland, then, calls us not to passivity, but to action. It invites us to discover the abundance of a life lived for God. It opens our eyes to the possibilities of that _inner land of the invisible where our spirit can find the roots of its strength and thus enable us to press on to the mastery of life we are called to by God._ Only there, says Eberhard Arnold, can our life be placed under the illuminating light of the eternal and seen for what it is. Only there will we find the clarity of vision we need to win the daily battle that is life, and the inner anchor without which we will lose our moorings. (shrink)

In his article ‘The Structure of Emptiness’, 467–80. doi: 10.1353/pew.0.0069[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]) Graham Priest examines the concept of emptiness in the Mādhyamaka school of Nāgārjuna and his commentators Candrakīırti and Tsongkhapa from a mathematical point of view. The approach attempted in this article does not involve any commitment to Priest's more controversial dialethic Mādhyamaka interpretation. The purpose of the present paper is to explain Priest's sketchy but very insightful interpretation of objects as non-well-founded sets in greater (...) detail. Some problems concerning his idea to model the Mādhyamaka claim of the emptiness of emptiness by means of this kind of framework will be noted. Moreover, we will also discuss the possibility to represent the Mādhyamika's denial of the existence of irreducible constituents of empirical reality within a well-founded system of set theory. Finally, some slight mistakes in Priest's mathematical construction need to be pointed out. (shrink)

Darwin proposed that evolutionary novelties are environmentally induced in organisms “constitutionally” sensitive to environmental change, with selection effective owing to the inheritance of constitutional responses. A molecular theory of inheritance, pangenesis , explained the cross‐generational transmission of environmentally induced traits, as required for evolution by natural selection. The twentieth‐century evolutionary synthesis featured mutation as the source of novelty, neglecting the role of environmental induction. But current knowledge of environmentally sensitive gene expression, combined with the idea of genetic accommodation of mutationally (...) and environmentally induced change, supports a revival of Darwin's original theory that is consistent with modern molecular and population genetics. †To contact the author, please write to: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, c/o Escuela de Biología, Universidad de Costa Rica, Costa Rica; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

In the present paper we model the Navya-Nyāya analysis of Vedic and secular injunctions and prohibitions by means of Giordani’s and Canavotto’s system ADL of dynamic deontic logic. Navya-Naiyāyikas analyze the meaning of injunctions and prohibitions by reducing them to plain indicative statements about certain properties whose presence or absence in the enjoined or prohibited action serves as a criterion for the truth or falsity of the “inducing” or “restraining knowledge”, a kind of qualificative cognition instilled in the recipient of (...) an injunction or prohibition. Thus, Navya-Naiyāyikas have found their own way to solve Jørgensen’s Puzzle concerning the very idea of a deontic logic as a tool to analyze arguments based on sentences which do not seem to be truth-apt. The teleological aspect of the Navya-Nyāya characterization of an enjoined or prohibited action can also give a clue to solutions of other puzzles and paradoxes which have beset the development of deontic logic in the West. A specific contrary-to-duty puzzle from the Indian tradition is related to the śyena, a malefic sacrifice meant for harming one’s enemy. The Vedic injunction to perform such a sacrifice runs counter to a religious practitioner’s duty not to harm a living being. In the present paper we examine the cogency of the very different solutions to this dilemma suggested by the Mīmāṃsaka Prabhākara on the one hand and the Navya-Naiyāyika Gaṅgeśa on the other hand. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage réunit des contributeurs du monde entier pour explorer l'enjeu du courage des alternatives dans le contexte actuel d'un changement paradigmatique où la complexité, le pluralisme et l'interculturalisme émergent comme nouveaux horizons de sens. "La vie n'est pas un vide à remplir. C'est une plénitude à découvrir". Oser la vie, oser l'Autre, s'ouvrir à soi-même, aux autres et au monde, voilà de grands défis éternels qui prennent toute leur actualité dans un contexte contemporain de globalisation qui exacerbe la tension (...) entre unité et diversité, tension qui peut se révéler destructrice ou au contraire extrêmement créatrice selon la manière dont on l'aborde. Les contributeurs à cet ouvrage invitent le lecteur à décaler son regard sur le monde en le faisant passer du "centre" vers les "marges". Ils explorent la richesse du monde tel qu'il apparaît dès lors que l'on accepte de sortir de l'univers de nos certitudes pour s'ouvrir au plurivers des possibles expérimentés ou esquissés dans la diversité humaine. Oser l'Autre, c'est oser s'ouvrir à la vie qui est transformation permanente et confronte constamment l'humanité, individuellement et collectivement, à ses limites tout en révélant ses potentialités cachées. Cette découverte ne peut se faire seule et appelle des approches interdisciplinaires et interculturelles. L'ouvrage articule ainsi des approches anthropologiques, philosophiques, juridiques, politiques, psychologiques et mobilise des points de vue d'Afrique, d'Amérique, d'Asie et d'Europe, non seulement pour décrire ou critiquer les situations et paradigmes dominants, mais aussi pour dégager de nouveaux horizons d'un vivre ensemble dans le dialogue et la complémentarité des différences. (shrink)

We present a formal derivation of the Mino–Sasaki–Tanaka–Quinn–Wald (MSTQW) equation describing the self-force on a (semi-) classical relativistic point mass moving under the influence of quantized linear metric perturbations on a curved background space–time. The curvature of the space–time implies that the dynamics of the particle and the field is history-dependent and as such requires a non-equilibrium formalism to ensure the consistent evolution of both particle and field, viz., the worldline influence functional and the closed- time-path (CTP) coarse-grained effective action. (...) In the spirit of effective field theory, we regularize the formally divergent self-force by smearing the local part of the retarded Green’s function and employing a quasi-local expansion. We derive the MSTQW–Langevin equations describing the perturbations of the particle’s worldline about its semi-classical trajectory resulting from interactions with the quantum fluctuations of the linear metric perturbations. Finally, we demonstrate that the quantum fluctuations of the field could, in principle, leave imprints on gravitational waveforms expected to be observed by gravitational interferometers, thereby encoding information about tree-level perturbative quantum gravity. (shrink)

Résumé Les textes auxquels on se réfère ici émanent tous de sociétés qui, en dépit des différences culturelles, ont en commun la croyance que la mort n’est jamais sans lendemain (exemples pris de contes d’Europe, de la Méditerranée et du Maghreb). Le héros/l’héroïne agissent en vertu d’une loi ancestrale : le devoir de respect à l’égard du corps du défunt. Les contes semblent vouloir établir une continuité et suggérer la relation d’interdépendance entre les vivants et les morts.

In Malta and Southern Italy, legends centred on the prestigious figure of the Sibyl are still known by the older people. In Majorca, the prophetic song attributed to the Greek Sibyl, Erythrea, is still sung on Christmas eve in the monastery-sanctuary of Lluc. This paper focuses on the history of this prophetic song since its adoption by the medieval Church and on its surviving tradition in certain areas of Catalan culture – a fabulous example of cultural continuity.

In view of the scope and scale of the latest scandals, e.g. Enron's maximum breaking bankruptcy, the re-discovery of ethics in business has received an impressive boost. By now even car salesmen have written ethics, a Code of Conduct, e.g. in the USA or Poland. But there is no clear aim of the role ethics obtains in organizational settings as we may show in some small cases of practical approaches to deal with ethics in organizations. We discuss how ethics is (...) the prerequisite to conduct any business and what advantages may be realized if a clear set of ethics is followed. We will discuss three practical examples. In cases of ethics-based values-added management of Siemens (Germany), Boeing (U.S.) and SAP (Germany) we explain the mechanisms of ethics in management to strengthen organizational success. We emphasize the importance of clear ethics-related communication processes in organizations. We explain the use of communication theories inside organizational processes to clarify communication about such an abstract topic as ethics. Finally, we point out how a management of ethical ideas and cultural values should be designed in business enterprises. (shrink)