In questo articolo ci si occupa di come il regno e la vita di due califfi abbasidi siano ritratti e valutati dalle fonti narrative arabe medievali. Hārūn al-Rashīd e al-Muqtadir divennero, pochi decenni dopo la loro morte, il paradigma del buono e del cattivo califfo rispettivamente; tuttavia, i loro lunghi califfatia le loro biografie personali presentano diversi elementi comuni. Un'analisi di temi simili presenti nelle rappresentazioni dei due sovrani illustrano mezzi e strategie narrativi impiegati dalle fonti, nel tentativo di stabilire (...) quali fattori determinino lo sviluppo di una reputazione post-mortem positiva o negativa.This paper looks at how the lives and reigns of two Abbasid caliphs are portrayed and evaluated in medieval Arabic narrative sources. Hārūn al-Rashīd and al-Muqtadir became, only a few decades after their death, the paradigm of the good and the bad caliph respectively. However, their long caliphates as well as their personal biographies share several elements. An analysis of similar themes in the portrayals of the two rulers illustrates narrative means and strategies employed by the sources, in an attempt to establish which factors determine the development of a positive or negative post-mortem reputation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Preliminary remarksSince John Capistran is among the most relevant figures of the fifteenth century, not only for the Franciscan Order but more generally for political and religious life , the very substantial corpus of his correspondence has a long history as well as a long historiography. The approximately seven hundred letters he sent or received beginning in 1418 until his death in 1456, were discovered and studied one at (...) a time over the centuries, for quite different reasons and with different aims.Certainly the gradual process of discovering and studying these documents is marked by some milestones. For example, there is the celebration of his canonization process in 1623 , as well as the works of the so-called Capistran Commission. This commission was a team established in 1952 in Rome by the leadership of the Franciscan Order , which was located first in Grottaferrata, College of Quaracchi, then in the Antonianum, and was managed by friars Ottokar Bonmann and Paulis Bédrune.The research archive of Capistrano materials that is housed at the Franciscan Institute at St. Bonaventure University was brought together through the efforts of Gedeon Gál, OFM. Gedeon had been heading up work on the critical edition of the theological and philosophical writings of William of Ockham at the Institute. His interest in John Capistran came from the fact that he was a member of the Hungarian Franciscan Province of St. John Capistran. The greater part of the material came from the research files of Ottokar Bonmann who died before being able to start any actual editing work for an edition of Capistran. Knowing of Bonmann's work Gedeon asked Conrad Harkins, O.F.M., then director of the Franciscan Institute, to request that Bonmann's research be shipped to the Institute from Rome where it was being stored. Also while Conrad was on sabbatical in Italy, Gedeon asked him to photocopy the manuscript of Capistran's letters copied in the 1600s by Antonio Sessa of Palermo that resides in the library of the Basilica di Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome. That being done the copies were sent to the Franciscan Institute and joined with the Bonmann materials to form the archive. It is a heritage that deserves to be retrieved by scholars, in order to accomplish the work according to modern criteria, where accomplish means to create a final edition.Bonmann was very familiar with the earlier research on these letters and his work reinforces the fact that the edition was an obstacle course. This is the case not only because scholars' sensibilities regarding these kinds of documents changed throughout the centuries, previously viewed as a relic of a saint or an attestation of his sainthood, and – more recently – as a precious source about European history in the first half of the fifteenth century. Despite scholarly interest in the correspondence, it remains unpublished.In fact, the first to have the intention to publish all of the correspondence was Lucas Wadding, who received some materials about these letters at St. Isidore College in Rome, but he could not complete his project although he mentions it in his Annales Minorum. After Wadding many scholars tried to work on the same project but using criteria that – in several cases – are no longer helpful because their methods are out-of-date.For example, as we will soon see, collections such as those provided by Antonio Sessa in the seventeenth or by Atanasio Masci in the eighteenth century, are inspired by hagiographical criteria or, at least, not philological criteria. All of these collections were acquired by the Capistran Commission and then by Ottokar Bonmann who wrote an article on the subject in which.. (shrink)

Oggi come in passato l'Oriente è vittima di stereotipi derivati dalla tradizione orientalistica ottocentesca che ha contribuito a plasmare una miriade di cliché esotici dai quali fatichiamo a renderci indipendenti. In questo intervento si cerca di segnalare, e in parte demitizzare, alcuni di tali luoghi comuni, con particolare riferimento al contesto musicale russo di fine Ottocento. Nel quadro dell'immaginario dell'Oriente che si sviluppa nella cultura russa si colloca la suite sinfonica Sekherezada op. 35 di Nikolaj Andreevič Rimskij-Korsakov: temi popolari di (...) sapore orientaleggiante si sviluppano su impianti sonori di grande effetto che trasportano gli uditori in un mondo lontano, sconosciuto, immaginato, chiamato Oriente As a consequence of the multitude of exotic cliché shaped by the eighteenth-century orientalistic tradition, the East has always fallen victim to a series of misleading stereotypes from which we can hardly set free.The aim of this paper is to bring to light and demythologize some of those cliché, with particular attention paid to the eighteenth-century musical output in Russia. Among the Russian musical works that focus on the theme of the East is the symphonic suite Sekherezada op. 35 composed by Nikolaj Andreevič Rimskij-Korsakov: oriental-sounding folk themes develop on impressive sonorities taking the listener to a far-away, unknown, imaginary place, called “East”. (shrink)

Die obligaten Kapital-Kurse in Studentenkreisen um 1968 bilden den Anfang einer Entwicklung in den Geisteswissenschaften, die den positiven Wissenskanon der einzelnen Fächer dem Zerfall überlässt. Ob Germanist, Philosoph oder Kunsthistoriker - Hauptsache, man hat seinen Marx, und später all die anderen gelesen. Der vorliegende Essay verfolgt die Leitwährungen der modisch variierenden Metadiskurse. Beginnend historisch mit der Frankfurter Schule, endend mit Derrida als Meisterdenker wird ihre Funktion beschrieben: Die postmoderne Monokultur erfüllt die politisch korrekte Aufgabe, aus den Geisteswissenschaften das genuine Wissen (...) um je eigene Gegenstände und Methoden auszutreiben. (shrink)

In this 1999 study, Beat Wyss provides a critical analysis of Hegel's theories of art history. Analogous to his philosophy of history, Hegel viewed the history of art in dialectical terms: with its origins in the Ancient Near East, Western art culminated in Classical Greece, but began its decline already in the Hellenistic period. Yet, as Wyss posits, art refuses its programmed demise. He highlights the political dimension of this contradiction, showing the implication of theories which subordinate art (...) to the will of absolute rule. Wyss follows his analysis of Hegel's theories with a discussion of the work of four modern successors - Nordau, Spengler, Sedlmayr and Lukacs - all of whom adapted Hegel's dialectical model, in an effort to demonstrate the central contradictions of twentieth-century aesthetics. (shrink)

This article reviews the outstanding and thought-provoking work by Roberta De Monticelli (2021), _Towards a Phenomenological Axiology. Discovering What Matters_. The article addresses the reasons why it should be read by everyone but especially by help professions practitioners. Although we all deal with morality and value judgments on on mundane, everyday bases, the professional life of education and care practitioners is namely a series of morally-loaded practices and decision-making informed by morally oriented (expert) knowledge. Beyond the thesis advanced in the (...) book, its major contribution consists in making the reader think the inescapability of morality in everyday thinking and acting and the need for a reflective positioning towards this issue. By aligning with “the hedgehog vs. the fox” struggle proposed by the author as the framework of her theoretical proposal, the article advances what would be the doubts and counterarguments of a fox-like scholar in education. It illustrates why her “professional vision” cannot but notice what appears to be under-thematized by the hedgehog, i.e., the unavoidable mediation of language and social interaction that _precedes_ and therefore impacts the constitution of what the hedgehog convincingly notices: the entanglement of fact and value. The conclusion is dedicated to the (underestimated?) place of social sciences in such a debate, their tension between implicit normativity and presumed descriptivity, as well the challenges of the increasingly explicit normativity of applied social sciences. (shrink)

The evidence-based turn in education reveals renewed consensus on empiricism and shared trust in science as if it were the allegedly value-free basis for decision-making: good, justifiable governance should be a non-discretional corollary of scientific knowledge. The article focuses on some risks implied in pursuing the de-moralization of educational decision-making, namely the realistic, the reductionist, and the perspective fallacies, as well as the minimization of individual responsibility in favor of the third-person perspective implied in following protocols and guidelines. In the (...) discussion I address some possible reasons for the appeal of the evidence-based turn despite these risks: the contemporary pressure for “accountability” and the need to justify social policies and practices with consensual criteria. In the conclusion, I claim that educational decision-making should deploy rather than conceal its moral bases despite their being potentially highly divisive. Consequently, I make a case for “moral accountability”: making publicly inspectable what evidence-based education tries to conceal, i.e. the unavoidable value-ladeness of educational policies and practices. (shrink)

After decades of epistemological inquiry on the social construction of science, we have observed a renewed consensus on empiricism in application-oriented social sciences and a growing trust in evidence-based practice and decision-making. Drawing on the long-standing debate on value-ladenness, evidence and normativity in sciences, this article theoretically discusses and empirically illustrates the Life-World origins of methods in a domain of inquiry strongly characterized by an empiricist epistemic culture and a normative stance: Children and Media Studies. Adopting a reflexive approach to (...) their own research in such an epistemologically underexplored field, the authors analyze a standard research instrument and two procedures. The analysis illustrates how background assumptions shape the research method and how the procedures routinely conceal this work of shaping. In the discussion the authors cast light on the role scientific procedures play in the naturalization of a given moral order, and put forward the question of whether and how this “morality-building” feature of methods should be taken into account in the assessment of their appropriateness. In the conclusion the authors advance that the situated nature of scientific knowledge, rather than discrediting its relevance, is what makes it relevant, here and now, for the larger community the research may impact on. The authors discuss the risks of such a pragmatic outcome and propose the adoption of an oscillating epistemic stance as a way to cope with them. (shrink)

As part of his defence of panpsychism, Strawson introduces the notion of 'brute' emergence, and hints at a contrasting notion of 'true' emergence. Panpsychism is true not least because brute emergence is incoherent. The alternative relation of true emergence is coherent and congruent with panpsychism. Strawson's distinction suggests that panpsychists endorse true emergence, while emergentists endorse brute emergence. I show that this yields a false dichotomy, which wrongly associates traditional emergentism with an implausible notion of emergence. I clarify the nature (...) and purpose of true and brute emergence, and I argue that traditional emergentists should reject both of them. (shrink)

Diachronic emergence has recently been characterised as transformation. This aims to capture the thought that the entities that emerge are radically new or different. Transformation is hence closely linked with a central (but rarely raised) challenge for all emergentists: how to account for the identity and individuation of entities involved in emergence. With this challenge in view, I develop and probe four interpretations of transformation: addition, replacement, fusion, and transubstantiation. Of those, transubstantiation provides the most plausible response to the challenge (...) about identity. Accordingly, diachronic emergence is a transformative process whereby an individual passes from one primary kind to another. (shrink)

This is an exclusive interview with the film-maker Nurith Aviv. Her last film Misafa Lesafa, on the plural linguistic identity in Israel, is linked to her former work and analysed through its cultural background, its symbolic dimension and its technical realization.

The author summarizes here the main theme of the papers gathered in the second part of this issue. It describes the dual identities they deal with (linguistic identities,métissages, masked exiles and social intermingling) and places them in the context of an ongoing seminar work carried out at the Maison des sciences de l’homme in Paris.

Asim Barut once,en passant, asked the question “For what transitions of the hydrogen atom do the spectral lines coincide”? It is a pleasure for us to give the answer in this paper.

Starting from the study of the physical world, we develop the concept of a dual pair, Comparing dual pairs is known as duality. We show that duality is a basic mechanism for our intellectual curiosity.