This chapter provides a short history of the reception of Liang Shuming’s thought in European-language scholarship since 1922. By reviewing a significant number of monographs, edited volumes, and articles published in academic and missionary journals in English, French, and German during the last one hundred years, the chapter aims to provide a historical typology of the multifaceted reception of Liang’s thought through time. In the scholarship reviewed, Liang is variously portrayed as a philosopher, a social reformer or activist, a (...) religious thinker, an educator, a legal thinker, and a political figure. Throughout the years, Liang has been described as a conservative, a restorationist, a fundamentalist, and a modern thinker, and has been labeled a Confucian, a Buddhist, and a populist. The many faces of Liang Shuming laid bare by this short history are revealing of the complexity and tensions of the man and his thought, but also of the interpreters’ gaze and the historical evolution of the academic field in the Euro-American region. The end result is a genealogy of sort—one that challenges some deep-seated assumptions about Liang by tracing them back to a particular and contingent historical moment and by situating them within a broad spectrum of alternative positions vying for attention in the small but diverse discursive space allotted to the thought of Liang Shuming in European-language scholarship. (shrink)

The Republican education, its concepts, theories, and form of discourse belong to the shared European heritage of the pre-modern Age. The pedagogy of humanism and its effects on the early Modern Age are represented by Republicanism. Even if Republicanism found a political continuation in liberalism and democratism of the Modern Age, the same cannot be said of pedagogic continuity without some reservations. In pedagogy of the Modern Age an alternative to Republicanism prevails that builds onto (...) a body of concepts, discourse, and theory; it goes back to an old theological tradition. Rousseau chooses this alternative exclusively for his concepts of education. He is neither the inventor nor the one who builds up this language in contrast to pedagogical Republicanism. Nonetheless, the pedagogical canonization of Rousseau as one of the co-founders of pedagogical Modernity, marks the specific development that this theological language of pedagogy undergoes at the turn of the nineteenth century. Originally it is closely linked to specific theological, dogmatic lines of thought, namely, to the respective Piety movements within the two Christian denominations of Western Europe. Yet at the turn of the nineteenth century, this theological language of pedagogy increasingly loses that exclusive link to this particular context and becomes thus freely available to any form of pedagogy, which puts at its centre the child’s soul, absolute inwardness, and introspection as both holy and also threatened by a basically decadent social environment and outward world. (shrink)

In this study, first of all, it was important to analyze this technique of returning to the ancient tradition of two outstanding thinkers of the 20th century. M. Heidegger and Sri Aurobindo Ghosh in order to understand to what extent the language of the ancient sages and rishis is still accessible to our understanding; Has it not already happened that the voice of the ancient sages will turn out to be completely foreign to us, like the language of the unconscious, (...) which we do not hear and do not understand? The conducted analysis showed that a certain intellectual conflict arose between Heidegger and the ancient Greeks. This conflict connected with the fact that the German thinker, repeatedly turning to different periods of Greek philosophy and different Greek thinkers and trying to apply to them the phenomenological method of his teacher Husserl, being atheistically minded, never managed to capture the original spiritual intuition of the pre-Socratics in the understanding of being. And at the same time, he himself could not find a suitable name for understanding being in modern culture. Where Heidegger still very carefully writes about the “open clearing” as a manifestation of the truth in the original ancient Greek thinkers, the essence of which, from the point of view of the German thinker, was still given to Heraclitus and Parmenides only intuitively (they did not yet understand the reason for this phenomenon of our consciousness), Sri Aurobindo directly indicates the existence of a connection between the ancient rishis and the existence (revelation) of the gods. Moreover, the processes described by the Indian thinker are very similar to those described by Heidegger. Everything indicates that the thinking of the ancient Greeks and ancient Hindus was very similar. The ancient Greeks (pre-Socratics) tried to understand why our consciousness is given to existence at all, and discovered the existence of inner peace in man – human openness to understanding the existence. Vedic sages, listening to the “voice” of the subconscious, discovered the waves of the subconscious and realized that man is like gods. It is important to note the difference between the pre-Socratics and the ancient Indian rishis in their interpretation of knowledge of existence. For the Greeks, true knowledge of being awakens human existence for knowledge (the logos, the world of naming, the world of concepts). According to the ideas of the ancient Indian rishis, when the gods awakened by man descend into their own world of existence, the consciousness of man in his actual existence also awakens. That is why the truth for the Greeks, according to Heidegger, is the opening and concealment of the truth of being (things), and the truth for the Rishi, according to Sri Aurobindo, is the ascent to true existence together with the gods that awaken in us. (shrink)

In 1578, the Anglo-Italian author, translator, and teacher John Florio wrote that English was 'a language that wyl do you good in England, but passe Dover, it is woorth nothing'. Learning Languages in Early Modern England is the first major study of how English-speakers learnt a variety of continental vernacular languages in the period between 1480 and 1720. English was practically unknown outside of England, which meant that the English who wanted to travel and trade with the (...) wider world in this period had to become language-learners. Using a wide range of printed and manuscript sources, from multilingual conversation manuals to travellers' diaries and letters where languages mix and mingle, Learning Languages explores how early modern English-speakers learned and used foreign languages, and asks what it meant to be competent in another language in the past. Beginning with language lessons in early modern England, it offers a new perspective on England's 'educational revolution'. John Gallagher looks for the first time at the whole corpus of conversation manuals written for English language-learners, and uses these texts to pose groundbreaking arguments about reading, orality, and language in the period. He also reconstructs the practices of language-learning and multilingual communication which underlay early modern travel. Learning Languages offers a new and innovative study of a set of practices and experiences which were crucial to England's encounter with the wider world, and to the fashioning of English linguistic and cultural identities at home. Interdisciplinary in its approaches and broad in its chronological and thematic scope, this volume places language-learning and multilingualism at the heart of early modern British and European history. (shrink)

A survey of the emergence of the philosophy of language in 17th- and 18th-century European philosophy as an independent subdiscipline of philosophy.

Language and tradition have long been relegated to the sidelines as scholars have considered the role of politics, science, technology and economics in the making of the modern world. This reading of over two centuries of philosophy, political theory, anthropology, folklore and history argues that new ways of imagining language and representing supposedly premodern people - the poor, labourers, country folk, non-europeans and women - made political and scientific revolutions possible. The connections between language ideologies, privileged linguistic codes, and (...) political concepts and practices shape the diverse ways we perceive ourselves and others. This 2003 book demonstrates that contemporary efforts to make schemes of social inequality based on race, gender, class and nationality seem compelling and legitimate, rely on deeply-rooted ideas about language and tradition. Showing how critics of modernity unwittingly reproduce these foundational fictions, it suggests strategies for challenging the undemocratic influence of these voices of modernity. (shrink)

The Grand Tour was “the classical continental trip to France and Italy, undertaken by young aristocratic men in early modern Europe, ostensibly for educational purposes.” According to Cambridge Uni...

The volume describes a virtual tour of the cities in which Franz Brentano and his pupils worked and lived, with a reconstruction of the intellectual climate of their time. After the Introduction, the intellectual life of Wurzburg, Munich, Vienna, Prag, Lvov, Warsaw, Cambridge, Florence and Milan is presented and analyzed. The papers collected in this volume propose several answers to the following question: to what do we refer when we speak of Central European philosophy?. Interpretations of Central European (...) philosophy have developed in at least two broad directions. An interpretation fashionable during the 1970s lumps specific philosophical achievements, especially those of Mach and Wittgenstein, characterized by research into and development of new languages, of new philosophical, scientific and artistic grammars. In this situation, literature was seen as the exploration of meanings moving towards frontiers in which reality and possibility, science and metaphor, meet and merge. On the other hands, the theme of a Central European philosophy, connected with but independent of literature, has recently been given more thorough development. The two outstanding figures to have emerged from this inquiry are those of Bernard Bolzano and Franz Brentano. With reference to Brentano in particular, it is almost as if the collapse of the Empire also erased awareness of the common origin of many diverse components of Central European philosophical and scientific thought. The Polish logical school, logical neopositivism, phenomenology, the Prague school of linguistics, analytic philosophy, Gestalt psychology, the Vienna economics school - as well as a number of individual thinkers - are all movements and groups connected in some manner with Brentano's work and teaching. Although in some respects these are movements still at the centre of interest, the overall effect, the pattern of their common and unifying aspects have been neglected if they have not entirely disappeared. It seems that the unity of this philosophical tradition was lost with the end of the geographical and political unity of the Danubian empire and with the events that accompanied its downfall. After 1918 the centres of that tradition - Vienna, Prague, Lvov, Graz - belonged to different states, and its rich network of exchanges, contacts and relationships was dismantled forever. However, there still remained something of its philosophical style in each individual school; traits which enable us to speak, as the Authors have done in this volume, of Central European philosophy.". (shrink)

Our analysis examined the language, structure, and meaning of mythological narratives, alongside relevant philosophical and theological works. Examining religious language, we found that religious texts utilize figurative language (metaphors, similes) to convey complex ideas about the divine. Philosophical works highlighted the concept of "family resemblance," where religious terms acquire meaning through connections within a religious framework. We explored how elements like plot, character development, and point of view shape meaning. The Popol Vuh's cyclical plot with repetitive elements underscores the interconnectedness (...) of creation and destruction. The Popol Vuh's deities, working together as creators, highlight the importance of collaboration. Pandora embodies the dangers of curiosity, while her role as the first woman adds layers of complexity. Finally, the transformation of Osiris signifies the triumph of good and the possibility of life after death. The Babylonian Enuma Elish features a violent power struggle among deities, with Marduk emerging as the victor and creator god. In contrast, the Judeo-Christian account depicts a singular, omnipotent God who creates the universe through spoken word, emphasizing divine orderliness and benevolence. Similarly, examining flood myths exposed differences in divine justice and hope. (shrink)

The field of modern European Jewish history, as I hope to show, can be of great interest to those who deal with conceptual history in other contexts, just as much as the conceptual historical project may enrich the study of Jewish history. This article illuminates the transformation of the Jewish languages in Eastern Europe-Hebrew and Yiddish-from their complex place in traditional Jewish society to the modern and secular Jewish experience. It presents a few concrete examples for (...) this process during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article then deals with the adaptation of Central and Western European languages within the internal Jewish discourse in these parts of Europe and presents examples from Germany, France, and Hungary. (shrink)

This paper presents a streamlined taxonomy for categorizing offensive language in Arabic, specifically Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and the Levantine dialect. Addressing a gap in the existing literature, which has mainly focused on Indo-European languages, our taxonomy divides offensive language into seven levels (six explicit and one implicit). We adapted our framework from the simplified offensive language (SOL) taxonomy by (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara, Slavko Žitnik, Anna Bączkowska, Chaya Liebeskind, Jelena Mitrovic & Giedre Valunaite Oleškeviciente. 2021a. Lod-connected offensive language (...) ontology and tagset enrichment. In Shubert R. Carvalho & Renato R. Souza (eds.), Proceedings of the workshops and tutorials held at ldk 2021 co-located with the 3rd language, data and knowledge conference, Vol. 3064, 135–150. CEUR Workshop Proceedings), customizing it to reflect the unique linguistic and cultural nuances of Arabic. To validate this taxonomy, we created a new dataset from various social media platforms, primarily focusing on Twitter. This dataset was manually curated by human annotators and is described in detail within the paper, serving as both a validation tool for our taxonomy and a foundation for future research on offensive language detection in Arabic. Initial analysis of the dataset reveals complex patterns of offensive expressions in MSA and Levantine Arabic, underscoring the need to account for linguistic and cultural variations in studying online abuse. Our taxonomy and dataset are vital for advancing research in Arabic sociocultural studies, natural language processing, and linguistic analysis, and contribute to the study of low-resource languages. (shrink)

In this article I endeavour to clarify the meaning of ‘responsibility’, which in the last decades has become a cornerstone of the ethical and political debate. To this end, I carry out an etymological enquiry into this notion with respect to antique and modern European languages. The thesis I argue is that language evidences a unique capacity to cherish, nurture, and foresee with a touch of wisdom an inexhaustible repertoire of existential meanings, which take the stage in (...) human endeavours. As a result, this enquiry helps to understand the original relational and future-oriented significance of ‘responsibility’. Additionally, the analysis steers clear of incorrect or incomplete interpretations, as well as of those willing to deal with the complex and multifaced meaning of ‘responsibility’ in a purely logical-analytical way, which results in moving to the background, if not disregarding altogether, its historical and linguistic stratifications, which are in fact relevant to the full comprehension of this notion. (shrink)

This dissertation studies modern European philosophy's reflection the historical appearance of the human sciences, under the spell of either positivist ideology or historicism, while also making their scientific character a philosophical issue. The work thus hopes to situate the human sciences in an historical context out of which they become unintelligible: the philosophical reflection that, throughout late modernity, has registered their progressive appearance as disciplines of an uncertain and often questioned degree of scientificity. In this way, it challenges (...) a standard practice of 20th c. philosophy of science---to start with the tradition inherited from logical positivism, as though the genre began ex-nihilo around the time, or with, Popper's Logik der Forschung. ;The historical itinerary reconstructed begins with the antinomy nature/freedom in modern philosophy, particularly as it appears in the Kantian corpus. This is followed by an analysis of the dissolution of system philosophy against the background of the movements that constitute the historical matrix of the human sciences: positivism and historicism. Then the work considers the "return to Kant" in Dilthey and the neo-Kantians, which is a conscious attempt to reenact philosophical theories that may serve as scientific meta-language. Finally, the dissertation traces the reception of this Fragestellung in the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger, particularly in the latter's turn from a destruction of metaphysics to a critique of science and technology. ;At the same time, the historical appearance of the sciences of man is considered together with the crisis of philosophy as epistemology or general theory of knowledge. This is done without disregard to the irreversible character of the epochal differend between science and philosophy, evidenced by the crisis of epistemology as scientific meta-language and the rise of an autonomous self-reflection of sciences that constitutes their own "philosophy of science." Thus the work's conclusion attempts to find the epistemological site of a reflection on man that may go beyond the empirical in the discursive space that opens up between natural science and the retreat of philosophy as theory of knowledge. (shrink)

This dissertation addresses the roots of fundamental changes in twentieth-century art in China by addressing how the cultural exchange between Europe and China transformed critical conceptions and artistic practices in the field of art. The translation of German aesthetic theories and the French academic training of Chinese artists engendered the conceptual and technical transformation of Chinese art in the early twentieth century. While the notions of pure nudity, artistic salvation, and archaeology of art were introduced from German philosophy into Chinese (...) art, the traditional ideas of art versus craft and artist as moral exemplars were converted. Chinese intellectuals analogized crisis-ridden China in the early 20th century to Germany being occupied by the Napoleon army in 1806. They believed that the superior academic culture, instead of its political and military strengths, was the foundation of the unification of Germany in 1871. The doctrines of German scholars were therefore introduced to China through German-trained Chinese intellectuals, aiming at achieving the modern transition of Chinese society. The implementation of aesthetic education based on German philosophical theories endowed modern artists and their works with the social mission to shape the citizens’ personalities and improve their tastes to establish a liberal and civilized modern Chinese society. Moreover, due to the establishment of the Institut Franco-Chinois in Lyon, more Chinese art students acquired the opportunity to study in Paris, the most important center for new artistic ideas and practices during the early twentieth century. Thus, the conceptual shift in the field of aesthetics was expressed through artists with a French academic training background. This study focuses on examining how the translation of German aesthetic doctrines and the introduction of French (sometimes Italian) artistic techniques contributed to the modern transition of Chinese art. How were German aesthetics translated and disseminated to young Chinese artists in the early twentieth century? How were the German scholars’ theories appropriated to establish new standards for evaluating artists and their works? What were the mechanisms, obstacles and cultural clashes encountered by European-trained Chinese artists in their training and creation processes? How did European-trained Chinese artists respond to these new modern aesthetic doctrines? Each of the five chapters of my dissertation centers on the introduction or transformation of an artistic concept: art versus craft, pure nudity, artistic salvation, and archaeology of art, discussing how these concepts were theoretically and practically formulated in Chinese art. (shrink)

The volume offers the first-ever synthetic overview of the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe. Covering twenty national cultures and languages wedged between Russia, Turkey, Austria and Germany, it goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narrative and offers a novel vision of transnational intellectual history. The authors focus on the ways political thinkers outside of Western Europe sought to bridge the gap between an idealized Western modernity and their own societies. Mapping these discourses and debates from (...) the Enlightenment to the First World War, the volume helps rethinking some of our basic assumptions about the history of modern European culture and politics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Gilgamesh among Us: Modern Encounters with the Ancient Epic by Theodore ZiolkowskiJohannes HauboldTheodore Ziolkowski. Gilgamesh among Us: Modern Encounters with the Ancient Epic. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011. xvi + 226 pp. 3 black-and-white ills. Cloth, $35.This book surveys modern receptions of the Gilgamesh Epic from the earliest lectures and publications of George Smith to recent reworkings of the epic in Western literature and (...) art. The argument is divided into five chapters. After an introduction which outlines the contents of the poem and tells the story of its rediscovery, chapter 1, “The Initial Reception (1884–1935),” takes us from Leonidas Le Cenci Hamilton’s Ishtar and Izdubar of 1884 via the “Babel and Bible” controversy of the early twentieth century to the predominantly German reception prior to World War II. Several major figures make an appearance here, including Freud, Jung, Rilke, Hesse, Mann, Döblin, Canetti, and Pannwitz. Chapter 2, “Representative Beginnings (1941–1958),” takes up the thread of German engagement with the towering achievements of Hermann Kasack’s Die Stadt hinter dem Strom (61–64) and, especially, Hans Henny Jahnn’s Fluß ohne Ufer (67–74), an enigmatic re-imagining of the Gilgamesh story on a scale that deserves a monograph study of its own. Elsewhere, the reception of Gilgamesh continues with “four poets in English” (Lucas and Bridson in Britain; Olson and Corso in the United States; 48–59) and with the first musical settings, among them Martinů’s oratorio The Epic of Gilgamesh (75–77). Chapter 3, “The Popularization of Gilgamesh (1959–1978),” surveys new translations into the major European languages (79–80), and with them a range of popular responses. Ziolkowski notes a surge in adaptations for children, as well as other initiatives aimed at a wider public (81–82). It is against this background, he argues, that we need to see more ambitious experiments in musical and literary reception, including Per Nørgård’s opera Gilgamesh (105–7); Louis Zukofsky’s “canto 23” (which forms part of his larger poetic cycle entitled “A,” 85–88); Stanisław Lem’s review of an imaginary Gilgamesh adaptation in his A Perfect Vacuum (Doskonała Próżnia, 97–99); and the “fictional exuberances” of John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues, Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, and Rhoda Lerman’s Call Me Ishtar (99–105). Ziolkowski also draws attention to what he argues was the first overtly gay reworking of Gilgamesh, in Guido Bachmann’s novel of the same name (91–94). Chapter 4, “The Contemporization of Gilgamesh (1979–1999),” continues the theme of popularization in a political key: Ziolkowski takes us on a whistle-stop tour of late twentieth-century preoccupations, from successive crises in the Near East (109) to post-colonialism (109–10); the spread of psychoanalysis, both in a Freudian and a Jungian key (112–19); deconstruction (118–19); the rise of ecologism [End Page 669] (110, 123–35); and minority politics in the USA (135–38). Chapter 5, “Gilgamesh in the Twenty-First Century (2000–2009),” sets out to show that “Gilgamesh, who was born and flourished in the mid-third millennium b.c.e., is alive and well” (154). Ziolkowski identifies “a new focus” (167) on cultural and religious conflict in the wake of Samuel Huntington and the events of 9/11, although it must be said that the responses of Schrott and Begrich (171–78) do not fit this framework particularly well, and in practice much of the chapter seems designed to tie up loose ends. The book is equipped with a timeline of works discussed (199–205), end notes (207–20), and an index (221–26), but no bibliography.In lucid and unpretentious prose, Ziolkowski sets out what he sees as the most significant “Western” responses to the epic of Gilgamesh. He leaves the Near and Far East to “appropriately qualified scholars” (x): one hopes that others will take up the invitation, and that they will make connections with the materials explored in this book. Ziolkowski also passes over Latin America and the Caribbean—perhaps he felt there was nothing to say (for a possible starting point, see C... (shrink)

The tragedy of European civilization is a protracted historical event spanning the twentieth century and in many ways is ongoing. During this time some of the greatest modern thinkers were active, producing works that both refl ected what was happening in history and contributed towards shaping it. This work is a critique of their ideas. Harry Redner establishes where and how they went wrong, in some cases with apocalyptic consequences for Europe and the world. The great intellectuals of (...) the age, at once philosophers, sociologists, political theorists, historians and much else besides, include Marx, Weber, Freud, Elias, Spengler, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Arendt, Nietzsche, and Foucault. All of them had a historical impact, even if only in molding academic disciplines and shaping of public opinion, as was the case with the philosophers Wittgenstein and Arendt. This book explores the close links between anti-Semitism and cultural pessimism and the relation between psychology and sociology. Other themes range from the history and theory of the state, to the misconception of language and power. Suitable for students of sociology, philosophy, political theory, history, and cultural studies, this brilliant exploration of our civilization and its tragedies will also be of interest to intellectual general readers. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to investigate the impact of the Greek language on modern legal languages in the United Kingdom and United States of America. The focus is placed on terms with the prefix cyber- of Greek origin that have recently enriched the English legal languages in connection with the fact that certain new phenomena have been regulated by laws as a result of the development of new technologies. Therefore, the authors have investigated the occurrence (...) of terms with the prefix cyber- in legislation and other legal texts. Apart from the analysis of borrowings in the English legal languages, the authors have also investigated the occurrence of equivalent terms in Greek and Cypriot legislation and other genres of legal texts. Furthermore, the analysis involved the investigation of the occurrence of terms with the analysed prefix cyber- in European Union legislation and terminological databases to find out whether the borrowings may become internationalisms of Greek origin. Furthermore, the authors have also investigated whether for those terms with a prefix of Greek origin there are synonyms in the languages under scrutiny of non-Greek origin. (shrink)

The essay offers a decolonial reading of the thought of Ọ̀rúnmìlà, the ancient legendary Yorùbá African messenger and interpreter of the spiritual tradition of Ifá with the aim to address the problem of hegemonic languages (such as English and French) and epistemic bias that have affected the Yorùbá intellectual tradition. The essay argues that reflection on the deep history of Yorùbá and the applied philosophy of Ọ̀rúnmìlà can better clarify the problem of language and epistemic injustices that European (...) modernity has generated in modern Africa. The essay therefore explores what could be described as the interaction of nature-culture in the Yorùbá African intellectual tradition that continues to be silenced and distorted by imposed hegemonic languages and cultures. Through a new reading of the thought of Ọ̀rúnmìlà within the context of Ifá, the essay highlights how the problem of language and epistemic injustices disrupts the continuity of inherited African philosophical and historical traditions in modern times. Ultimately, such reading aims at revealing the contribution of the Yorùbá intellectual tradition to the global philosophical and historical discourse. (shrink)

He work of the Russian nationwide conference ‘National identity through language and literature. Characteristics of conceptoshere of national culture‘ is analyzed in the article. Previous theoretical sources on the issue in question are summarized. The matters represented in the considered scientific forum are generalized. Diachronic analysis of national cultural consciousness as well as complex cognitive-based approach are used to investigate the issue. Special attention is paid to the study of linguistic world-image as exemplified in fiction, folklore, religious texts, business papers, (...) scholarly works and media texts, as well as to the research of intercultural communication in the era of multiculturalism and globalization. As long as terms ‘cultural code‘, ‘national code‘, and ‘fictional code‘ are not precisely defined, the problem of terminological field was noted, as well as the issue of linguo-cognitive interpretation of methods for representing country image in linguistic consciousness. The attention was paid to Russian as a foreign language, to perception and transforming of European cultural codes by American and western European writers in synchronous and diachronic ways. Geopolitical factor of North and South that matters both in global and local context was noted, particularly the issue of German distinction of the modern European mindset was reviewed. Lots of speaker papers mirrored interdisciplinary links that is of importance for contemporary scholarship in the context of globalization and multicultural society. Up-to-date schools of thought in the field of linguistics, literary studies and journalism were represented. (shrink)

Is medieval logic formal? And if yes, in what sense? There are striking affinities between medieval and contemporary theories of language. Authors from the two periods share formal ambitions and maintain complex, and at time uneasy, relations with natural language. However, modern scholars became careful not to overlook the specificities of theories developed more than five hundred years apart, in particular with respect to their 'formal' character. In 1972, Alfonso Maieru noted that the efforts of medieval logicians to identify (...) logical structures in language formal enough to become objects of scientific consideration. He also stressed that the language investigated is a historical one, Latin, so that one can legitimately wonder to which extent... one is allowed to speak of 'formal logic' in the middle ages. In other words, medieval logic is characterized by a tension between 'formalist ambitions' and constraints proper to natural language. Today, our knowledge of the field has considerably expanded, calling for a new assessment of the question. (shrink)

All utopias share one crucial characteristic, namely the critique of contemporary society, either explicit or implicit. This paper shows, however, that there were limits to this critique, as well as to the compassion and imagination of utopian authors. It addresses the crimes that were punishable by death in contemporaneous communities and utopias. The descriptions of executions in utopias are compared to the types of executions in reality at the time and ancient sources. Several early modern utopias have been scrutinized (...) closely, from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to Mercier’s L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante (1771) and beyond. Utopias from different countries and languages were analysed to capture the early modern European character of such attitudes. This article argues that death penalty was such an integral part of the early modern era that utopian authors, highly educated and sophisticated humanist scholars, could or would not imagine societies without capital punishment. This proves that early modern utopian writers did not look to the future, but rather to the past to find the ideal model for their societies. (shrink)

In early modern China, natural history and medicine were shifting along with the boundaries of the empire. Naturalists struggled to cope with a pharmacy's worth of new and unfamiliar substances, texts, and terms, as plants, animals, and the drugs made from them travelled into China across land and sea. One crucial aspect of this phenomenon was the early modern exchange between Islamic and Chinese medicine. The history of theriac illustrates the importance of the recipe for the naturalization of (...) foreign objects in early modern Chinese medicine. Theriac was a widely sought-after and hotly debated product in early modern European pharmacology, and arrived into the Chinese medical canon via Arabic and Persian texts. The dialogue between language and material objects was critical to the Silk Road drug trade, and transliteration was ultimately a crucial technology used to translate drugs and texts about them in the early modern world. (shrink)

The article discusses the relationship of the axiological foundations of modern bioethics with casual and even incidental effects of the activity of scholars in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The author examine the ability of humanists to influence the formation of values system as well as the possibility of instrumentalizing these values in social practices. The study determines the entire causal complex that led to the formation of a special tradition of non-religious substantiation of values associated with (...) the teaching and study of ancient languages in the context of the functioning of political and legal institutions and cultural and historical traditions of European states. The author considers the origins and meaning of humanism and the gradual change of its content as well as the transformation of humanistic experience into a tool of constructing ideals and values and an element of social technology. A special place is given to the analysis of attempts to form meta-ethics and bioethics within the framework of the value system of post-Soviet Russian society and the role of humanistic ideas in this process. On the example of the development of modern European philosophical thought, the controversial and problematic nature of various interpretations of humanism is shown, and the thesis of the historical conditionality of the ideals of humanism and its connection with some certain paradigms of metaphysic is confirmed. The central theme of the article is the problem of the relationship between the historical and conceptual, conditional and unconditional, contextual and universal in the heritage of the late medieval humanism. Technologization paths and contexts for the interpretation of humanistic ideas in modern Russia are outlined. The paper determines the ways of harmonization of humanitarian values and the system of their social and legal legitimation. On the example of the educational policy of higher education in recent decades, achievements and failures in the process of forming a new value system are analyzed. This value system could be used as a basis for legislative practice and state policy that would allow determining the basis of modern bioethics, which is of great importance for the development of Russian society and further improvement of the moral and legal foundations of its existence. (shrink)

Monsters as a category seem omnipresent in early modern natural philosophy, in what one might call a “long” early modern period stretching from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century, when the science of teratology emerges. We no longer use this term to refer to developmental anomalies (whether a two-headed calf, an individual suffering from microcephaly or Proteus syndrome) or to “freak occurrences” like Mary Toft’s supposedly giving birth to a litter of rabbits, in Surrey in the early (...) eighteenth-century (Todd 1995). But the term itself has a rich semantic history, coming from the Latin verb monstrare (itself deriving from monere, to remind, warn, advise), “to show,” from which we also get words like “monitor,” “admonish,” “monument” and “premonition”; hence there are proverbs like, in French, le monstre est ce qui montre, difficult to render in English: “the monsters is that which shows.” Scholars have discussed how this “monstrative” dimension of the monster is in fact twofold: on the one hand, and most awkwardly, the monster is an individual who is “pointed at,” who is shown; on the other hand, the monster is a sign, a portent, an omen, and in that sense “shows us” something (on the complex semantic history of the term across Indo-European languages see Ochsner 2005). The latter dimension persists in naturalized form in the early modern period when authors like Bacon, Fontenelle or William Hunter insist that monsters (or anomalies) can show us something of the workings of Nature. (shrink)

This article offers the concept of `global modernity' (in the singular) as a way to understand the contemporary world. It suggests that the concept helps overcome the teleology implicit in a term such as globalization, while it also recognizes global difference and conflict, which are as much characteristics of the contemporary world as tendencies toward unity and homogenization. These differences, and the appearance of `alternative' or `multiple' modernities, it suggests, are expressions, and articulations, of the contradictions of modernity which are (...) now universalized across, as well as within, societies. If we are to speak of alternative or multiple modernities, which presently valorize the persistence of traditions and `civilizational' legacies, we need to recognize that the very language of alternatives and multiplicity is enabled historically by the presupposition of a common modernity shaped by a globalizing capitalism. (shrink)

The article considers the formation and development of philosophy in Belarus in the context of historical conditions and modern opportunities. Discussing the national context of the philosophical process, the author reveals the four aspects of the phenomenon of “national philosophy.” Firstly, there are national institutional and disciplinary structures, which are responsible for an organized scientific, methodological, research and educational activity, which at the level of the nation-state is formalized by certain institutions, system of professional education, norms of professional ethos, (...) standards of behavior within the community and in the wider social environment. Secondly, in the light of philosophical culture, national philosophy is interpreted as a set of value and cognitive orientations passed down from generation to generation. Thirdly, national philosophy can be viewed in the aspect of the tradition of studying the philosophical thought of the nation in the context of its historical development. Fourthly, national philosophy appears in the aspect of the philosophical foundations of the national idea and national-cultural identity. The author examines the main stages of the development of the Belarusian philosophical culture, it is shown that the features of this culture were formed under the condition of a complex combination of the worldview and values of Latin civilization, Christianity, modern European science, rationalism of social projects of the Enlightenment, ideological and worldview attitudes of Western Russian culture, formalized Soviet philosophical disciplines. The article reviews the circle of theoretical, ideological, and practical problems that the modern philosophical process in Belarus faces, the author emphasizes the unfading value of philosophical knowledge as a source of heuristic means for finding effective local answers to global problems of cultural and civilizational development. The author argues that there are two conditions that make national philosophy possible: this is, first of all, a connection with the history of thought in the area of national genesis and also the expression of thought in a national language. (shrink)

Visions of reality and supernatural powers accompanied man closely throughout his pre-history and recorded history. The role of the higher religions in the history of human civilization is outlined in an appealing theory developed by Arnold J. Toynbee. Toynbee sees the need for a synthesis of today’s higher religions, a synthesis which should take effect in a trans-rationalistic spirit. The author of the article notes that, although there can be no greatness without the awareness of participating in greatness, uniting Europe (...) is making no effort to build a modern metaphysical awareness to support its ambitious plan. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 21-39 [Access article in PDF] Capability and Language in the Novels of Tarjei Vesaas Catherine Wilson I THOUGH RELATIVELY UNKNOWN to English-speaking readers, Tarjei Vesaas (1897-1970) is recognized as one of the great Scandinavian novelists and literary innovators of the last century. His oeuvre is substantial, extending to thirty-four volumes published between 1923 and 1966, many of them translated into English and European (...) languages. He was one of four nominees for the 1964 Nobel Prize in literature, and he received a number of other awards and citations in the course of his life. At the same time, his work has failed almost entirely to generate a secondary literature going beyond plot summary, stylistics, and moral approval, and even that literature remains strongly regionalized. 1 Vesaas wrote in nynorsk or "New Norwegian," the minority language of the country created from south-central dialects and distinct from the official, bureaucratic bokmal. He settled permanently on a farm in the remote Telemark district of Norway and assumed no role in European culture as critic or essayist, refusing to discuss his own work in literary or philosophical terms. As a result, analytic and comparative studies have proved difficult to launch.The present essay is intended to provide one such analytical study, addressed specifically to the philosophical themes of ethical resignation, the precariousness of communication, and inwardness. These are familiar themes in twentieth-century literature. In his study of the "literary conquest of the void," R. M. Adams shows how Moravia, Musil, and Beckett amongst others make use of devices of paralysis, immobility, exhaustion, and incomprehension that have their origins in the romantic literature of the nineteenth century, notably in Baudelaire [End Page 21] and Gogol. 2 Literary modernism rejected certain nineteenth-century conventions of plot and character, but did not abandon the fascination of the preceding century with nihilistic themes. Vesaas's work demands to be read in this literary context. The novels, at once semirealistic and highly stylized, deal almost exclusively with rural people and their struggles against the elemental forces of nature. The main characters are often children and adolescents who suffer some degree of helplessness. Simple contrasts are posed: warmth and cold; loss and retrieval, childbirth and death. Agricultural cycle motifs abound. The choice of protagonists and the dominance of vitalistic and biological themes pose the threat of sentimentality and preciousness, but it is avoided by the ubiquity of devastation and destruction in the moral landscape. According to Randi Brox's note in the Dictionary of Scandinavian Literature, the early novels in particular "advocate as the highest goal in life an accepting, contented attitude toward the human condition." 3This judgment reflects what might be termed a judicial-theological picture of fiction. On this view, a novel constitutes a testing ground for discovering what sort of world we live in and what pursuits are possible and worthwhile. Various alternatives are set up as hypotheses, and novels prove and disprove them through narrative demonstrations of the causal effects of adopting them. False theories of the human world and untenable values are subject to refutation. This template is surprisingly useful, not only with respect to the nineteenth-century novel, with its apparent tendency to confident judgment, but even to modern fiction. Moravia, for example, can be seen to be awarding divergent roles to characters and allowing the qualities they represent to struggle for supremacy. 4Yet poststructuralist and postmodernist criticism have cast doubt on the notion that, to the extent that they are important, such contests can ever be decided, and it is increasingly clear that the greatest nineteenth-century novelists, Hardy and Eliot, did not regard the hierarchy of values as settled and demonstrable. Persons, we are coming to understand, are more plausibly seen as sites of conflict; thus fictional representations of persons are repositories of opposing values. Vesaas's novels reflect such an understanding of persons and values, and so the judicial-theological template is inapplicable.The critical view that Vesaas's novels are essentially instructions in adaptation is untenable, because the goal of... (shrink)

It is argued that the analysis of language should play a central role in the study of social psychological phenomenon. For example, there is evidence that habitual inauthenticity in the use of language which was practised in the Eastern and Central European totalitarian systems was partly related to the breakdown of moral principles and to the loss of identity. Using two sentences, ‘Proletarians of the whole world – unite’ and ‘The Bororo are arara’, it is shown that they can (...) carry content which goes beyond their semantic meanings. In the given examples, the former sentence is analysed in terms of an ideology and the latter in terms of a social representation. It is pointed out that subjectivation, which is a pervasive feature of modern individualism, just as totalitarianism, represents a threat to autheniticity in language. (shrink)

Here is the concluding volume of Sir Anthony Kenny's monumental four-volume history of philosophy, the first major single-author narrative history to appear for several decades. In this volume, Kenny tells the fascinating story of the development of philosophy in the modern world, from the early nineteenth century to the end of the millennium. Alongside (and intertwined with) extraordinary scientific advances, cultural changes, and political upheavals, the last two centuries have seen some of the most intriguing and original developments in (...) philosophical thinking, which have transformed our understanding of ourselves and our world. In the first part of the book, Kenny offers a lively narrative introducing the major thinkers in their historical context. Among those we meet are the great figures of continental European philosophy, from Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche to Heidegger, Sartre, and Derrida; the Pragmatists such as C.S. Pierce and William James, who first developed a distinctively American philosophical tradition; Marx, Darwin, and Freud, the non-philosophers whose influence on philosophy was immense; and Wittgenstein and Russell, friends and colleagues who set the agenda for analytic philosophy in the twentieth century. Kenny then proceeds to guide the reader lucidly through the nine main areas of philosophical work in the period, offering a serious engagement with ideas and arguments about logic, language, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, politics, and the existence of God. Graced with many beautiful illustrations, Philosophy in the Modern World concludes Kenny's stimulating history of the intellectual development of Western civilization, allowing readers to trace the birth and growth of philosophy from antiquity to the present day. (shrink)

This paper is a comparative study based on the linguistic evidence in Vedic Sanskrit and Homeric Greek, aimed at reconstructing the space-time cognitive models used in the Proto-Indo-European language in a diachronic perspective. While it has been widely recognized that ancient Indo-European languages construed earlier events as in front of later ones, as predicted in the Time-Reference-Point mapping, it is less clear how in the same languages the passage took place from this ‘archaic’ Time-RP model or (...) non-deictic sequence, in which future events are behind or follow the past ones in a temporal sequence, to the more recent ‘post-archaic’ Ego-RP model that is found only from the classical period onwards, in which the future is located in front and the past in back of a deictic observer. Data from the Rigveda and the Homeric poems show that an Ego-RP mapping with an ego-perspective frame of reference could not have existed yet at an early Indo-European stage. In particular, spatial terms of front and behind turn out to be used with reference not only to temporal events, but also to east and west respectively, thus presupposing the existence of an absolute field-based FoR which the temporal sequence is metaphorically related to. Specifically, sequence is relative position on a path appears to be motivated by what has been called day orientation frame, in which the different positions of the sun during the day motivate the mapping of front onto ‘earlier’ and behind onto ‘later’, without involving ego’s ‘now’. These findings suggest that early Indo-European still had not made use of spatio-temporal deixis based on the tense-related ego-perspective FoR found in modern languages. (shrink)

The article analyzes the work of Hanno Kesting, Reinhart Koselleck, Roman Schnur, and Nicolaus Sombart—four young followers of Carl Schmitt in postwar Germany. Their “intellectual Schmittianism” was less than a full commitment to Schmitt’s political positions, yet had more than an arbitrary similarity with them: it pertained to assumptions, categories, and modes of thought. Drawing on Pocock’s terminology, I identify a particular “language” of intellectual Schmittianism, introduce its key components, and analyze their interaction. I focus on six categories derived from (...) Schmitt’s narrative of European political modernity: discrimination, historical parallels, secularization, global civil war, open/latent civil war, and category blurs. The analysis shows that these categories were interlinked argumentative devices rather than mere rhetoric and that they systematically upheld the postwar scholars’ arguments. While the Schmittian language enabled the young scholars to express their political skepticis... (shrink)

SUMMARYHistorians of historiography have recently adopted the language of ‘epistemic virtues’ to refer to character traits believed to be conducive to good historical scholarship. While ‘epistemic virtues’ is a modern philosophical concept, virtues such as ‘objectivity’, ‘meticulousness’ and ‘carefulness’ historically also served as actors' categories. Especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historians frequently used virtue language to describe what it took to be a ‘good’, ‘reliable’ or ‘professional’ scholar. Based on three European case studies—the German (...) historian Georg Waitz, his French pupil Gabriel Monod and the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne —this article argues that such virtues cannot neatly be classified as ‘epistemic’ ones. For what is characteristic about virtue language in historical scholarship around 1900 is an overlap or entanglement of epistemic, moral and political connotations. The virtues embodied by, or attributed to, Waitz, Monod and Pirenne were almost invariably aimed at epistemic, moral and political goods at once, though not always to the same degrees. Consequently, if ‘epistemic virtues’ is going to be a helpful category, it must not be interpreted in a strong sense, but in a weak one. (shrink)

Navigating the tension between moral virtue and realism in a ruler’s effort to preserve power, Justus Lipsius’ Politicorum libri sex (1589) was a foundational text in Catholic reason of state, but its ambiguous form and content leave it open for interpretation. The present article shows how in his Italian translation, the Ferrarese secretary and scholar Ercole Cato offers an individual reading of the Politica, transforming it to underline its usefulness and enhance its orthodoxy. Through a creative use of examples from (...) ancient and modern history, Cato presented Lipsius’ political prudence as one that rejected political calculation without virtue, and placed in direct dialogue with contemporary political events. This article argues that in reshaping and expanding the Politica, Cato presented his own intervention in the debate on Catholic reason of state, and it suggests that translators like Cato should be taken seriously as active and inventive participants in early modern political languages. (shrink)

This book argues for the importance of writing to conceptions of language, technology, and civilization in the early modern era.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:European Network of Buddhist-Christian StudiesSalzburg, Austria, June 8–11, 2007John D’Arcy MayIs it a problem for Buddhists that what is generally regarded as religion can be profoundly different from tradition to tradition? Is it appropriate or even desirable to speak of a Buddhist “theology of religions”? Does Buddhism have its own ways, however subtle, of affirming its superiority over all else that claims the name “religion”?The European Network (...) of Buddhist-Christian Studies set out to find answers to these questions at its seventh conference, held at the splendid Catholic conference center of St. Virgil on the outskirts of Salzburg, Austria.Given the demographic realities in Europe, the network has inevitably tended to be a group of Christians discussing Buddhism, as far as possible with the participation of Buddhist guests but without really providing a platform for a thoroughgoing Buddhist discussion of religious plurality. This time, more Buddhists than ever before, including significant scholars from America and Asia as well as Europe, participated in the conference. We were thus treated to a discussion of Buddhist attitudes to the religions that broke new ground and presented a vivid picture of Buddhism’s own internal diversity.In his introductory address the president of the network, Prof. John May, paid tribute to the University of Salzburg’s newly established Centre for Intercultural Theology and the Study of Religions, whose director, Prof. Gregor Maria Hoff, welcomed participants on behalf of the university. Dr. Ulrich Winkler contributed substantially to the organization of the conference.Dr. Kristin Kiblinger (Winthrop University), author of the first systematic treatment of Buddhist “inclusivism,” opened the conference proper by distinguishing between “open” and “closed” forms of inclusivism. She suggested a parallel with George Lindbeck’s “experiential-expressive” paradigm of religious doctrine in order to make clear that Buddhists, like Christians, have ways of privileging their own positions, though these generally remain unacknowledged.“One vehicle” (ekayāna) theories of Buddhism have something in common with “common core” theories of Christian pluralism in that they presuppose a “single end” [End Page 149] inclusivism. Whether the “positionless position” derived from Buddhist “emptiness” (śūnyatā) is a better guarantee of genuine pluralism than the Christian notion of “self-emptying” (kenōsis), as suggested by Masao Abe, remains an open question. The Buddhist doctrine of “two truths,” one expressed in the “higher” language (paramārthasatya) accessible only to Buddhist practitioners and the other in the “lower” language (samvrtisatya) of discourse with others, does not hold out much promise of true mutual respect between traditions.Prof. John Makransky (Boston College), an ordained lama and meditation teacher as well as a renowned scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, took up the challenge of developing a Buddhist “theology” that avoids the claim to superiority. What matters to the Buddhist practitioner is to cut through all subconscious clinging, even to approved teachings and spiritual results. “Ultimate truth” can be known, directly but nonconceptually, yielding a “nonconceptual compassion” comparable to what Christians call “totally undivided oneness with God.” Lacking historical consciousness, however, teachers have tended to project their understanding of skillful means back on to Śākyamuni Buddha, each school assuming that other schools are merely preparations for itself. The same pattern is evident in the integration into Buddhism of indigenous religions such as Shintō, which enriched Buddhism but also assimilated it to themselves. Prompted by his contacts with Christian colleagues to venture beyond practice into Buddhist self-reflection, Makransky is now prepared to see in conceptions such as the Dharmakāya (“Dharma body” of the Buddha or ultimate reality) an equivalent of what Christians understand by God. The Body of Christ, with its implications for ecclesiology, could open up a further avenue for comparison.Existing under the conditions of late or post-modernity, Buddhism is forced to come to terms with pluralism and ecumenism. Prof. Kenneth Tanaka (Musashino University, Tokyo), an ordained Jōdo Shinshū priest, sees himself as incapable of saying to a non-Buddhist, “You’re not saved,” because the practice of prajñā and karunā (wisdom and compassion) is not restricted to Buddhists. Even within traditions, however, levels of spiritual attainment are not equivalent, nor are all religions equally valid. “Prophets can’t be pluralists,” but like... (shrink)

The actuality of research paper is the integration of Ukraine into the European Union and the achievement of victory over Russia in the "hybrid war" of the XXIst century, the need to unite Ukrainian people around common goals based on national pride. The Ukrainians study two important concepts - the Ukrainian the national idea and the national identity, the means of their evaluation and development. The aim of the research is a critical analysis of common and distinctive concepts of (...) the UNI and national identity. The purpose of the research is to define the main difficulties for spreading the victorious UNI in present conditions; to research the practice of studying and measuring the numerous characteristics of national identification by sociologists and the other Ukrainian scholars. The research methodology has a modern system and multidisciplinary character. The method of dialectical analysis is taken from philosophy, evolutionary approach - from historical sciences, comparative analysis - from linguistics and pedagogics, etc. We will be constantly turning to the latest scientific discoveries in ethology, cognitive science, noohistory and the other “young” sciences, that is necessary for predictions in the topic of "national identification”. Particularly we are going to borrow foreign experience in the protection of the national language and in effective teaching of foreign languages. The main result of the research is the need to create and apply the UNI as a strategic means on consolidation of Ukraine. UNI-21 should rely on a combination of noohistory as the sum of exact dates of archaeological findings and the decoding of the DNA of their organic part. The facts about the Great Trypillya and the other ancestors’ achievements of Ukrainians for over 15,000 years have already raised national pride and created a scientific outlook. The noohistorians have created a new theory on the of the Indo-European languages’ family origin. Besides they confirmed the hypothesis of German linguists of the XIXth century about the extension of Indo-European languages’ family from Ukraine's forest steppes. These and other facts are forming a high national pride, which greatly facilitates the solution of language problems. Conclusion: We have proved that the experience of Ireland on the language issues has special significance for modern Ukraine. It is known that Ireland has been colonized by the United Kingdom for 800 years. The Irish were suffered from a linguistic split and separation of a part of the nation, but they did not lose their native language. And even after the “economic victory” over the colonialists in circumstances of a very high standard living they started to restore the Irish language position of the main state language. (shrink)