This paper discusses the relation between letters and numbers in the case of ancient Greek and, other writing systems and, supports that priority must be given to the numbers, that is to say the use of letters of the alphabet was constrained, by the necessities of mathematics. In the case of Ancient Greece the ‘24 letters of the alphabet’ plus ‘3 additional signs’ were used to notate the numbers. These 27 signs formed the three enneads of the Greek Numeral System, (...) which was in use in Eastern Mediterranean and parts of Europe for almost 2,000 years. So, the 24 letter-signs were also digit-signs. The arithmetic use of letters is considered by epigraphologists and Hellenists a later development, occurring two or three centuries after the invention of the Greek alphabet. This paper supports that, from the very beginning, the alphabet should, have had, 27 signs in order to meet the needs of mathematics, that is to meet the necessity of using the enneads of the Egyptian numeral system, which probably was transferred, to Greeks via the Semitic writing system. This hypothesis is based, on the contradictions which arise between the choice of signs and their use, from ancient Greek ‘Logistikē’, from archaeological finds and from the examples of other writing systems, which were also created so as to serve the needs of mathematics — namely Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, and, other alphabets. Consequently, the alphabet should, not be considered, as a secondary system of signs, which was created, in order to record, the spoken word, but as a subset of a broader semiotic system that attempts to express human Reason in general. (shrink)

This article begins with a review of studies in perception and depth psychology concerning the experience of exposure to sacred artworks in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox contexts. This follows with the results of a qualitative inquiry involving 45 Roman Catholic, Eastern and Coptic Orthodox, and Protestant Christians in Canada. First, participants composed narratives detailing memories of spiritual experiences involving iconography. Then, in the context of a darkened room evocative of a sacred space, they viewed artworks depicting Biblical themes (...) and interpreted their meanings. Stimuli included “Western” paintings from the Roman tradition—a selection from the Gothic, Northern Renaissance, and Renaissance canon—and matched “Eastern” icons in the Byzantine style. Spiritual experience narratives were analyzed in terms of word frequencies, and interpretations of sacred artworks were analyzed thematically. Catholics tended to utilize emotional language when recalling their spiritual experiences, while religious activity was most often the concern of Protestants, and Orthodox Christians wrote most about spiritual figures and their signifiers. A taxonomy of response styles was developed to account for participants’ interpretations of Western and Eastern artworks, with content ranging from detached descriptions to projective engagement with the art-objects. Our approach allows for representation of diverse Christians’ interpretations of sacred art, taking into consideration personal, collective, and cultural-religious sources of meaning. Our paradigm also offers to enrich our understanding of the numinous or emotional dimension of mystical contact. (shrink)

In the study of Hiberno-Saxon art, three key monuments stand out: the Book of Durrow, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and the Book of Kells. They form an impressive trilogy. The earliest, the Book of Durrow, represents a developed but still “archaic” early stage; accomplished, but colored by a certain primitivism, it boldly reveals its sources in the art of pre-Christian Celtic and Germanic peoples and perhaps the late antique art of Coptic Egypt. These foundations are still evident in the latest (...) in date of the three, the Book of Kells, but they are shrouded in a world of decorative richness, intense technical virtuosity, and “baroque” complexity. Between these two in time, the Lindisfarne Gospels represents the “classical” manifestation of Hiberno-Saxon illumination — highly ordered in its ornamental mazes, sharp and clear in the statement of its forms. An aura of timeless perfection is felt especially in the majestic stability of its five cross-carpet pages. (shrink)

In the Qur’ān the most significant words used to indicate settlement are diyār, qarya, madīna, miṣr and balad. Among these, qarya and madīna are the most important ones. While Qarya means, county, city, urban, land and settlement, madīna means town. Miṣr is used for a city as well as for a specific name of a country. Diyār indicates a geographic border and the places of a settlement, and balad infers a political unity of a number of settlements. Due to this (...) use in ‘Arabic, the word balad is used as a country and a state at the same time. Recently, there are some studies focusing on examining the terms of qarya and madīna. Hovewer, we cannot encompass the semantic area of these words only by looking up their dictionary meaning and how they were used in the Qur’ān. Therefore, in this study the old cities are examined as they exist in their places. In this study, we have utilised from the modern and contemporary scientific findings which were made for urbanization and its history. For a better understanding of the concept of urbanization, some prophets’ stories have been revised. In Qur’ān the words indicating urbanization are related to society, nature, place, human, art, economy, politics and reconstruction. Therefore, the concepts of the diyār, qarya, madīna, miṣr and balad used to describe the settlements point to the relationship of society with different elements and activities.Summary: Cities, the birth of the cities, sociology, history, anthropology and cultural history are the major subjects in social science. Among them, the birth of cities are especially important for history, anthropology and sociology. For some researchers, cities are the most important revolution of humanity. Cities do not merely mean the places where the human settle down or form a society. In many human languages there is a strong relation between the words expressing civilization and settlement. There is a strong connection between cities and civilization. In Turkish, the word civilization/uygarlık comes from Uygurlar/Uighurs which means those who settled down first. Again in Turkish, the word of madaniyet which is originally Arabic is derived from madīna which means city. In English and French, civilization derives from civitas which is originally Latin. Civitas means a settlement and also the people who live within it. In ‘Arabic, the word hadārī, means settling in a place, is used for civilization, In this study, the words related to urbanization to which social science like sociology, history, anthropology and cultural history attribute a great importance are investigated from the mufassirs’ perspective. As a result of the researches, it was observed that the words qarya, madīna, diyār miṣr and balad were used in the Qur’ān in close terms with the city. Before examining the words which refer to city in the Qur’ān like qarya, madīna, diyār, mıṣr and balad, the approaches of sociology, history and anthropology are investigated for comparative purposes. According to modern and contemporary researches, jobs like art writing, music and architecture appeared after urbanization. The evolution of humanity from primitive period to modernity is because of urbanization. Cities are the crops of social relationships between people. Urbanization caused wider social interactions and the formation of more complicated societies. People who constitute societies and complicated relationships founded cities. With the increase of specialization and jobs, people of one or more job were able to meet the needs of each other through social cooperation.Before the urbanization the human-nature relation was more important but in cities human-human relation got more important. Cities caused social status to be a result of human-human relations. In these social categories, jobs like managers, merchants, guilds, soldiers and religious groups like religious leaders and darvīsh appeared. The physical features of a city are as important as their social structure. A city firstly has walls, administration, bazaar, laws, and the sense of common belonging among people.In the Qur’ān, it can be noticed that the history of settlement is developed chronologically. In the Qur’ān, the words qarya, madīna, diyār miṣr and balad are used in the meaning of the city. These words have a close relationship with people and society. For example, because societies and cities were not formed during the time of Adam, there is no word in the stories that evokes society and the city. The same is true for Idrīs. When we look at the narratives about Noah, for the first time there are words like the people, mala/the leaders of the community, erāzil/shameless, and the ship. Although no word meaning city or city is used in these stories, it is seen that society and social strata are formed. In the Hoad period, the word house, palace, building and Irem were used in addition to the word peoples/tribe. In addition to the words that express the civilized developments in the stories of Noah and Hoad, the existence of the words diyār and madīna draws attention during the reign of Ṣāleḥ. In the Qur’ān, the first terms related to urbanization were mentioned in the story of Hoad, and the words meaning settlement and city were mentioned in the story of Ṣāleḥ. Moreover, the words realm and madīna were used in the story of Ṣāleḥ. In the periods of Abraham and Moses, the words qarya and miṣr were added to this. The word Midian was used specifically for the city of Shu‘ayb, and the word balad was used for Mecca during the time of Prophet Muhammad.As mentioned in Noah’s era peoples and the states of people were present; in Hoad’s era, vineyard, garden, agriculture, houses, buildings and small scale settlements started to be constructed. In the Qur’ān, during the era of prophet Hoad, words like: vineyard, garden, agriculture, houses, building and palace, were used, however there is not a single word which means city. In Ṣāleḥ’s era the words dār and diyār were used in a general meaning? Therefore, it can be safely said that urbanization seriously started in Ṣāleḥ’s era. Additionally, dār also means house, vineyard, garden, grassland, region and home. Descriptions of dār, diyār and madīna in Ṣāleḥ’s parable point out the three directions of Thamūd peoples about urbanization. The word dār refers to the architectural features of their houses; the word diyār refers to their vineyards, gardens, houses and lands; and the word madīna refers to the largest and most important settlement in their homes. As modern and contemporary science has argued, according to the commentators, madīna is used for the settlements surrounded by walls, with its bazaar, army, ruler, tradesman and merchant.In the Qur’ān, the word qarya is closer to diyāri even if its used as madīna in some of the parables. Nevertheless, qarya is different from diyār due to its two distinctive features of political structure and intimacy. Qarya is a city or city state in some way, but it is not only a center but also a city or city state with a political structure with villages, towns, mountains, slopes and plains. So today, it refers to a city which has political integrity with its provincial borders or environment. Diyār was used for the places which were suitable for agriculture, while qarya was used for the cities of Sāmī people as a common word in Sāmī languages. For this reason, qarya was never used for the settlements of Copti, which are African communities; instead, the misr, which is a common word in Coptic and Arabic, was preferred. Even the word miṣr which means city in the Coptic language was used as a country name in the Egyptian regions. The word Balad indicates more a political formation, so it only means country. In the time period of Jahiliyyah they used balad for Mecca which owned a political formation.In the Qur’ān the words qarya and balad are used for Mecca but words like diyār, madīna and miṣr were never used for it. The use of the name qarya for Mecca indicates that it was established by a non-Arab like Abraham on the one hand and that it was the common place of all people. The word of madīna is not used to describe it because Mecca has not embody walls, bazaar, army or craftmanship. The reasons for not using diyār is because there are no vineyards or gardens. The lack of the word miṣr for Mecca also indicates that there is no influence of North African races such as Hāmī in Mecca.Briefly, Qarya is a settlement with its village and towns which is under administration. Madīna is a important center which exists inside qarya with walls, bazaar and architecture. Diyār is a settlement of the city center with houses, vineyards and gardens. Miṣr is a city where the Northern Africans are residing and Balad is a settlement where is prominences as political organization. (shrink)

Singing and praying in the words of biblical men and women is basic to sacramental mimesis, i.e., Christian imitation of the actions of the saints with the intention of thereby opening themselves to grace. This evidence counters the “voiceless victim” paradigm prevalent in much feminist scholarship. In pre-Christian Jewish liturgy, the song of Miriam after the Crossing of the Red Sea was already important in the annual celebration of the Passover. Jesus emphasized the spiritual equality of the sexes in his (...) teaching and ministry, and this led to increased visibility for women in Christian tradition: Susanna was the first of at least eight women interpreted as types of Christ. She was presented this way even within the synoptic Gospels themselves [see “Aneboesen phone megale: Susanna and the Synoptic Passion Narratives,” forthcoming in Gregorianium]. Moreover, the practice of presenting examples from both sexes in sermons and church decoration was so pervasive as to constitute a pastoral program of the Church. Such balanced representation of the sexes is found in both texts and art. The linguistic range of the evidence for the singing of women’s words includes Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Slavonic, and German. The artworks depicting women are from throughout the Christian world, including Dura Europos, Jerusalem, Egypt, Ethiopia, Cyprus, Syria, Armenia, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany. More than twenty biblical women are treated in the essay. Women’s words, quoted from the biblical record or imaginatively supplied, became the prayer of the whole congregation. Miriam’s words remain focal universally on Holy Saturday. The acclamations of Elizabeth and of the Virgin Mary became prominent early in both East and West . Both Byzantine and Gregorian chant commemorated them and other women such as Eve, Esther, Judith, Sarah , Susanna, Martha of Bethany, the Samaritan woman, the Canaanite woman, the woman with the ointment, the Samaritan woman, the ten virgins of the parable , and especially the Holy Women at the Tomb . Their proclamation of the Lord’s rising became particularly important in Byzantine resurrection hymns used at Easter and year-round. With four other first-century female saints– Junia, Mariamne, Photina and Thecla– Mary Magdalene was deemed ἰσαπόστολος “equal to the apostles,” because the angel commissioned her to announce the Lord’s Resurrection to the disciples. Martha’s profession of faith is the fullest recorded in the Gospels and became the basis for a Byzantine communion prayer . Repeatedly, one finds that women’s words were sung at important Sunday feasts and during Holy Week. In Gregorian chant their words were sung over the course of several days. Susanna’s words are readily found in fifty Gregorian chant manuscripts from the ninth through fifteenth centuries, used in cathedrals, in monasteries and other religious houses, and in parish churches; an appendix lists these manuscripts. Throughout the continent–in Italy, Austria, Slovenia, Germany, Switzerland, France, The Netherlands, England, Wales–the varied communities of the church sang Susanna’s words. Moreover, her words as mediated through Gregorian chant were quoted by Bernard of Clairvaux in a sermon and by Hermann of Scheda in his account of his conversion from Judaism. These men used Susanna’s words to evoke her as a type of Christ and thereby to seek to be like him themselves. That is, they experienced sacramental mimesis through singing women’s words. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3 (2001) 463-482 [Access article in PDF] The "Antiquarianization" of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible (1653-57) Peter N. Miller The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the heroic age of the antiquaries. Roaming from text to context and back again, these scholars completed the revolution begun by the humanists who realized that Greek and Roman texts could never be understood isolated from (...) the men and societies that made them. These scholars, from Petrarch to Poggio, from Panvinio to Peiresc to Perizonius, looked beyond the page and collected, described, and compared the material remains of the ancient world. That these investigations transformed the understanding of the past and effected a revolution in the method of historical inquiry was insisted upon by Arnaldo Momigliano beginning half a century ago. 1 In recent years these antiquaries have also attracted the attention of historians of early modern art, science, archaeology, politics, and scholarship. 2 [End Page 463]This renewed focus on antiquaries as agents of late humanism has tended to concentrate on their contribution to understanding ancient Greece and Rome, but they were also responsible for the first generation of serious scholarship about the ancient and modern Near East. Drawing on the same methods to ask the same questions they had asked of classical antiquity these antiquaries directed their attention to the extra-European world. Like the study of the earlier Renaissance of Greece and Rome, that of Israel and Egypt was stimulated by a profusion of new materials, streaming back to scholars' studies from the missionaries, merchants, and diplomats traveling to the Ottoman East in greater and greater numbers. It is breadth of inquiry that characterizes this new approach--more texts in more languages--but also a much greater explanatory weight placed on objects as evidence and more confidence in using knowledge provided by people presently living in far-away places to shed light on those who lived there long ago. In this approach to a region and its culture as a whole early modern antiquaries created oriental studies.Because so much of the contemporary interest in the Near East was driven by the ingrained association of these lands and their peoples with the history narrated in the Bible, early oriental studies is inseparable from biblical scholarship. Pietro della Valle's letters from the East were, after all, signed "Il Pellegrino," and Fabri de Peiresc's efforts to recover the Samaritans and their history were triggered by his desire to contribute to the publication of their Pentateuch. It is because oriental studies like these were shaped by the ways and means of antiquaries that so much seventeenth-century biblical scholarship can be described as having been "antiquarianized." Like the earlier humanists who had given Virgil and Horace a context, those fascinated and obsessed with understanding every jot and tittle of the sacred text turned to the Bible's context for help: the history of the ancient Near East as it could be reconstructed from texts, objects, and the long-lived traditions preserved by marginal groups like the Samaritans or in out of the way places like the Coptic monasteries of Wadi Natrûn. This antiquarianization reflects the move from the word to the world that had begun with Petrarch. Early modern sacred philologists--the Englishman Thomas Fuller called this figure "The True Church Antiquary"--set out to prove, by the most sophisticated methods available, that sacred history was historical.At the heart of this inquiry lay a belief in historia sacra, understood as both a theory of providential history and a methodology of historical scholarship. The theory gave them the confidence to pursue with reason the truth of revelation because all had to reflect the plan of the One Creator. The practice encouraged scholars to recruit the evidence of history, philosophy, archaeology, and geography to the service of the sacred, all confirming the triumph of Christianity. They [End Page 464] were convinced that erudition could only amplify, and not undermine, the conclusions already reached by faith. 3 It was this... (shrink)

Business ethics courses have been launched with professors from business pulling on one oar, and professors of philosophy pulling on the other, but they lack a sense of direction. Let's begin with the basics: What is an ehtical decision? More fundamentally, why the interest in professional ethics in the first place?There are over 300 centers for the study of appIied ethics in this country-why? The events which face our society today are outside the business-oriented collection of shared beIiefs that set (...) our pubIic policy agenda. Cur beIiefs are too narrow, thus we see, understand, and control small slices of life.Business ethics should be the study of the structure and impact on us of what we call "business science," e.g., accounting, marketing, economics, law, etc., and the corresponding study of the process of what Carl Jung called individuation: learning to become one's own uniqueself in the face of these bodies of professional knowledge which have structured our lives and charted the direction for our sensibilities for too long. (shrink)

Business ethics courses have been launched with professors from business pulling on one oar, and professors of philosophy pulling on the other, but they lack a sense of direction. Let's begin with the basics: What is an ehtical decision? More fundamentally, why the interest in professional ethics in the first place?There are over 300 centers for the study of appIied ethics in this country-why? The events which face our society today are outside the business-oriented collection of shared beIiefs that set (...) our pubIic policy agenda. Cur beIiefs are too narrow, thus we see, understand, and control small slices of life.Business ethics should be the study of the structure and impact on us of what we call "business science," e.g., accounting, marketing, economics, law, etc., and the corresponding study of the process of what Carl Jung called individuation: learning to become one's own uniqueself in the face of these bodies of professional knowledge which have structured our lives and charted the direction for our sensibilities for too long. (shrink)

What role does race play in the moral judgment of character? None, ideally, philosophers insist, contending that the proper assessment of an action requires that we disregard any social values associated with the body performing it. What rightly comes under evaluation, they assert, is the neutral, abstract deed irrespective of the race of the agent. Only under these conditions, presumably, can we gauge true moral worth. Reading together Immanuel Kant and Frantz Fanon on ethics and race, I propose instead that (...) embodied values such as those accorded by race do not distort the portrait of the ethical subject but rather bring that subjectivity into being. Key Words: blackness • embodiment • ethics • Frantz Fanon • Immanuel • Kant • morality • race • value. (shrink)

We explore themes in Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan’s work and apply his Ethics and Economic Progress to problems facing individuals and firms. We focus on Buchanan’s analysis of the individual work ethic, his exhortations to “pay the preacher” of the “institutions of moral-ethical communication,” and his notion of law as “public capital.” We highlight several ways people with other-regarding preferences can contribute to social flourishing and some of the ways those who have “affected to trade for the public (...) good” might want to redirect their efforts. We show how Buchanan’s work has considerable implications for business ethics. Just as his economic analysis of politics changed how we understand government, we think his economic analysis of ethics can (and should) change how we understand business. (shrink)

Bhabha, Georges Didi-Huberman, David Morgan and Lee Siegel, as well as a series of focused contributions by Yve-Alain Bois, Wendy Doniger, Kenneth Frampton, Martin E. Marty, John Hallmark Neff, Annemarie Schimmel, and Helen Tworkov consider how rapture resonate's both in a cultural context and within the experience of a single human being.

Abstract…observations of skylfull pylotts is the onlye waye to bring it in rule; for it passeth the reach of naturall philosophy. – Michael Gabriel, 1576 (Collinson, 1867, p. 30)Abstract The tension between empirical data and formal theory pervades the entire history of geomagnetism, from the Middle Ages up to the present day. This paper explores its early-modern history (1500–1800), using a hybrid approach: it applies a methodological framework used in modern geophysics to interpret early-modern developments, exploring to what extent formal (...) conjectures shaped observation and vice versa. A range of pertinent case studies supports classification of this entire period as proto-scientific, characterised by the initial formation of theories being largely disconnected from observational constraints, and their subsequent evolution being advanced primarily by their empirical falsification, and not necessarily associated with the introduction of an alternative. The few exceptional instances of purely data-driven discovery were essentially due to an improved signal-to-noise ratio. (shrink)

Discusses about selective engagement as the most desirable strategy for contemporary America, stating that it is the one that seeks to forestall dangers, not simply to react to them; that is politically viable; at home and abroad; and that protects US interests.