“April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire… ” So, begins T.S. Eliot’s iconic poem, “The Wasteland,” challenging the memory of Chaucer’s April from Canterbury Tales, as being a delightful month to go on pilgrimage. Platonic teachings emphasize that you don’t create, you just remember. Might the inverse might also be true, “You don’t remember, you just create.” As the oneirocritic, Robert Bosnak, contends, you do not actually remember your dreams. You remember (...) your memory you recreate the dream in this time. Since the challenges of post-modernism, this is no longer a far-fetched idea. The eminent historian of immigration, Deborah Dash Moore, defines history in this regard, as “a search for a plausible narrative.” “History” is not a record of what happened, but rather, is a record of what we believe happened, or what we want to believe happened. This brings to the fore Foucault’s documenting the relationship of knowledge to power, as well as Freud’s assertion that material which is unacceptable to the ego, is disguised, in order to make them palatable. This places the notion of memory in a different light. There are incidents that occurred fifty years ago that seem as if they occurred five minutes ago. The depth psychologist and champion of the imagination, James Hillman, referred to this process as “soul-making.” Back to T.S. Eliot: when he studied Sanskrit at Harvard, he was certainly aware that the Sanskrit word for memory, smara (from which smrti “that which is remembered,” is derived) is also an epithet for Kama Deva, the Indian Cupid. Hence, the mixing of memory and desire. Perhaps, in this light, the study of history, which is a form of collective memory, is also a form of mass therapy, an effort to process the collective past. Hegel and Marx both believed classical India to be an inferior civilization because it had “no history,” but collections of mythologies. Maybe classical India, however, held an awareness that all memory is myth, a word which in its early Greek form literally translates as “plot.” Jesus declares (in the Gospel story) “Let the dead bury the dead.” As the Jesus narrative exemplifies, however, burying the dead is no easy task. Perhaps our ongoing, ever-morphing narratives, allow us an oblique opportunity to connect with and process our pain. And in this theatre of memory, the goal may not be to accumulate or catalogue what has been spoken (itihasa), but look a good miller, to process the grain into its essence: from what has passed, and is passing, and is to come, into what always is. Perhaps, the pilgrimage of the mind, on its endless perigination of story, is meant to ultimately take us to love, but that may be unspeakable. Keywords: memory, desire, narrative, history, myth, power. (shrink)

This article proposes a geostatistical solution for area-to-point spatial prediction (downscaling) taking into account boundary effects. Such effects are often poorly considered in downscaling, even though they often have significant impact on the results. The geostatistical approach proposed in this article considers two types of boundary conditions (BC), that is, a Dirichlet-type condition and a Neumann-type condition, while satisfying several critical issues in downscaling: the coherence of predictions, the explicit consideration of support differences, and the assessment of uncertainty regarding the (...) point predictions. An updating algorithm is used to reduce the computational cost of area-to-point prediction under a given BC. In a case study, area-to-point prediction under a Dirichlet-type BC and a Neumann-type BC is illustrated using simulated data, and the resulting predictions and error variances are compared with those obtained without considering such conditions. (shrink)

Court-ordered caesarean sections against the explicit wishes of the pregnant woman have been criticised as violations of the woman's fundamental right to autonomy and to the inviolability of the person--particularly, so it is argued, because the fetus in utero is not yet a person. This paper examines the logic of this position and argues that once the fetus has passed a certain stage of neurological development it is a person, and that then the whole issue becomes one of balancing of (...) rights: the right-to-life of the fetal person against the right to autonomy and inviolability of the woman; and that the fetal right usually wins. (shrink)

While new regulations obligate or recommend people to wear medical masks at public places to prevent further spread of the Covid-19 virus, there are still open questions as to what face coverage does to social emotional communication. Previous research on the effects of wearing veils or face-covering niqabs showed that covering of the mouth led to the attribution of negative emotions and to the perception of less intense positive emotions. The current study compares a sample from the Netherlands with a (...) sample from the United Arab Emirates on their perception of emotions from faces covered by a niqab, censoring black bars, or uncovered faces. The results show that covering the mouth area leads to greater anxiety in participants in both countries. Furthermore, although participants did not report greater decoding difficulties for faces that were covered as compared to fully visible, results show that face coverage did influence emotion perception. Specifically, happiness and anger were perceived as being less intense. Further, face coverage by a niqab, as compared to black bars, yielded lower emotional intensity ratings. We conclude that face coverage in particular can modulate the perception of emotions, but that affective contextual cues may play a role as well. (shrink)

Upshot: In our response we focus on how different types of systems are related from a constructivist perspective, and specifically on the relation between communicational social systems and embodied agency.

Open peer commentary on the article “Social Autopoiesis?” by Hugo Urrestarazu. Upshot: We agree on the need to explore a concept of social autopoiesis that goes beyond a strictly human-centered concept of social systems as autopoietic communicative systems. But both Hugo Urrestarazu and Niklas Luhmann neglect the importance of semiosis in understanding communication, and this has important implications for the question of a more general approach to social systems.

The Thebaid is not easy reading, and copyists have not helped to make it easier. There are many pitfalls in the language of Statius, and words cannot be taken always at their face value. I have erred myself and suffered. It may be of interest to give a few instances.

St. Thomas is usually thought to have rejected abortion and euthanasia as murder (viz, the statement of The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith "On Procured Abortion"). By going back to Aquinas' own words I show that this is mistaken: that he explicitly states abortion prior to a certain point of fetal development to be non-murderous and that his position, when consistently developed, allows for euthanasia under analogous circumstances. These claims are argued by presenting an analytical expose of (...) Aquinas’ metaphysics of man and of human ontogenesis. The implications of this for current bioethical concerns are sketched briefly. (shrink)

In the fourth section of Goethe’s Zahme Xenien we find the quatrain from which I have taken the theme of such an old and new controversy, which, as I hope, concerns both Germanic studies and the other humanities: “What was it that kept you from us so apart?” I always read Plutarch again and again. “And what was the lesson he did impart?” “They were all human beings—so much is plain.”1 In the very years when Goethe wrote these lines, that (...) is in the 1820s, Hegel repeatedly gave his lectures on the philosophy of history. Right at the beginning he formulated the opposite view which I should like briefly to characterize as “cultural relativism.”Every age has such peculiar circumstances, such individual conditions that it must be interpreted, and can only be interpreted, by reference to itself…. Nothing is shallower in this respect than the frequent appeal to Greek and Roman example which so often occurred among the French at the time of their Revolution. Nothing could be more different than the nature of these peoples and the nature of our own times.2 What is at issue here is not, of course, Hegel’s assertion that ages and peoples differ from each other. We all know that, and Goethe, the attentive reader and traveler, also knew, for instance, that the Roman carnival differed in its character from the celebrations of the Feast of Saint Rochus at Bingen, both of which he had described so lovingly. What makes the cultural historian into a cultural relativist is only the conclusion which we saw Hegel draw, that cultures and styles of life are not only different but wholly incommensurable, in other words that it is absurd to compare the peoples of a region or an age with human beings of other zones because there is no common denominator that would justify us in doing so. 1. ‘Was hat dich nun von uns entfernt?’ Hab immer den Plutarch gelesen. ‘Was has du den dabei gelernt?’ Sind eben alles Menschen gewesen.’ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtlich Werke. Jubiläums-ausgabe in 40 Bänden 4:73; with commentary.2. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorselungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, Werke, 20 vols. , 12:17. E. H. Gombrich was director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of London from 1959 to 1976. His many influential works include The Story of Art, Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, The Sense of Order, Ideals and Idols, The Image and the Eye, Tributes, Aby Warburg, and New Light on Old Masters. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include “The Museum: Past, Present and Future” , “Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the Moving Eye” , and “Representation and Misrepresentation”. (shrink)