Beginning from Plato, there exists a philosophical tradition, which interprets philosophy as preparation for death. However, for Plato the death of a philosopher does not necessarily imply death in its ordinary meaning, but rather a spiritual way of life maximally free from corporeal affections. This kind of relationship between philosophy and death was intensively discussed in late antique philosophy, Patristics, medieval Byzantine philosophy, and also in medieval Georgian literature. Based on Plato’s and Plotinus’ philosophy, Porphyry presented definitions of (...) three kinds of death in his Sententiae : ‘death’ of a philosopher, natural death, ‘death’ of a soul. The aim of this paper is to provide a philosophical analysis of three concepts of death in the post-Porphyrian tradition, mainly in Byzantine and Georgian texts. The paper is based on the analysis of the above mentioned issues in the texts of Porphyry, Macrobius, Michael Psellos, as well as in the old Georgian versions of the works of Ammonios Hermiae, John of Damascus and John Sinaites. We also take into consideration the views on the relation between philosophy and death in the thought of the philosophers of Humanism and Renaissance, such as Georgios Gemistos Plethon, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Michel de Montaigne, whether or not and to what extent their views on the relation between philosophy and death are different from the theories of ancient and medieval Platonists. (shrink)

After the invention of a national script, c.400 AD, Armenians rapidly developed their own literary forms, drawing on foreign texts as well as their own traditions. Historical writing is the most original genre in classical and medieval Armenian literature. Greek works constituted the major part of translated histories. But in the thirteenth century the extensice Chronicle of the Syrian Patriarch Michael and the first part of the Georgian chronicles were adapted for an Armenian readership. The collection known as (...) the `Georgian Chronicles' was finally codified in the eighteenth century and represents only a small part of Georgian historical writing. The thirteenth century Armenian version is in fact the earliest attestation of this growing corpus of texts, predating all extant Georgian manuscripts of it. This book presents the two texts, Georgian and Armenian, in English translation for the first time. The Introduction and Commentary draw attention to the ways in which the unknown Armenian translator changed his original material in a pro-Armenian fashion. His rendering became the standard source for early Georgian history used by later Armenian historians. The book includes a useful overview of the background to the chronicles, the history and culture of Christian Georgia and Armenia, and their respective languages and literature. (shrink)

After the invention of a national script, c.400 AD, Armenians rapidly developed their own literary forms, drawing on foreign texts as well as their own traditions. Historical writing is the most original genre in classical and medieval Armenian literature. Greek works constituted the major part of translated histories. But in the thirteenth century the extensice Chronicle of the Syrian Patriarch Michael and the first part of the Georgian chronicles were adapted for an Armenian readership. The collection known as (...) the `Georgian Chronicles' was finally codified in the eighteenth century and represents only a small part of Georgian historical writing. The thirteenth century Armenian version is in fact the earliest attestation of this growing corpus of texts, predating all extant Georgian manuscripts of it. This book presents the two texts, Georgian and Armenian, in English translation for the first time. The Introduction and Commentary draw attention to the ways in which the unknown Armenian translator changed his original material in a pro-Armenian fashion. His rendering became the standard source for early Georgian history used by later Armenian historians. The book includes a useful overview of the background to the chronicles, the history and culture of Christian Georgia and Armenia, and their respective languages and literature. (shrink)

Stephen RAPP (R.) has embarked on a very ambitious project – to investigate Georgian cultural contacts with the Byzantine and Iranian worlds through Georgian historial writing from its beginnings to medieval times. This involves nothing less than a presentation in English of all the relevant texts, save where a recent translation has already made them accessible, a survey of modern scholarship in Georgian as well as western languages, and a critical assessment of the dates of composition of (...) the various works, their motivation and reception. The volume under review is the first of a planned trilogy. Based on research dating back over a decade, it concentrates on those texts in the Georgian “Chronicles” which predate the political unification of the country. The second volume will tackle the literary dimension of Georgia's conversion to Christianity, the invention of a native script, and the beginnings of ecclesiastical literature; while the third volume will study the reorientation of the Georgian élite from their original Iranian background towards the Byzantine world as this is reflected in local historiography. All in all, this massive undertaking will update, expand and carry forward the work of Cyril TOUMANOFF reflected in his Studies in Christian Caucasian History, which was published exactly forty years before R.'s first volume appeared. (shrink)

Objective: To cope with the Coronavirus Disease 2019 pandemic health authorities released social restrictions. Such social restrictions impacted on the people's possibilities to move deliberately in a public space and to gather with other people. In the present study, we investigated the impact of COVID-19-related restrictions on physical activity patterns before and during the confinement among team sports participants. Such PA patterns were further related to current mood states, and possible sex differences were also explored.Methods: A total of 476 adults (...) exercising team sport completed a series of self-rating questionnaires covering sociodemographic information, former and current PA patterns, and current mood states.Results: Compared with the period before the confinement, PA intensity decreased, but PA frequency increased during the confinement. Past, current, and changes in physical activity patterns were unrelated to participants' mood states. Sex differences in mood were spurious. Sex differences in physical activity patterns were modest, with male participants reporting a higher physical activity intensity during the confinement.Conclusions: The present pattern of results suggests that the COVID-19-related confinement did not impact in a uniform fashion on PA patterns of adults attending team sports. Furthermore, mood states were unrelated to current physical activity patterns. Given the complex psychosocial situation of COVID-19-related confinement, it appeared very unlikely that sole physical activity patterns could counterbalance possible impaired states of mood and behavior. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 10.2 (2000) 175-188 [Access article in PDF] Scope Note 38 Bioethics Resources on the Web * Once described as an "enormous used book store with volumes stacked on shelves and tables and overflowing onto the floor" (Pool, Robert. 1994. Turning an Info-Glut into a Library. Science 266 (7 October): 20-22, p. 20), Internet resources now receive numerous levels of organization, from basic directory listings (...) to elaborate "links" (cross-references to other Internet documents) that flash and glow in the dark. In many ways, the Internet functions as a direct extension of the traditional library. Following linked references across various sites is an electronic version of browsing library stacks, and the serendipitous discoveries made while "surfing the Net" recall the wonders of physically going "book-to-book." Although many of the Internet's best aspects augment library strengths by eliminating physical distance from sources, Net resources pose unique problems for researchers. It is not always clear who is responsible for the content of Web documents, when the document was produced, or how often (if ever) it is updated. Internet resource tools, then, must enable researchers to identify appropriate resources and to evaluate what they find when they get there. Web Research as Taking "Snapshots" Given the Internet's visual nature and fluid content, the process of conducting research on the Web has been likened to taking an informal picture of information on a specific date at a particular time. This metaphor also conveys the "zoom-in" aspect of searching through Web pages by going from general to specific categories. In the first section of this Scope Note, National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature (NRCBL) staff present a snapshot of bioethics resources taken during the spring months of 2000. Entries are divided into the categories of directories, electronic journals, full-text documents, news/current awareness, and teaching resources. In the two subsequent sections, this series of categories is repeated for entries on a specific topic within bioethics-genetics-and again for general search and evaluation tools. Where a Web site may contain pages applicable [End Page 175] to more than one category, multiple entries are made for that site with appropriate information for each category.Much as telecommunication advances have strengthened the relationship of patients and providers as partners, the dynamic nature of the Internet acknowledges that the researcher functions as a librarian whenever accessing the Web. It is our hope that BIOETHICSLINE and the other NRCBL databases not only will enable researchers to search the Web more efficiently, but also will help them to evaluate what they find when they get there. Bioethicsline on the Web: An International Plan in Progress Once only available through libraries, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), the funding agency for the ongoing development of the BIOETHICS LINE® database from the Kennedy Institute, has provided free Web access to that database of 63,000 citations since September 1998 through Internet Grateful Med. Plans are now underway to eliminate such specialty databases and incorporate all citations into PubMed (for journal articles) or LOCATORplus (for book-like materials and chapters in books). Both of these databases are likewise available at no cost on the Web. In the transition to PubMed and LOCATORplus some features of BIOETHICSLINE that presently are available may be lost. Researchers are encouraged to contact the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature with search requests or for search strategy assistance with either the current or the future system ([email protected]).The inclusion of bioethics citations in PubMed and LOCATORplus will have several advantages. First, unique keywords from the Bioethics Thesaurus will be considered for inclusion in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the indexing vocabulary for PubMed and LOCATORplus, thereby enhancing retrieval of relevant clinical literature by offering more precise terminology covering ethical issues. Second, it will be easier to identify foreign-language materials, which are not currently included in the scope of BIOETHICSLINE. Third, the updating schedule will become more frequent. On the other hand, there may be some loss of searching precision because certain specialized features... (shrink)

Objective Apeiron was founded in 1966 and has developed into one of the oldest and most distinguished journals dedicated to the study of ancient philosophy, ancient science, and, in particular, of problems that concern both fields. Apeiron is committed to publishing high-quality research papers in these areas of ancient Greco-Roman intellectual history; it also welcomes submission of articles dealing with the reception of ancient philosophical and scientific ideas in the later western tradition. The journal appears quarterly. Articles are peer-reviewed on (...) a double-blind basis. Topics ancient philosophy ancient science reception of ancient philosophical and scientific ideas in the later western tradition Article formats Original Articles. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

Richly illustrated study drawing on art, literature and science to explore Victorian attitudes towards sight.

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us to (...) reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)

Examines interrelated topics in Medieval and Renaissance Latin literature: the status of women as writers, the status of women as rhetorical figures, and the status of women in society from the fifth to the early seventeenth century.

Enthält: Gesichtspunkte zur Beurteilung von Wissenschaftsbegriffen / von Gerhard Funke. Kriterien zur Beurteilung der Naturwissenschaften / von Erhard Scheibe.

An examination of the rise in prestige of the Bible as a literary and aesthetic model during the late eighteenth century.

Disturbed by these acrimonious arguments, the authors - former colleagues and university-press board members - embarked on an ambitious project to reexamine a number of major literary and philosophical works dealing with the liberal arts and education. With their discussions ranging from Plato to Rousseau, from Cicero to Vico, from Erasmus to Matthew Arnold, Sousa and Weinsheimer offer not a history of education philosophy but an examination of the present.

"Kevin Hart and Geoffrey H. Hartman bring together essays by prominent scholars from a range of disciplines to focus on Blanchot's diverse concerns: literature, art, community, politics, ethics, spirituality, and the Holocaust."--Jacket.

This book analyses the use of the crucial concept of 'taste' in the works of five major seventeenth-century French authors, Méré, Saint Evremond, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Boileau. It combines close readings of important texts with a thoroughgoing political analysis of seventeenth-century French society in terms of class and gender. Dr Moriarty shows that far from being timeless and universal, the term 'taste' is culture-specific, shifting according to the needs of a writer and his social group. The notion of (...) 'taste' not only helped to shape a new dominant culture, but also registered the conflicts within that culture between a view of taste that presupposted the values of 'polite society' as an exclusive (though not necessarily aristocratic) group, and a view that stressed the value of the classical-humanist tradition as a source of standards ratified by a broader public. this study sheds light not only on the central concept, but also on the individual authors discussed and on the norms of French classical literature in general. (shrink)

The author begins by analyzing Walter Benjamin’s quarrel with George Kreis and the respective visions of culture advocated by both sides of the debate. Then, he offers a reading of a poem by Paul Celan in which the poet sides with Benjamin, but also makes his position more complex, ultimately offering a paradoxical figure of “the secret openness” or “open/public secrecy” as a remedy against the “mystery” of the Georgians. This idea can be seen as developed in Jacques Derrida’s understanding (...) of secrecy, which the author proceeds to analyze. The secrecy as a deconstructive rift in the public discourse, a split which tears it open, can be seen as opposed both to the undemocratic mystery and to the seeming openness of globalatinization. After considering the formal, political and religious aspects of secrecy, the author ends with showing how literature as such is the most powerful medium of Derridean secret. (shrink)

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, conflict in the former USSR has been a key concern in international security. This book fills a gap in the literature on violent conflict, evaluating a region that contains all the modern ingredients for instability and aggression. Bringing together leading experts on war and security, the book addresses current debates in international relations about power, interests, globalisation and the politics of identity as major drivers of contemporary war. Incidents such as the 2008 (...) Russo-Georgian conflict, the wars in Chechnya, and Russia's struggles over national identity and resources with former communist states are all thoroughly examined. With new issues like energy security, terrorism and transnational crime, and older tensions between East and West threatening to deepen once more, this is an important contribution to the international security literature. (shrink)

This provocative book explores the difficulties surrounding the attempt to understand the relationship between literary and political discourse. It examines the initial formulation of these difficulties in Georgian Britain, and traces them through the cultural debates of the Victorian men of letters to the critical ideologies of the twentieth-century literary academy. Richard Bourke offers an incisive critique of the way in which the idea of Culture has been used as a means of resolving the failure to establish an adequate (...) theory of politics in the wake of the French Revolution. (shrink)

Im Beitrag wird auf der Basis der noch nicht recherchierten und enforschten georgischsprachigen Nietzsche-Literatur das Anfangsstadium der georgischen Nietzsche-Forschung rekonstruiert. Dabei stechen vor allem die Nietzsche-Studien von Tschenkeli, Tschitadse, Kasradse, Robakidse, Gamsachurdia, Kapaneli und Tatischwili im Mittelpunkt der Darlegung. Diese Dekner befaßten sich mit Nietzsches Philosophie intensiv und machten von ihm einen produktiven Gebrauch. In den internationalen Nietzsche-Studien had die georgische Nietzsche-Rezeption bisher keine Berücksichtigung gefunden. Es gibt keinen ausführlichen sowie sachgerechten Aufsatz in den westlichen Sprachen, welcher Nietzsches Wirkung auf (...) die georgische Kultur dargelegt hättre. Mit diesem Beitrag soll dieses Forschungsdefizit besitigt und diese Interpretationslinie der Philosophie Nietzsches dargestellt werden.This article reconstructs the early stage of Nietzsche research in Georgia on the bassi of Nietszche literature written in Georgian, which has yet to be researched. The presentation centres above all on the studies of Nietzsche by Tschenkeli, Tschitadse, Kasradse, Robakidse, Gamsachurdia, Kapaneli and Tatischwili. These thinkers occupied themselves intensively with Nietzsche's philosophy and made productive use of it. The Georgian reception of Nietzsche has so far been neglected in international Nietzsche Studies. There are no detailed informed articles in Western languages which deal with Nietzsche's influence on Georgian culture. This article aims to remedy this deficit and present this line of interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy. (shrink)

This book examines the complex and varied ways in which fictions relate to the real world, and offers a precise account of how imaginative works of literature can use fictional content to explore matters of universal human interest. While rejecting the traditional view that literature is important for the truths that it imparts, the authors also reject attempts to cut literature off altogether from real human concerns. Their detailed account of fictionality, mimesis, and cognitive value, founded on (...) the methods of analytical philosophy, restores to literature its distinctive status among cultural practices. The authors also explore metaphysical and skeptical views, prevalent in modern thought, according to which the world itself is a kind of fiction, and truth no more than a social construct. They identify different conceptions of fiction in science, logic, epistemology, and make-believe, and thereby challenge the idea that discourse per se is fictional and that different modes of discourse are at root indistinguishable. They offer rigorous analyses of the roles of narrative, imagination, metaphor, and "making" in human thought processes. Both in their methods and in their conclusions, Lamarque and Olsen aim to restore rigor and clarity to debates about the values of literature, and to provide new, philosophically sound foundations for a genuine change of direction in literary theorizing. (shrink)

This book discusses the writings of the mystic Jan van Ruusbroec (1293-1381) within their medieval contexts of literary, religious and intellectual life, thus offering the first comprehensive biography of the most influential medieval Dutch author.

Absolute devaluation : Friedrich Nietzsche -- Homelessness : Martin Heidegger -- Fatal positivities : Theodor Adorno -- The naive calculation of the negative : Maurice Blanchot -- Bad violence : Jacques Derrida -- The fracture : Giorgio Agamben -- Distortions, or, Nihilism against itself : Gianni Vattimo -- The denial of (Greek) thought : Alain Badiou.

It is a great privilege to have been invited to speak on this occasion. I shall not talk about Janet Semple's life, since I did not know Janet Semple well. I first came across her work when the Oxford University Press sent me a copy of her Ph.D. thesis, asking for my opinion as to its publishability. I groaned—yet another study of the panopticon! I opened it, started reading—and read it straight through. It was so clear, insightful, powerful in its (...) interpretation and beautifully written. I am delighted to see that it has appeared as Bentham's Prison. I was, at a later stage, equally pleased to be involved in persuading Janet to publish some of her research on Bentham's medical and health interests. I shall not try to evaluate her work today. I think I might best honour her by trying to reflect upon some of the wider issues that surround Bentham's concerns with prisons and hospitals—issues raised by her work. (shrink)

Viewed in the light of the discussions ofscientificlecturing in eighteenth-century London contained in this issue, the case of medicine may be said to be both more of the same but also something different.

The article discusses the concept of multisensuality in the satirical prints of the Georgian era in England, focusing on how the sensory perception enhances the visual humor. Drawing upon historical and cultural contexts, this study investigates how English caricaturists employed various sensory elements, such as sight, sound, smell, taste and touch to convey satire and provoke emotional responses among viewers. Ten satirical prints by five different authors were chosen for the analysis.

Often overlooked by historians, specialist gardeners with an expert understanding of both native and exotic plant material were central to the teaching and research activities of university botanic gardens. In this article various interrelationships in the late Georgian period will be examined: between the gardener, the garden, the botanic collection, the medical school and ways of knowing. Foregrounding gardeners’ narratives will shed light on the ways in which botanic material was gathered and utilized for teaching and research purposes, particularly (...) for medical students, as well as highlighting the importance of the garden as a repository of botanic material for the classroom. In this way, the blurred lines between art and science, skill and scholarly activity, and shared pedagogic practices between botany and anatomy will be revealed. (shrink)

"_Of Literature and Knowledge_ looks... like an important advance in this new and very important subject... literature is about to become even more interesting." – Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino University Professor, Harvard University. Framed by the theory of evolution, this colourful and engaging volume presents a new understanding of the mechanisms by which we transfer information from narrative make-believe to real life. Ranging across game theory and philosophy of science, as well as poetics and aesthetics, Peter Swirski explains (...) how literary fictions perform as a systematic tool of enquiry, driven by thought experiments. Crucially, he argues for a continuum between the cognitive tools employed by scientists, philosophers and scholars or writers of fiction. The result is a provocative study of our talent and propensity for creating imaginary worlds, different from the world we know yet invaluable to our understanding of it. _Of Literature and Knowledge_ is a noteworthy challenge to contemporary critical theory, arguing that by bridging the gap between literature and science we might not only reinvigorate literary studies but, above all, further our understanding of literature. (shrink)

The rapid technological transition requires the adoptive approach to the digital conduct of public and private institutions. Countries and companies strive to integrate a balanced understanding of digital ethics and sustainability concepts from various standpoints, which results in a dispersed and uncategorized knowledge base. This work presents a literature review on digital ethics published from 2010 to 2020 in three technical libraries and one library maintained by the community of philosophers. The investigation process integrates a thorough review of digital (...) ethics concepts in the leading academic libraries using keywords representing various concept applications. This study’s outcome is a quantitative and sectorial categorization of works on digital ethics, followed by a holistic review of concepts, maturity level, and conclusions on each category. This work aims to understand the trends from a technological and philosophical perspective towards designing a sustainable digital ethical frame-work applied in digital services that fulfill sufficiency thresholds of justice and do not foster overshooting of planetary boundaries. The first version of a holistic framework based on the literature review is presented at the end of this work. It will be extended in future work. (shrink)

Feriköy is a district where the ethnic origins and religious differences of Istanbul show a great diversity in the late 19th century. In this period, the presence of Bulgarians and Georgians attracted less attention, albeit with the knowledge that Greeks and Armenians from Ottoman citizens, and foreigners from European countries lived in the neighbourhood. The conflict between Orthodox Bulgarians and Catholic Georgians, who have corporate structures around Feriköy and Şişli, as a result of a decision on governance uncovered some unknown (...) and interesting facts about the city and its history. The decision taken about giving a building plot to the Bulgarian congregation for the construction of a school used as a garden located next to the Catholic Georgian Church in Feriköy; caused the two groups to engage in a tough battle with each other. In this article, through the documents in the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives, the conflict process between the people who use the urban space of the decision to build the Bulgarian Seminary has been considered, and the result of the disagreement between Orthodox Bulgarian Priests and Catholic Georgian Nuns has generally been evaluated. (shrink)

Nowadays there are practically no political empires in the world: they have disintegrated. In the ruins of the former communist empire of the Soviet Union, our Ukraine became independent even in 1991. Who would have thought that the Ukrainian people, who for centuries had been taunting about its unbreakable fraternal union as if from a half-Russian people, suddenly decided to stay away from this "brother". Our 350-year-old colonial existence has come to an end.

There is a long tradition in philosophy and literary theory defending the view that engagement with literature promotes readers’ empathy. Until the last century, few of the empirical claims adduced in that tradition were investigated experimentally. Recent work in psychology and neuropsychology has now shed new light on the interplay of empathy and literature. This article surveys the experimental findings, addressing three central questions: What is it to read empathically? Does reading make us more empathic? What characteristics of (...) literature, if any, affect readers’ empathy? While experimental studies have delivered no conclusive answers to these questions, it has exposed their psychological complexity and constructed a more nuanced picture of the diverse ways in which literature interacts with our empathic capacities. (shrink)

This book is a conceptualization of the literary aesthetic in relation to ethics, in particular, an ethics for a concern for the Self. Bringing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's constructivist thinking into a practical domain, Sabrina Achilles rethinks the ways in which literature is understood and taught. Through an interdisciplinary approach, literature is viewed from the position of a problem without any pre-given frame.