"...This book combines inspiration for the mind and spirit by juxtaposing.... photographs of the cosmos next to... words by scientists, poets and theologians. Introduced by an essay from... science writer Sharon Begley, the book creates for the reader an... experience of the wonder of the universe...."--Book flap.

: This article analyses some of the anatomical waxes in the Museo della Specola in Florence. Executed in at least two different periods in the history of Florentine wax modelling (in the late 17th century and between the 18th and 19th centuries), they project culturally determined images of the body which are analysed from a historico-semiotic perspective. "Rotten corpses," a "disembowelled woman" and a "flayed man" emerge as salient figures in the collection and reveal the close tie between anatomical (...) representations and aesthetics, social relations and religious scruples, in other words, the culture tout court which produced them. (shrink)

This article analyses some of the anatomical waxes in the Museo della Specola in Florence. Executed in at least two different periods in the history of Florentine wax modelling , they project culturally determined images of the body which are analysed from a historico-semiotic perspective. "Rotten corpses," a "disembowelled woman" and a "flayed man" emerge as salient figures in the collection and reveal the close tie between anatomical representations and aesthetics, social relations and religious scruples, in other words, the (...) culture tout court which produced them. (shrink)

ArgumentThis essay considers the work of projection and the hand of the projectionist as important components of the social space of the cinema as it comes into being in the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. I bring the concept of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the place of the body as an entity that applies itself to the world “like a hand to an instrument” into a discussion of the pre-cinematic projector as an instrument that we (...) can interpret as evidence of the experience of the work of the projectionist in the spirit of film theory and media archaeology, moving work on instrumentation in a different direction from the analysis of the work of the black box in laboratory studies. Projection is described as a psychological as well as a mechanical process. It is suggested that we interpret the projector not simply in its activity as it projects films, but in its movement from site to site and in the workings of the hand of its operator behind the scenes. This account suggests a different perspective on the cinematic turn of the nineteenth century, a concept typically approached through the study of the image, the look, the camera, and the screen. (shrink)

. This article analyses some of the anatomical waxes in the Museo della Specola in Florence. Executed in at least two different periods in the history of Florentine wax modelling, they project culturally determined images of the body which are analysed from a historico-semiotic perspective. “Rotten corpses,” a “disembowelled woman” and a “flayed man” emerge as salient figures in the collection and reveal the close tie between anatomical representations and aesthetics, social relations and religious scruples, in other words, the (...) culture tout court which produced them. (shrink)

England, known as “the empire without sun settling down” and being among the final winners of the World War I (1914-1918), had one of the heaviest defeats of its history against the Ottoman Empire in the Kut al-Amara, which happened on 29 April 1916 close to Baghdad. Following the defeat of Kut al-Amara, which was the most important war trauma for England during the World War I, the Turks and Germans, as winner side of the battle were evaluated by British (...) prisoners from military, political, cultural and socio-psychological aspects in their memories. Content analysis method is used in the article for qualitative evalution of the data related to the Turkish and German image reflected in the memories of British prisoners after the siege of Kut al-Amara. The alliance between Turks and Germans is regarded as contrast in terms of important elements as national and ethnic identity, language, religion and culture in the main sources of the research as My Compain by Charles Townshend, Besieged in Kut and After by Barber, A Kut Prisoner by Bishop, In Kut and Captivity with the Sixth Indian Division by Sandes, The Secrets of a Kuttite by Mousley which occationally use exaggerated language and the subjective information due to the impact of traumatic defeat.Summary: Being a heroic epic in the war history of Turkey, Kūt al-‘Amāra has been the subject of very fewer researches until recently, despite its importance in Turkey’s history. This argument is supported by the fact that the memoirs by Ottoman soldiers related to the WWI, which also encompass information about Kūt al-‘Amāra, were published half a century after the war at the earliest. Unlike the records of Turkish soldiers participating in Kūt al-‘Amāra, the memoirs and the war diaries of British soldiers were published shortly after the war, as early as possible, between the years of 1918-1921. The authors of these memoirs and war diaries informed the public on the reasons for the defeat of Kūt al-‘Amāra on the one hand, and on the other hand created the Ottoman and Turkish image which was concidered differently in the British society in terms of culture and civilization. They also strengthened this image over that of German’s, with whom they shared many common values despite the fact that they represented the opposite fronts of the war.It is worthy mentioning that the role of the Ottoman army in the victory of Kūt al-‘Amāra was highly underestimated by the memoirs of the British prisoners. According to the authors, it is not the Turkish army that has achieved real victories over the British, but Germany’s support, notably General von der Goltz, the great strategist of Europe. The effects of bad weather conditions and geographical situation are also emphasized among the reasons of the defeat of Kūt al-‘Amāra. Consequently, the success of the Turkish army in the victory of Kūt al-‘Amāra was ignored, except for the role of Halil Pasha. The image of an army that knows the trench and defence techniques well, but fails to attack is one of the prominent evaluations in the memoirs related to the Turkish military characteristics.The British prisoners of war, who evaluate the Turkish and German image through the economic and political situation, draw a very desperate picture of the situation of the Turks in the mentioned areas. According to this image, corruption and bribery prevails at every stage of the Turkish government. The Turks are unable to repay their dept to Germany, which dominates the economy of the country completely. According to these records, besides ordinary people, the army is also facing great difficulties in meeting basic requirements. To convert the Ottoman Empire into their own property and keep the Turks under their control in military, economic and political spheres, the Germans lend a high amount of money.On the basis of Turkish soldiers encountered in Kūt al-‘Amāra, the British prisoners characterizes the Turks as physically large, hard and strong-bodied people. The authors also note that the Turks are not as cold-blooded, calm and obedient as they seem at first sight, rather they become rude people when they get angry. Another feature that British prisoners evaluate as a potential of the Turks, is their childish spirit. In as much as they are happy with small things and can be offended by small things. According to the memoirs, the Germans should not be allowed to benefit from these characteristics of the Turks, but the British should take the advantage of their potential power.The moral characteristics of the Turks and the Germans are among the most emphasized subjects. Written in exceptional time such as war, sometimes the diaries include exaggerated and sentimental phrases related to the moral attitudes enemy soldiers exhibited during siege, as well as captivity. Turks are regarded as negligent and careless rather than cruel or ruthless. They owe these characteristics to their Eastern identity, which is different from the Europeans having virtues such as task responsibility and diligence. The moral characteristic of the Turks regarding the duty, responsibility and kindness is evaluated comparatively with the civilized and humanistic behaviors of the Germans towards the prisoners. Being Europeans, the Germans often come to the fore because of their more polite treatment towards the British prisoners. Although the Germans as an enemy fought against the British on the front, they were kind to them in the Ottoman territories as the only civilized people among the barbarian peoples of the East.The Turks and the Germans are compared in the field of education, as well as other areas of development. The authors emphasize that the education level of the Turks is very low; Armenian and Greek subjects of the Empire are its brain and financial resources, which is the reason why the Turks are anxious about them. The Germans have the superiority in both transportation and communication technology in the Ottoman territories. One of the reasons they had a huge investment on the Ottoman territories is the Berlin-Istanbul-Baghdad-Basra railway. The British prisoners give details on the German communication technology they encountered during both the battle and the captivity days in Anatolia. In addition to the transport and communication technology, they also record much German-made military equipment, from weapons to maps.Evaluating the Turks and the Germans as opposites, the British prisoners draw an image for the latter, with whom they share a common cultural legacy, as a fully equipped enemy in terms of technology and strategy on the front, and the civilized Europeans characterized with their virtue in non-war situations. On the contrary, the Turks are described as a strong defender and daredevil soldiers on the front line, but strategically weak on the front. In terms of duties and responsibilities, the Turkish soldiers are presented with negligent and irresponsible approach towards their prisoners. The images of the Turks and the Germans, which are compared by the British prisoners, are often based on their Eastern and Western identity. The Turks symbolize the East with economic, political and cultural backwardness, yet quite the contrary, the Germans symbolize the West in terms of development, modernity and civilization. The British prisoners sometimes used exaggerated expressions in their approaches regarding both sides, as well as different details in terms of information and interpretation about the same event, due to the trauma of defeat. (shrink)

The article presents philosophical views on music in the context of the transformations of the worldview from Antiquity to the Modern Time. In this research author also mentions the contemporary issues, and uses her own philosophical concept of the music, which can be described as following: the value of music as a substance and the way of the valuable interaction of a person with the world affirm the essence of musical being, in which the invariable principle of Harmony, the principle (...) of Chaos-Form movement, is preserved. Music expresses the fluid essence of the world and changes of being in space and time. Philosophy of music as a field of philosophical knowledge considers music from ontological-epistemological and phenomenological-axiological prospectives, as something more than just a form of art. It explores the deep, ultimate foundations of the existence of music as such and the philosophical and aesthetic foundations of musical art. Since ancient times music has been a representation of the world in the human conscience and served as the harmonic equivalent of cosmological philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and astrophysics. The scientific view on music was enriched in the Modern Time by the expanded view on the cosmo-sound space reflected in musical art, which at the same time transforms the mathematical ideas of geometricity, squareness etc. The tendency to create integral world music in the musical practice of the XX-XXI centuries explains the attempt of mankind to present music by modern methods of composing musical art as an expression of fear towards the secret Harmony of universal existence, and, on the other hand - as a form of search for salvation and mental balance, intuitively reflecting what is happening in natural science, which more and more points to the abyss of unknowable universe, and the unstable place of man in the world. (shrink)

Anatomo-functional studies in humans point out that handedness and language-related functional laterality are not correlated – except during language production; and that the convergence of language and hand control is located in the precentral gyrus, whereas executive functions required by movement imitation and phonological and semantic processing converge onto Broca's area. Multiple domains are likely to be actors in language evolution. Footnotes1 Nathalie Tzourio-Mazoyer is the corresponding author for this commentary.

The reception of the heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus in Jewish thought of the 17th-century period is a good exemplification of the issue concerning the formation of the relationship between natural science and theology, or more broadly: between science and religion. The fundamental question concerning this relationship, which we can ask from today’s perspective of this problem, is: How does it happen that claims of a scientific nature, which are initially considered from a religious point of view to be incompatible (...) with the religious view of the world, are later accepted as possible to agree with this image of reality and are assimilated by a given religion? Based on the reception of the Copernican image of the universe by two representatives of Jewish philosophy in the 17th century—David Gans and Joseph Solomon Delmedigo—it is possible to trace this process and pose the thesis that it takes place according to two strategies. Within the framework of the first one, represented by Gans, in a situation of incompatibility between the scientific and religious images of nature, a scientific theory is sought that explains the observed phenomena and, on the other hand, satisfies the religious claims. Finding such a theory solves the problem of the incompatibility mentioned above of images of the world, gives the theory credibility from the religious point of view and constitutes an argument for its correctness. The second strategy, represented by Delmedigo, consists in refraining from pursuing a direct, immediate, and unequivocal reconciliation of the two images of the world while at the same time recognizing a properly justified scientific theory as correctly describing and explaining the phenomena occurring in nature. Consequently, the apparent incompatibility between the scientific and the religious worldview demands either a reformulation of religious statements in such a way as to remove this incompatibility or the restriction of the meaning of religious statements to the strictly religious and moral sphere, without the ambition to speak about nature. In either case, however, it is already a task for the representatives of the religion concerned who, when confronted with adequately justified scientific claims, to avoid exposing their religion to the accusation that its claims are unreasonable and anachronistic, undertake the task mentioned above of modifying or limiting the scope of their statements. It seems that in the representatives of Jewish thought and Judaism, who are the successors of Gans and Delmedigo, generally speaking, the second strategy has prevailed in this version, in which one abandons the claim of religion to statements about the material world at the price of a significant divergence of the paths of science and religion. Consequently, it treats them as different narratives, describing and explaining two separate spheres of reality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Future of the Book: Images of Reading in the American Utopian Novel by Kevin J. HayesMatthew LeggattKevin J. Hayes. The Future of the Book: Images of Reading in the American Utopian Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. E-book, 192 pp. ISBN 9780192670960.Kevin J. Hayes is a writer of high regard, having published many books over his distinguished career, including biographical studies such as Herman Melville, (...) Mark Twain, George Washington: A Life in Books, and several on Edgar Allen Poe. Works like the 2020 monograph Shakespeare and the Making of America showcase his intersecting interests in biography, literature, and American political history. It is these interests that are very much on display in his 2022 monograph The Future of the Book: Images of Reading in the American Utopian Novel, and we should be thankful that Hayes has turned his attention to the subject of utopian fiction as he certainly has much to add to the discussion. The book is clearly a labor of love and Hayes writes with a great degree of detail and authority suggesting he has always held a deep interest in the utopian novel. In fact, from the preface, it is clear the research supporting this book has spanned many years.The preface sets it all up very neatly. Immediately, the reader is invited into the research story of the book. Hayes has an evocative and methodical style that carries that research throughout. The author is also careful in this preface to assert his expertise in the field. Having read “virtually every utopian novel in American literature published before 1910” on microfilm gives Hayes the opportunity to explore many of the obscure and lesser-known works of the period (ix), which he notes in his introduction is primarily between 1880 and 1915. Since many of these novels are yet to be digitized, his insight is notably rare.Aside from an introduction and conclusion, the book is divided into five chapters. The first is titled “The Residential Library” and is centrally about [End Page 601] books in home-spaces, from personal libraries to books on shelves in someone’s living room. Chapter 2, “The Public Library,” explores depictions of public libraries and ways that collected knowledge might be organized and made accessible in utopian visions. “The Idea of Authorship,” chapter 3, is about the professional/amateur status of authors in utopian societies. In this section, Hayes also explores ideas about literary quality and attempts to answer concerns that a utopian age would necessarily be incapable of producing great literature. Chapter 4, titled “The Newspaper,” details the struggles utopian authors have had with the newspaper format. Finally, “The Printed Page and the Written Word” examines ways in which utopian authors sought to refine the printed and written word and their innovative suggestions in this area. Each of these chapters opens by considering Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward in relation to the subject at hand and Bellamy’s 1888 novel is referred to extensively throughout The Future of the Book, offering a frame for Hayes’s exploration of utopian literature’s inner dialogue with the printed word.In his introduction, Hayes highlights that much of the scholarly work in this area has focused on dystopias. Indeed, when I think about the representation of literature in speculative fiction I tend, first, to think of the great dystopias like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which history is erased and rewritten by The Party, or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, in which books are considered dangerous and thus are rigorously hunted and burned by the ironically named Firemen of the future. Alternatively, postapocalyptic movies spring to mind. Taking shelter in the New York Public Library, Sam Hall (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) frantically burns books for warmth despite the protests of several other characters in Roland Emmerich’s 2004 blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow. Likewise, in “Marooned” (1989), an episode of the British SF sitcom Red Dwarf (1988–), of which I was particularly fond during my formative years, a copy of the collected works of Shakespeare is burned to keep the last remaining human, David Lister (played by Craig Charles), alive. In the opposite direction, some postapocalyptic... (shrink)

This article is concerned with the affective relationship among bodies and film technologies in the process of building and using filmmaking instruments, taking as its object the early Rotoscope, a device patented by the legendary American animator Max Fleischer that entailed the projection of live-action film for use as a template in the drawing of animated figures, to which the live-action trace was thought to impart life-like, normative patterns of movement. Drawing from media archaeology, psychoanalytic theories of repetition, projection, and (...) condensation, and object relations theory, this article offers an interpretation of some of the kinds of psychic interactions offered in animated film through traces of the Rotoscope’s production history found in the device’s patent drawings, its patent embodiments, and its published family legend. It is proposed that the device was the locus of a collective fraternal performance, serving as a shared ground for an array of condensations and displacements and enactments of repetition compulsion among the multiple bodies engaged in the production of the device, as well as among the multiple animated and live-action film bodies that crossed its production screens and patent pages. One objective of this article is to shift the interpretive and analytic focus in film studies from the filmstrip and the projected screen image to the relationship between bodies and technologies in the experience of making films, and making the filmic apparatus. A secondary objective of this article is to suggest that the approach to bodily movement embedded in the design of the Rotoscope was hardly normative. The device offered a means to stretch and distort both norms and stereotypes of human expression through movement. The rotoscoped body sometimes performed in ways that pushed the limits of viewer expectations about how a given body will, or should, move, in space or across the screen. (shrink)

Bocchi's Opera sopra l'imagine miracolosa della Santissima Nunziata di Fiorenza of 1592 is concerned with the miracle-working image in the Florentine Servite church of SS. Annunziata. The image theory expounded in this book is in part derived from Aristotle, but Bocchi nonetheless allows for the fresco's miraculous nature. He addresses questions relating to the artistic authorship and style of the image, widely believed not to have been completed by human hand, and thus arrives at a new understanding of the (...) fresco both within and outside the history of art as defined by Vasari's Lives. (shrink)

The experience of embodiment may be studied using the rubber hand illusion. Little is known about the cognitive mechanism that elicits the feeling of embodiment. In previous models of the rubber hand illusion, bodily signals are processed sequentially. Such models cannot explain some more recent findings. Carruthers (2013) proposed a multidimensional model of embodiment, in which the processing of embodiment is understood in terms of conceptual hand space. Visual features of hands are represented along several dimensions. The (...) rubber hand illusion is then explained as the erroneous matching of the online representation of the artificial hand to the stored prototype in a space defined by those dimensions. We conducted the first experimental tests to investigate the multidimensional conceptual space account. First, participants performed a series of odd-one-out judgments for triads of hand images (including their own hand) and we then employed multidimensional scaling analyses. We found that a multidimensional model of perceived hand similarity could be fitted to our data. Second, we tested if a multisensory bodily signal manipulation (the rubber hand illusion) influences the position of the viewed artificial hand in hand space. We employed synchronous and asynchronous stroking and found that in the synchronous condition, which elicits the rubber hand illusion, compared to the asynchronous condition, which does not, the artificial hand was closer to the center of hand space; that is, to a prototype hand. We discuss these findings in the context of the Carruthers (2013) conceptual space model as well as other rubber hand illusion models. (shrink)

Sellars (1963) distinguished in Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind between ordinary discourse, which expressed his “manifest image”, and scientific discourse, which articulated his “scientific image” of man-in-the-world in a way that is both central and problematic to the rest of his philosophy. Our contention is that the problematic feature of the distinction results from Sellars theory of inner episodes as theoretical entities. On the other hand, as Sellars attempted to account for our noninferential knowledge of such states, particularly in (...) correspondence with Castañeda, discussed by Lehrer and Stern (2000), he is lead to account of representation of such states that incorporates the states into what Lehrer has called exemplar representation (2004, 2011a) and Ismael reflexive self-description (2007). What is common to the three accounts, with some differences, is that such states may be function reflexively in selfrepresentation. Our argument is that the elaboration of this account, suggested in Sellars, shows how the discourse of the manifest image can be transformed into the discourse of the scientific image as self-representations of scientific entities. (shrink)

The history of mathematics can be read in two ways. On the one hand, unlike the history of physics, it does not proceed by conjectures and refutations. New theories rarely refute old theories, but give them new foundations, generalize them, and reinterpret them through new concepts. This reading is unifying, highlighting the unity of the history of mathematics from its origins, through the permanence of its truths. On the other hand, many contemporary historians of mathematics have insisted on (...) the diversity of methods, objects, and practices throughout history. They have shown that the objects of the past mathematics are not the same as those of today. That second reading shatters the illusion of unity. It disjoins what the first reading unifies.Rather than deciding between these two readings, this chapter examines what makes them both possible and legitimate, based on an analysis of the acts of reading that we have to perform when confronted with the pages of a mathematical text, its signs, diagrams and images, and the different language modalities it employs. Starting with a discussion of Husserl's theses in The Origin of Geometry on the role of writing in the history of mathematics, and using a number of historical examples, the chapter shows that any reading of a mathematical text involves at least three divisions, three delimitations made by the reader’s gaze: divisions between the true and the false, between language and image, and between what is inside mathematics and what is outside. For the same text, these divisions are traced by the gaze in different ways throughout history.The chapter develops an example in greater detail, concerning the status of the equation in Descartes’ Geometry. It discusses the contrasting recent readings of the equation by two historians of science, Henk Bos and Enrico Giusti. It shows the concepts of The Geometry and the ideas the philosopher develops on reading and the nature of the sign. It shows how these ideas can be used to reconstruct how Descartes might have read a mathematical text, and it explains how successive readings of The Geometry can at the same time insert it into the mathematics of later centuries. (shrink)

Sellars distinguished in Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind between ordinary discourse, which expressed his “manifest image”, and scientific discourse, which articulated his “scientific image” of man-in-the-world in a way that is both central and problematic to the rest of his philosophy. Our contention is that the problematic feature of the distinction results from Sellars theory of inner episodes as theoretical entities. On the other hand, as Sellars attempted to account for our noninferential knowledge of such states, particularly in correspondence (...) with Castañeda, discussed by Lehrer and Stern, he is lead to account of representation of such states that incorporates the states into what Lehrer has called exemplar representation and Ismael reflexive self-description. What is common to the three accounts, with some differences, is that such states may be function reflexively in selfrepresentation. Our argument is that the elaboration of this account, suggested in Sellars, shows how the discourse of the manifest image can be transformed into the discourse of the scientific image as self-representations of scientific entities. (shrink)

The paper aims to clarify Ratnākaraśānti?s epistemological theory that mental images in a cognition are false (*alīkākāravāda) in comparison with Śāntarakṣita?s criticism of the Yogācāra position. Although Ratnākaraśānti frequently uses the neither-one-nor-many argument for explaining his Yogācāra position, the argument, unlike Śāntarakṣita?s original one, does not function for refuting the existence of awareness itself as the basis of mental images. This point is examined in the first two sections of this paper by analyzing Ratnākaraśānti?s proof of the selflessness (...) of entities (dharmanairātmya) and his application of the neither-one-nor-many argument for demonstrating the falsehood of mental images. On the other hand, the last section investigates into his defense of the alīkākāravāda against Śāntarakṣita?s severe criticism of it. Here, too, we can find his tactical usage of the neither-one-nor-many argument, or more precisely, one of its variants: the neither-identical-nor-different argument. Through the above procedure, we can see how Yogācāra philosophy survived in the late period of Indian Buddhism by blending the Madhyamaka opponent?s argument with its own thought. (shrink)

Summary Colourful plant images are often taken as the icon of natural history illustration. However, so far, little attention has been paid to the question of how this beautiful colouring was achieved. At a case study of the eighteenth-century Nuremberg doctor and botanist, Christoph Jacob Trew, the process of how illustrations were hand-coloured, who was involved in this work, and how the colouring was supervised and evaluated is reconstructed, mostly based on Trew's correspondence with the engraver and publisher (...) of his books, Johann Jacob Haid in Augsburg. Furthermore, the question of standardizing colours, their uses and their recipes is discussed at two examples of the same time period: the colour charts of the Bauer brothers, arguably the most renowned botanical draughtsmen of the period, and the colour tables by the Regensburg naturalist, Jacob Christian Schaeffer. Hand-colouring botanical illustrations, it is argued, was far from a straightforward task but confronted botanists and their employees with a plethora of practical and methodological problems, to which different solutions were developed in the course of time. Analysing these problems and solutions reveals some new and interesting aspects of the practices of eighteenth-century botany and of the production of scientific illustrations in general. (shrink)

Justice is usually represented as a feminine figure holding a pair of scales and a sword. The history of that image is relatively recent and has attracted a great deal of attention. However, a different appreciation of it may come from a “nocturnal” jurisprudence seeking to foreground its presence and effects in the transmission of modern culture and so also of law. In this essay, I take my cue from Aby Warburg and the Pathosformeln that, he suggested, can be glimpsed (...) through certain material objects inherited from the past—specifically, Dürer’s The Death of Orpheus and other related visual art. I then consider what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘the image of the image’ emphasising the timely quality of those images and I ask, with Georges Didi-Huberman, whether it might not be high time to “return” that which those images ostensibly show. The associations established in this essay between those different insights may help to recognise the extent to which the innumerable images to do with justice found at the four corners of the world can make the cognitive and emotional experience of those encountering them a rather more complex and potentially problematic affair than it may be at first supposed. What, on closer inspection, can those images give us to see? Are the ancient configurations they sometimes transmit not made up of crystals of historical memory carrying dormant energies that could be suddenly reignited in unpredictable ways? Should the task ahead not be, in some cases, one of restitution—the inapparent gift that turns the “blotted-out” into something striking that can be then handed over and known? These, I argue, are some of the questions a “nocturnal” jurisprudence of the image can be about. (shrink)

The article devoted to the study of an artistic image of female saint from stylistic and linguocultural perspectives. The image is represented by the characters of Judith and Juliana in Anglo-Saxon literature. Stylistic peculiarities of the image are result of the fact that it emerges as a combination of heroic and religious genres. Thus, two genre pictures of the world account for characteristics of the image: on the one hand, it is described by epithets relating to the sphere of (...) divinity, on the other, by lexis relating to military heroism. As a result, Anglo-saxon female saint stands out among other female images by a considerable degree of activity, which is manifested at all levels of analysis. Female saints are connotated positively and described as ‘bright‘, ‘wise‘, and ‘brave‘. A category binding the image and a sphere of culture is a notion of value, which is reflected in a linguocultural concept. Study ofconceptual space of female saints contributes to reconstructing values and anti-values of the Anglo-Saxon period. An interaction of heroic and religious pictures of the world account for a specific character of an image of the saint in Old English literature, namely the co-existence of concepts typical of these conceptual outlooks. On the one hand, God-related concepts: God, love, glory, on the other, such heroic concepts as strength, bravery, dignity. Anti-values within the image are associated with the macroconcept ‘devil‘ and devil-related concepts like death and feud. (shrink)

Drawing on both anthropology and philosophy, this paper argues that the profiled form of the human hand is a universally recognizable image; one whose significance transcends temporally and geographically defined cultural divisions, and represents the earliest known artistic symbol of the human form. The unique co-occurrence of five properties in the image of the human hand and the way it is recognized support this argument, including that it is: (1) unmistakably a hand, (2) unmistakably human, (3) a (...) universal point of interface, (4) a universal referent of scale, and (5) an easy way of making a complex shape. This underappreciated aspect of hand art makes these images among the most important forms of early artistic expression encountered in the prehistoric record. (shrink)

The anthropology of Colin E. Gunton begins with the Trinity and specifically, the person of Christ. From trinitarian persons, Gunton deduces the ontological definition of what it means to be a person, that is, a being in relationship and in distinction, or ‘free relatedness’. To be a person is to be in the image of the personal God, which is christological language, for it is Christ who bears the image of God in its fullness. As the true image bearer, Christ’s (...) humanity is paradigmatic of what it means to be in relationship: with God, with the world and with other human persons. Gunton’s christology is also thoroughly pneumatological, borrowing Irenaeus’ metaphor of God’s ‘two hands in the world’: The Son and the Spirit. Not only do the Son and the Spirit mediate God’s presence to creation according to Irenaeus, but Gunton builds on this metaphor to include the Spirit’s mediation of the eternal Son to the Father as well as the Incarnate Son to humanity. The Spirit also reshapes humanity to be in the image of Christ, through his relationships with God, with the world and with other human persons. This is an eschatological project, for in this reshaping, the creation is recreated toward its teleological perfection. The article concludes with a potential direction for future study within Gunton’s christological anthropology. To conceive what it means to be human theologically, Gunton insists that we must look to Christ’s own person. (shrink)

This article addresses a stated need within the food justice movement scholarship to increase the attention paid to the political socialization of hired farm hands in industrial agriculture. In Canada, tackling the problem of farm worker equity has particular social and political contours related to the Canadian horticultural industry’s reliance on a state-managed migrant agricultural labour program designed to fill the sector’s labour market demands. As Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program produces relations of ‘unfree labour’, engaging migrant farm workers in (...) social movement initiatives can be particularly challenging. Critical educational interventions designed to encourage migrant farm workers’ contribution to contemporary social movements in Canada must therefore confront the socio-cultural obstacles that constrict migrant farm workers’ opportunities to participate as full members of their communities. In this article, I argue that social justice oriented approaches to community-based arts can provide a means for increasing the social movement contributions of farm workers employed through managed labour migration schema such as Canada’s SAWP. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Images of Ancient Rome in Late Eighteenth-Century Neapolitan HistoriographyMelissa CalaresuThe case of the late Neapolitan enlightenment, the variety and sophistication of which has been little recognized outside of Italian scholarship, illustrates the significance of particular regional concerns and intellectual traditions in the development of enlightened movements in Europe. 1 This becomes apparent when examining how Neapolitans looked to their own past in relation to the unique set of (...) political and social problems of the Kingdom of Naples. In this article I shall examine a number of historical writings published in the 1780s. This was a decade of intense intellectual activity which saw the publication of the defining works of the later Neapolitan enlightenment, such as Gaetano Filangieri’s Scienza della legislazione from 1780 and Francesco Mario Pagano’s Saggi politici between 1783 and 1785. 2 It was also the decade in which Giuseppe Maria Galanti’s Storia filosofica e politica delle nazioni antiche e moderne [End Page 641] introduced in translation important texts of the British and French Enlightenments, and the journal Scelta miscellanea briefly became an important focal point of collaboration and intellectual exchange for reform-minded intellectuals in Naples. 3 The impetus which bound together these many projects of the 1780s was twofold: on one hand, the growing awareness of the particular problems of Neapolitan society and of the urgent need for reform, expressed through the language and concerns of the wider enlightened movement; and at the same time a revived sense of a distinct cultural and political identity. The writing of history, even of the most remote age, did not escape these concerns.The cultural renewal of the 1780s brought new histories of the Kingdom, and in these Rome played an essential role. As Naples’s most powerful neighbor in ancient times, Rome defeated the Samnites, the tribe which had inhabited the Kingdom, and brought the region under Imperial control. From the Middle Ages the universal pretensions of the Roman papacy had continually threatened the temporal authority of Neapolitan rulers, and the symbol of these pretensions had survived into the eighteenth century with the offering each year of a feudal homage, the Chinea, to Rome. It was against this threat which Pietro Giannone’s anti-clericalism in the Istoria civile del Regno di Napoli (1723) was directed. 4 The symbol of Rome, ancient and modern, served as an effective foil for Neapolitan intellectuals who believed that the development of good government in the Kingdom had been frustrated by the interference of outside powers.This interference was perceived as having broken the natural bond between the rulers of Naples and their subjects. The Spanish viceroys already had an established and especially reviled place in this history of misgovernment in Naples. 5 The arrival of Charles III in 1734 and the establishment of an autonomous monarchy in the Kingdom broke this history and brought a new optimism for the possibility of reform. As regalisti, the reformers of the end of the [End Page 642] eighteenth century continued their efforts to strengthen the jurisdictional rights of the now autonomous Bourbon monarchy against both the Papacy and the feudal nobility within the Kingdom. 6 Within these historiographical and political traditions Rome was clearly recognized as a recurring symbol of oppression and obstacle to Naples’s sovereignty, and late eighteenth-century historians looked back to a period before the arrival of the ancient Romans to find a native tradition which could inform contemporary reform and upon which a cultural identity could be constructed.Italian writers, from the Renaissance, had charted the early history of the various city-states, duchies, and kingdoms in the Italian peninsula relative to the rise and fall of ancient Rome. Despite the local patriotism which these histories expressed, Rome remained a powerful symbol and model of civilization, and it was from such a model that both politics and culture were discussed and compared in Europe. Consequently, interest in pre-Roman Italy most often related to the reconstruction of the origins and early history of Rome, and it was towards this which most antiquarians and historians worked in their attempts to understand the causes for its rise. 7 In any case antiquarian interest in pre-Roman... (shrink)

The barest awareness of the ubiquity and influence of the media today provides proof enough that our fate is in the hands of the image. But when and how was this fate sealed? _Image, Icon, Economy_ considers this question and recounts an essential thread in the conceptualization of visual images within the Western tradition. This book argues that the extraordinary force of the image in contemporary life—the contemporary imaginary—can be traced back to the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy of the eighth (...) and ninth centuries. It was during this period that the church was compelled to produce an account of the theological status of the religious image that would nevertheless not be open to even the slightest suspicion of idolatry. The solution arrived at was the dual doctrine of the _image_, _invisible_ and the _icon_, _visible_, and thus perfectly fitted to be placed at the center of a pedagogical and political strategy serving the temporal power of the church. The foundations of this immense philosophical enterprise were laid in no less than the multifarious, interwoven strands of the divine _economy_, God's overall plan for the salvation of humanity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article offers the first comprehensive reconstruction of Hannah Arendt's contribution to the venerable chapter of modern intellectual history known as ‘the Idea of the university.’ Arendt first jotted down her thoughts on this topic in a 1946 letter to Karl Jaspers, in response to the manuscript of his then forthcoming book Die Idee der Universität. She later revisited the topic in three different moments. We trace these three sequels back to three contemporary political crises to which she bore (...) witness: (i) the problem of Arab-Jewish relations following the founding of Israel, (ii) the suppression of freedom of speech during the McCarthy era, and (iii) the American student protest movement of the 1960s. At the heart of Arendt's idea of the university is a tension that she never managed to resolve: namely, that between the image of the university as a nonconformist community ethically committed to the transformation of the social world, on the one hand, and the image of the university as a secluded sanctuary of contemplative freedom dedicated to the disinterested pursuit of truth, on the other. Whereas the first puts her at odds with Jaspers and is predominant in the early reflections, the second pulls her closer to him and becomes prominent in the later ones. More broadly, the article contends that the history of Arendt's reflections on the university bears on our understanding of the evolution of her political thought. (shrink)

This article explores imagination as a means of ethical re-orientation in the aftermath of atrocity. The discussion of the problem of evil is based on Hannah Arendt’s critique of Kant and her notion of ‘rootless’ rather than ‘radical’ evil. On this basis, the orienting potential of visual images is investi­gated with regard to images of violence in the media on the one hand, and, on the other, with regard to Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Then the role of (...) verbal and mental images of humanity or inhumanity is discussed with reference to the Holocaust survivor Jorge Semprun’s testimony in his book Literature or Life. Finally, the biblical motif of the human being created in the image of an invisible God, the imago Dei, comes into view as an exemplary image of humanity that appears in a framework of interpretation where the invisible is mediated with the help of verbal, visual and/or mental images. (shrink)

Children seem to have a profound implicit knowledge of human behaviour, because they laugh at Bugs Bunny cartoons where much of the humour depends on animals behaving like humans and our intuitive recognition that this is absurd. Scientists, on the other hand, have problems defining what this 'human difference' is. I suggest these problems are of cultural origin. For example, the industrial revolution and the protestant work ethic have created a world in which work is valued over play, object (...) intelligence over social intelligence, and science and technology over the arts. This may explain why we have so many imaging studies of tool-use and object manipulation, but only four studies of dance, two of pretend play, and one of role-play. Yet in order to understand child development, the evolution of the brain, and the emergence of human self-consciousness, we need to look at social displays-- such as dance, song, image-making and role-play-- which underpin human culture, cooperation and the arts. I will discuss recent brain imaging research on playful versus instrumental behaviour and show how, in conjunction with archaeological data, we can use this to make sense of human evolution. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image by Thomas PfauThomas ZingelmannPFAU, Thomas. Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022. xxiii + 785 pp. Cloth, $80.00Thomas Pfau reconstructs one of the most traditional and possibly most decisive philosophical debates, [End Page 559] namely, the one about the form and function of appearance (Schein). This debate is taken up (...) on the basis of the concept of image. This means that Pfau concentrates historically as well as systematically on a specific topic within this debate. The book is divided into two major sections.In the first section, Pfau examines how the history of the metaphysics and theology of the image develops, starting with Plato in the first chapter. The basic idea in this section is that the image has a crucial epistemic role in the metaphysical and theological systems of the authors addressed. Here Pfau shows that Plato, at the latest in the Sophist, develops a theory of images that revalues appearance contrary to the assumptions in the Republic. Chapter 1 is about the mediation of unity and multiplicity, as it is also shown in Plotinus. Chapter 2 attempts to show how the Byzantine icon embodies the conviction that the invisible truth of the visual world can be revealed only through images. Pfau's demonstration of various epistemic dimensions of the image then begins with chapter 3: the eschatological vision from Augustine to Bonaventure to Julian of Norwich. Chapter 4, the last of the first section, reconstructs Nicholas of Cusa's position, which attempts to understand mystical visions mediated by images of Christ.The second section examines how the metaphysics of the image—in the sense of an epistemology, which tries to establish ultimate justifications—nevertheless persists and even evolves despite two crucial switches in philosophy. On the one hand, this concerns philosophy that subordinates the visual to the abstract (for example, Hegel) and, on the other, the supposedly nonmetaphysical status of the image in the developing natural sciences. Chapter 5 then attempts to show, through Goethe's botanical investigations and reflections, how, despite the establishment of the natural sciences, Goethe attempts to defend intuition as a scientific method and appearance as a scientific object of investigation. This position is then pursued historically in chapter 6, through the work of Lyell, Darwin, and Ruskin, where the visible is understood as the connecting point of the sciences in general. Gerard Manley Hopkins is then identified in chapter 7 as representing a position that combines theological with proto-phenomenological arguments to highlight the epistemic value of images. The last chapter then deals with decisive developments at the beginning of the twentieth century. In phenomenology (Husserl), painting (Cézanne), and poetry (Rilke), a conception develops that epistemically valorizes sensual and intuitive experience.Generally speaking, Pfau attempts to trace historically what arguments and positions have been developed on the relationship between image and knowledge. His work is based on the conviction that the image is the basis for human orientation in the world and is therefore of great epistemological value. Of outstanding importance for his question is that the epistemological value of images is not to be located in the properties of images, that is, an ontology of the image; rather, Pfau is interested in those positions that reflect on the relationship between knowledge and [End Page 560] experience of images. While clarifying the ontological status of images remains important, the epistemological status of images—what role the experience and usage of images has for humans—is in the foreground. Pfau reconstructs positions that hold that the pictorial is a medium of knowledge. He puts forward the thesis that there is a tradition that is of the opinion that in and through the medium of the image—and this closes the arc to the Schein-debate—being can be experienced by man. In other words, the invisible is to become recognizable through the visible. Of particular importance is his reading of the late Platonic dialogues: While appearance and being are still thought of as distinct in these dialogues, they are not opposed, in the sense of an epistemic opposition. Plato's... (shrink)

The ArgumentFocusing on the celebrations of Newton and his work, this article investigates the use of the concept of genius and its connection with debates on the methodology of science and the morality of great discoverers. During the period studied, two areas of tension developed. Firstly, eighteenth-century ideas about the relationship between genius and method were challenged by the notion of scientific genius as transcending specifiable rules of method. Secondly, assumptions about the nexus between intellectual and moral virtue were threatened (...) by the emerging conception of genius as marked by an extraordinary personality – on the one hand capable of breaking with established methods to achieve great discoveries, on the other, likely to transgress moral and social conventions. The assesments of Newton by nineteenth-century scientists such as Brewster, Whewell, and De Morgan were informed by these tensions. (shrink)

Michigan State University faculty, staff, alumni, and students travel the world on "study abroad" programs, research and development projects, and personal vacations; many document their experiences photographically. "MSU Global Focus" is an international photography competition created in 1999 by MSU's Office of International Studies and Programs, to foster the sharing of such photographs. Global Focus: Images of a Land-Grant Tradition is a blend of images and words, of artistic expression and historical documentation, of past and present, and of (...) the perspectives of many people. Many of the archival and current photographs have never before been published. More than 60 winning photographs from the first five years of the competition are featured in this book. These photos are juxtaposedwith more than 100 images depicting the breadth of M.S.U.'s international involvements, stretching from as long ago as the 1870s to the present day. Michigan State University has a long history of international involvement. The institution was among the handful of U.S. colleges and universities involved in supporting and establishing foreign programs immediately after World War II. Those efforts involved hun-dreds of faculty members and initiated the tradition of strong international involvement that continues today. In her preface to the book, M.S.U. President Lou Anna K. Simon said, "Advancing Knowledge. Transforming Lives. That is how we sum up our land-grant mission today. And at its core, that means we make a difference in people's lives--not just those people who come to Michigan State, but all of the people whose lives we touch around the world. The photos and text in this book tell an important part of that story, one that helps define who we are and one in which all of us who are part of Michigan State can take tremendous pride.". (shrink)

The paper deals with the problem of representation on the background of J. Rancière’s political philosophy, in which he rejects the concept of the unrepresentable. The resolution of the problem follows from the confronting of two conceptions of the unrepresentable: that of the esthetics of the sublime in Kant and Lyotard and of the politics of prohibition in Foucault on one hand and Rancière’s understanding of sharing the perceptible on the other hand. This discussion leads the author to (...) the problem of visuality conceived as a set of visual representations, which in a historically given period are legitimately visible. This definition of visuality returns the representation and the unrepresentable back into the political conception of image. (shrink)

Mental imagery of movement is a potentially valuable rehabilitation task, but its therapeutic efficacy may depend on the specific cognitive strategy employed. Individuals use two main strategies to perform the hand mental rotation task, which involves determining whether a visual image depicts a left or right hand. One is the motor imagery strategy, which involves mentally simulating one’s own hand movements. In this case, task performance as measured by response time is subject to a medial–lateral effect wherein (...) the RT is reduced when the fingertips are directed medially, presumably as the actual motion would be easier. The other strategy is to employ visual imagery, which involves mentally rotating the picture and is not subject to this medial–lateral effect. The rehabilitative benefits of the HMRT are thought to depend on the MI strategy, so it is essential to examine the effects of individual factors such as age, image perspective, and innate ability on the strategy adopted. When presented with pictures of the palm, all subjects in the current study used the MI strategy, regardless of age and ability. In contrast, when subjects were presented with pictures of the back of the hand, the VI strategy predominated among the young age group regardless of performance, while the strategy used by middle-age and elderly groups depended on performance ability. In the middle-age and elderly groups, the VI approach predominated in those with high performance skill, whereas the MI strategy predominated among those with low performance skill. Thus, higher-skill middle-aged and elderly individuals may not necessarily form a motion image during the HMRT, potentially limiting rehabilitation efficacy. (shrink)

Previous research has linked the concept of number and other ordinal series to space via a spatially oriented mental number line. In addition, it has been shown that in visual scene recognition and production, speakers of a language with a left-to-right orthography respond faster to and tend to draw images in which the agent of an action is located to the left of the patient. In this study, we aim to bridge these two lines of research by employing a (...) novel method that measures the spatial bias produced by transitive sentences that use a wide variety of abstract and concrete verbs. Across four experiments, participants read sentences and then responded to probe words appearing on either the left or right sides of the screen. Probe words consisted of agents, patients, other words in the sentence, or newly encountered words. We found consistent lateral biases to responding to agents and patients, which appears to be independent of order of mention in the sentence but which does reflect a correspondence between position in the sentence and role in the causal sequence of the action. Our results also show that this spatial bias is driven by the use of the hands in two different ways: The left hand shows a greater sensitivity to the spatial effect than the right hand, and vocal responses produce no spatial effect. (shrink)

During face‐to‐face conversation, transitions between speaker turns are incredibly fast. These fast turn exchanges seem to involve next speakers predicting upcoming semantic information, such that next turn planning can begin before a current turn is complete. Given that face‐to‐face conversation also involves the use of communicative bodily signals, an important question is how bodily signals such as co‐speech hand gestures play into these processes of prediction and fast responding. In this corpus study, we found that hand gestures that (...) depict or refer to semantic information started before the corresponding information in speech, which held both for the onset of the gesture as a whole, as well as the onset of the stroke (the most meaningful part of the gesture). This early timing potentially allows listeners to use the gestural information to predict the corresponding semantic information to be conveyed in speech. Moreover, we provided further evidence that questions with gestures got faster responses than questions without gestures. However, we found no evidence for the idea that how much a gesture precedes its lexical affiliate (i.e., its predictive potential) relates to how fast responses were given. The findings presented here highlight the importance of the temporal relation between speech and gesture and help to illuminate the potential mechanisms underpinning multimodal language processing during face‐to‐face conversation. (shrink)

The images of migrants and refugees arriving in precarious boats on the shores of southern Europe, and of the makeshift camps that have sprung up in Lesbos, Lampedusa, Calais and elsewhere, have become familiar sights on television screens around the world. But what do we know about the border places – these liminal zones between countries and continents – that have become the focus of so much attention and anxiety today, and what do we know about the individuals who (...) occupy these places? In this timely book, anthropologist Michel Agier addresses these questions and examines the character of the borderlands that emerge on the margins of nation-states. Drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork, he shows that borders, far from disappearing, have acquired a new kind of centrality in our societies, becoming reference points for the growing numbers of people who do not find a place in the countries they wish to reach. They have become the site for a new kind of subject, the border dweller, who is both 'inside' and 'outside', enclosed on the one hand and excluded on the other, and who is obliged to learn, under harsh conditions, the ways of the world and of other people. In this respect, the lives of migrants, even in the uncertainties or dangers of the borderlands, tell us something about the condition in which everyone is increasingly living today, a 'cosmopolitan condition' in which the experience of the unfamiliar is more common and the relation between self and other is in constant renewal. (shrink)

The study zeroed in on the perception of college students who are exposed to sights of poverty in their immediate environment. The student-participants were asked to provide their perception, understanding, and behaviour towards poverty using the photographs that they took on their own. In qualitative research practice, this methodology is called photo elicitation. It was revealed, among others, that the participants have shown negative perceptions about poverty. They strongly felt bad about each photograph that they took and what these (...) class='Hi'>images portrayed. The participants visualized their community and thereby weaved analyses and opinions that encroached on various philosophical and sociological theories. There are four interrelated dominant images that were drawn: exteriority image, dirt-poor image, victim-blaming image, and hand-to-mouth image. (shrink)

Little understood in early U.S. history, the Florida manatee suffered at the hands of people. After the manatees were listed as endangered, scientists began to study manatees and gained much knowledge about them. With education efforts, the species then went from inspiring acts of cruelty to inspiring dedication and admiration among scientists, policymakers, and the interested public. The image of the manatee underwent a transformation. The social and cultural reinvention of the Florida manatees improved their chances for protection.

Reale points out that the good and the demiurgic intelligence are radically distinct, a conclusion denied by J. Seifert in the last paper of the book. Fourteen characteristics of the idea of the good are listed by T. A. Szlezák. It is obvious, he argues, that the theory of principles of Plato’s unwritten doctrines is not identical with what Republic 6 and 7 say about the good, but there is no real opposition. In the next paper, however, H. W. Ausland, (...) after a sober evaluation of the esoteric teachings, suspects that Reale and Szlezák succumb to a certain romanticism. According to L. Brisson, the good belongs to the sphere of being, even if it is not being ; it is not in every way beyond being. Plotinus was the first to place it above being. M. Erler shows what must be the attitude of the philosopher with regard to the information orally received by him. Although Plato did not want to define the good, he pointed out several of its characteristics. The good, M. Migliori notes, combines in itself beauty, proportion, and unity. The Philebus pursues the doctrine of the Republic and goes into the direction of the unwritten doctrines. The ultimate reality, however, is beyond our understanding. E. Cattanei attempts to explain how for Plato mathematics is a way of access to the knowledge of the good. R. Ferber, on the other hand, stresses that Plato nowhere directly says that the essence of the good is the one. Beauty, symmetry, and truth are not the good itself. According to C. Gill, Gadamer demystified the idea of the good, a view which shows some common ground with the position of analytical philosophy: the good is not a transcendent entity. M. Vegetti, however, upholds the transcendent character of the good as a cause of being. G. A. Press argues that over the past hundred years Plato was considered a dogmatic philosopher, and it was believed that the leading speaker in the dialogues states Plato’s own views, but the situation is far more complex. Plato wants us to acquire a vision rather than propositional knowledge. The idea of the good should not be accorded a special position. C. Rowe tries to demystify some current interpretations, whereas F. Ferrari insists on the causality of the good, and sees Plato’s teaching as the origin of the entire tradition of negative theology. Yet some texts give the impression that the good belongs to the ontological order. C. Porebski reminds us that problems of ethics are the starting point of what Plato says about the good in the Republic. According to F. Trabattoni, Aristotle’s description of Plato’s theory of principles is wrong and his philosophy differs fundamentally from Plato’s. The School of Tübingen is a prisoner of Aristotle’s interpretation. Plato’s reluctance to describe the good in detail may mark the beginning of a skeptic trend in the Academy. The Parmenides tells us, E. Berti says, that one has first to remove all hypotheses before a definition of the Good can be given. E. Moutsopoulos draws attention to some simplistic and wrong qualifications of Plato’s thought as related to idealism and mentions Kant and Hegel’s attitudes with regard to Platonism. J. F. Crosby points to a clear leaving behind of the Socratic “no one knowingly does wrong” in the Alcibiades 216b: as Plato explains in the Protagoras, one may live according to one’s lower appetite or follow the insight of the rational soul. G. Santos makes a strong stand in favor of the identity of goodness and reality. L. P. Gerson examines theories of Platos’s development: there is no evidence of a theory of the form of the good earlier than the Republic. Aristotle, J. Dudley writes, upheld an ethical ideal resembling that of Plato, substituting the contemplation of the unmoved mover for that of the idea of the good. In the last paper J. Seifert argues that Plato identified the demiurge and the good. (shrink)

Mary Shelley in her writings relies on the romanticised notions of nature: in addition to its beauties, the sublime quality is highlighted in its overwhelming greatness. In her ecological fiction, The Last Man (1826), the dystopian view of man results in the presentation of the declining civilization and the catastrophic destruction of infested mankind. In the novel, all of the characters are associated with forces of culture and history. On the one hand, Mary Shelley, focussing on different human bonds, (...) warns against the sickening discord and dissonance, the lack of harmony in the world, while, on the other hand, she calls for the respect of nature and natural order. The prophetic caring female characters ‘foresee’ the events but cannot help the beloved men to control their building and destroying powers. Mary Shelley expresses her unmanly view of nature and the author’s utopian hope seems to lie in ‘unhuman’ nature. While the epidemic, having been unleashed by the pests of patriarchal society and being accelerated by global warming, sweeps away humanity, Mother Nature flourishes and gains back her original ‘dwelling place’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Meditations on the Letter A:The Hand as Nexus Between Music and LanguageEleanor V. StubleyThe image is that of a little girl. She stands alone, center-stage, her lips moving quietly as she rehearses the letters of the alphabet so that her forthcoming performance will be fresh and perfect. Her name is called. She takes a deep breath and begins, haltingly, doh,... doh, ray,... doh, ray, me,.... Her tongue catches (...) at the beginning of each sound as if it were a new found delight, but it is the sequence, the linear progression that is the focus of her concentration. And slowly, her recitation begins to take on its own rhythmic fluidity, each sound's name becoming stronger and more confident than the one before. Then just as quickly as it began, it is over, and she stands tall in the glory of the final doh's resonance, proud in her belief that having mastered the letters of the alphabet, she has at long last discovered the key to unlocking music's deepest and darkest mysteries.The alphabet—I begin its story with the hand behind the hieroglyphic markings of our ancient ancestors, the hand that discovered in the tracings of its own aimless movements across the sand a capacity to replicate the arc of the moon, the flowering branches of a shrub. It was a hand pre-occupied with the visual, its scratchings serving to extend the communicative power of its own reach by calling forth the image of a thing not immediately present. Meaning, as such, was typically a matter of a one-to-one correspondence inferred on the basis of shape and form, with concepts such as speed and light portrayed by animals and natural objects that one would associate with each (for instance, a running cougar, a stylized sun). But as language and the art of storytelling evolved, the emergence of concepts lacking precise visual associations required the development of a variety of phonetic strategies that, often working through pictographic puns (that is, belief, bee+leaf), used the visual to invoke the sound of the human voice.1 The effect, David Abrams suggests, was that of magic, the word having seemingly been "drawn" from the silence of thin air.2 And, like all tricks, the hand disappeared behind the magic. Where initially voice and hand had worked as extensions of one another, the voice serving to bring people together,3 the hand pointing to that which was voiced, the word as name now sounded alone.The story continues with the artistry of the storyteller. It was the artistry of a rhapsodist, one who used the voice to spin a tale of a "remembered present" from [End Page 42] the remnants of the hand's scratchings that had withstood the ravages of time.4 I say "remembered present" because the voice was valued for its expressive qualities and worked in and through a battery of memorized melodic embellishments that allowed it to stitch one image to the next on the basis of the storyteller's own experience and knowledge.5 It was a voice, consequently, that worked in the moment, a voice that drew energy and inspiration not only from the hand's scratchings but also from those that had gathered to listen. The first alphabets did little to change the dynamics of the event, they being nothing more than crudely assembled compilations of idiosyncratic phonograms (that is, z = buzzing bee) designed to define the possibilities of language as a vocabulary of names.6 Etched into bark, tree, stone, and parchment, however, they came to have a longevity that allowed the sounding codes they represented to be carried "word of mouth" from place to place. Where the spoken word had once been both fleeting and fluid, gone before it was fully sounded, it now had a repeatability that served to fix both its spellings and its meanings. And it was not long before the spinning of a tale had become a matter of second sight, the work of an extraordinary memory able to "recall" that which the storyteller had not been present to hear.7The gift worked through a self-conscious awareness of oneself as... (shrink)