In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Writing and Authority in Early ChinaLothar von FalkenhausenWriting and Authority in Early China. By Mark Edward Lewis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. vii + 544. Hardcover $92.50. Paper $31.95.Writing and Authority in Early China is a forceful and sparklingly original work in which Mark Edward Lewis explores the role of writing and texts in the transformation of political authority during the Warring States, Qin, (...) and Western Han periods. Following in the footsteps of the author's well-received first book1 and his magisterial contribution to the Cambridge History of Ancient China,2Writing and Authority establishes Lewis as the premier Western historian of the crucial centuries surrounding the unification of China under a centrally administered empire in 221 B.C. The book's complex, comprehensive, and coherent argument is informed by a variety of Western theoretical approaches, but it principally emanates from a close reading of the full record of transmitted texts and recently excavated manuscripts on [End Page 127] bamboo or wooden slips. The inclusion of the latter class of sources, beset with treacherous problems of decipherment, is still unusual in mainstream sinological scholarship and indicates the author's supreme confidence in his philological skills. With a firm hand, undaunted by the multifarious nature of his materials, Lewis guides the reader to some fundamental themes in recent sinology, opening manifold novel perspectives along the way. Even when dealing with well-known texts, he often proposes striking reinterpretations.In his Introduction, Lewis enumerates six main functions of writing in ancient China: enforcing state authority; creating text-based communities and "public spheres"; transcending the confines of space, time, and human mortality; fashioning figures of authority in the past; standardizing specialized technical terminology; and encrypting secret meanings. In Lewis' own words, "the culminating role of writing in the period, and the key to its importance in imperial China, was the creation of parallel realities within texts that claimed to depict the entire world" (p. 4). This ultimately led to the formation of the Confucian canon as a "textual double of the polity" that could survive cataclysmic changes of regimes.In chapter 1, "Writing the State," Lewis points out that before the Warring States period Chinese writing occurred exclusively in religious contexts. After circa 500 B.C., written documents gradually came to be used in the administration of government and trade. Both in their details of formulation and in the implication that anything committed to writing was thereby supernaturally validated, these new types of documents exhibit pervasive continuity with the earlier kinds of texts used in ritual communication with the ancestral spirits. Such continuity is also reflected in the rise of religious beliefs in a netherworld governed by a bureaucratic hierarchy and administrative processes parallel to those of the world of the living. According to Lewis, "the most important modification in the shift to an administrative polity [in the Warring States] was the extension of writing to new elements of the population. The attributes of the Zhou nobility... were transferred to the common people in the administrative documents of the new state. This widening range of inscription into the state order altered the social meaning of being recorded from a sign of power to one of subjection" (p. 13).Warring States rulers were cast in the role not of the authors of texts but of the authority behind them. Administrative and legal texts were concerned, ultimately, with the proper naming of phenomena, a process that had to adapt itself continually to the changes of the times. The authority of rulers came to encompass both human society and the natural world. "Whereas local and central administration were largely created through reworking and rewriting the ritual bases of the old Zhou order by means of a rationalizing cosmology, the re-invention of rulership drew on the contemporary religious realm and what is sometimes described as shamanism to provide images of cosmic power" (p. 42). Lewis illustrates the mechanics for applying these universal principles of rulership by a comprehensive analysis of the Zhou li (or Zhou guan), emphasizing the cosmological arrangement of the ideal government described therein and the dual administrative and religious dimensions of... (shrink)

This major work covers almost all that has been learned about the acoustics of stringed instruments from Helmholtz's 19th-century theoretical elaborations to recent electroacoustic and holographic measurements.Many of the results presented here were uncovered by the author himself over a 20-year period of research on the physics of instruments in the violin family. Lothar Cremer is one of the world's most respected authorities on architectural acoustics and, not incidentally, an avid avocational violinist and violist.The book - which was published (...) in German in 1981 - first of all meets the rigorous technical standards of specialists in musical acoustics. But it also serves the needs and interests of two broader groups: makers and players of stringed instruments are expressly addressed, since the implications of the mathematical formulations are fully outlined and explained; and acousticians in general will find that the work represents a textbook illustration of the application of fundamental principles and up-to-date techniques to a specific problem.The first - and longest - of the book's three parts investigates the oscillatory responses of bowed strings. The natural nonlinearities that derive from considerations of string torsion and bending stiffness are deftly handled and concisely modeled.The second part deals with the body of the instrument. Special attention is given to the bridge, which transmits the oscillations of the strings to the wooden body and its air cavity. In this case, linear modeling proves serviceable for the most part - a simplification that would not be possible with lute - like instruments such as the guitar.The radiation of sound from the body into the listener's space, which is treated as an extension of the instrument itself, is the subject of the book's final part.Lothar Cremer is Professor Emeritus at the Technical University of Berlin, where he served as director of the Institute for Acoustical Engineering. (shrink)

Die digitale Transformation erfasst die Medien der Literatur und Literaturkritik in unterschiedlicher Geschwindigkeit. Die Substituierung der gedruckten Zeitung, der Stammheimat der Literaturkritik, durch digitale Formate ist weit vorangeschritten. Auf dem Buchmarkt ist das gedruckte Hardcover nach wie vor ein relativ stabiles Element. Der Beitrag kommentiert diese Differenz in medienhistorischer Perspektive.

Kritik: Laurenz Lütteken, Mozart. Leben und Musik im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, München: C.H. Beck 2017.

The following conjecture is due to Shelah–Hasson: Any infinite strongly NIP field is either real closed, algebraically closed, or admits a non‐trivial definable henselian valuation, in the language of rings. We specialise this conjecture to ordered fields in the language of ordered rings, which leads towards a systematic study of the class of strongly NIP almost real closed fields. As a result, we obtain a complete characterisation of this class.

Le portrait politique de Constant est divisé en quatre parties.

This article is about the post-history of Hobbes’s name for the state and thus about the history of the name ‘Leviathan’ insofar as this name has remained the catchword for the (modern) state to this day (from the late 17th century to the beginning of the 21st century), but above all for that of absolutist-despotic proportions. This story, told here for the first time, is particularly interesting because it ultimately reveals a continuity in the understanding of Hob-bes that suggests that (...) this post-history not only has something to do with Hobbes’s Leviathan itself, but at least as much with its pre-history - with the name ‘Leviathan’, which Hobbes gave the state in reference to the biblical monster of the same name. (shrink)

An exponential $\exp $ on an ordered field $$. The structure $$ is then called an ordered exponential field. A linearly ordered structure $$ is called o-minimal if every parametrically definable subset of M is a finite union of points and open intervals of M.The main subject of this thesis is the algebraic and model theoretic examination of o-minimal exponential fields $$ whose exponential satisfies the differential equation $\exp ' = \exp $ with initial condition $\exp = 1$. This study (...) is mainly motivated by the Transfer Conjecture, which states as follows:Any o-minimal exponential field $$ whose exponential satisfies the differential equation $\exp ' = \exp $ with initial condition $\exp =1$ is elementarily equivalent to $\mathbb {R}_{\exp }$.Here, $\mathbb {R}_{\exp }$ denotes the real exponential field $$, where $\exp $ denotes the standard exponential $x \mapsto \mathrm {e}^x$ on $\mathbb {R}$. Moreover, elementary equivalence means that any first-order sentence in the language $\mathcal {L}_{\exp } = \{+,-,\cdot,0,1, <,\exp \}$ holds for $$ if and only if it holds for $\mathbb {R}_{\exp }$.The Transfer Conjecture, and thus the study of o-minimal exponential fields, is of particular interest in the light of the decidability of $\mathbb {R}_{\exp }$. To the date, it is not known if $\mathbb {R}_{\exp }$ is decidable, i.e., whether there exists a procedure determining for a given first-order $\mathcal {L}_{\exp }$ -sentence whether it is true or false in $\mathbb {R}_{\exp }$. However, under the assumption of Schanuel’s Conjecture—a famous open conjecture from Transcendental Number Theory—a decision procedure for $\mathbb {R}_{\exp }$ exists. Also a positive answer to the Transfer Conjecture would result in the decidability of $\mathbb {R}_{\exp }$. Thus, we study o-minimal exponential fields with regard to the Transfer Conjecture, Schanuel’s Conjecture, and the decidability question of $\mathbb {R}_{\exp }$.Overall, we shed light on the valuation theoretic invariants of o-minimal exponential fields—the residue field and the value group—with additional induced structure. Moreover, we explore elementary substructures and extensions of o-minimal exponential fields to the maximal ends—the smallest elementary substructures being prime models and the maximal elementary extensions being contained in the surreal numbers. Further, we draw connections to models of Peano Arithmetic, integer parts, density in real closure, definable Henselian valuations, and strongly NIP ordered fields.Parts of this thesis were published in [2–5].Abstract prepared by Lothar Sebastian KrappE-mail: [email protected]: https://d-nb.info/1202012558/34. (shrink)