In the medieval Islamic world, eloquent expression was an important skill for statesmen to acquire, such that many of the leading viziers were often prominent belletrists. Among the most well known of these literary figures was the Būyid vizier Ibn ʿAbbād. Drawing from a wide range of historical and literary sources, this article compiles and corroborates the many accounts relating to Ibn ʿAbbād’s political career, beginning with his family background and early education as a scribe, to his experiences in the (...) Būyid courts of Baghdad, Iṣfahān, and Rayy and his two decades as vizier to the Būyids Muʾayyid al-Dawla and Fakhr al-Dawla in western Iran. (shrink)

La Pensée d’Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ: Un «agent double» dans le monde persan et arabe. By István T. Kristó-Nagy. Studia Arabica, vol. 19. Paris: Éditions de Paris, 2013. Pp. 605. €34.

Citizenship rights have become vital to our sense of personal identity and social membership in modern society. Roche argues that today we have to shift from the conventional postwar politics of social rights to a new politics of social obligations and personal responsibility.

How do we use our mental images of the present to reconstruct our past? Maurice Halbwachs addressed this question for the first time in his work on collective memory, which established him as a major figure in the history of sociology. This volume, the first comprehensive English-language translation of Halbwach's writings on the social construction of memory, fills a major gap in the literature on the sociology of knowledge. Halbwachs' primary thesis is that human memory can only function within (...) a collective context. Collective memory, Halbwachs asserts, is always selective; various groups of people have different collective memories, which in turn give rise to different modes of behavior. Halbwachs shows, for example, how pilgrims to the Holy Land over the centuries evoked very different images of the events of Jesus' life; how wealthy old families in France have a memory of the past that diverges sharply from that of the nouveaux riches; and how working class construction of reality differ from those of their middle-class counterparts. With a detailed introduction by Lewis A. Coser, this translation will be an indispensable source for new research in historical sociology and cultural memory. Lewis A. Coser is Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the State University of New York and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at Boston College. (shrink)

The Sensible World and the World of Expression presents the lecture notes for a course taught by Maurice Marleau-Ponty, a central figure of phenomenological philosophy, at a key point in his career.

The Matter of the Mind addresses and illuminates the relationship between psychology and neuroscience by focusing on the topic of reduction. Written by leading philosophers in the field Discusses recent theorizing in the mind-brain sciences and reviews and weighs the evidence in favour of reductionism against the backdrop of recent important advances within psychology and the neurosciences Collects the latest work on central topics where neuroscience is now making inroads in traditional psychological terrain, such as adaptive behaviour, reward systems, consciousness, (...) and social cognition. (shrink)

This article uses transcriptions from video recordings of airline pilots at work, on actual flights, to consider some locations and the interactional significance of a feature of routine talk in the airline cockpit: and-prefaced turns. As pilots’ work is formally organized for them as many discrete and ordered tasks, and-prefacing is a local means for maintaining an ongoing sense of their conduct of a flight as a whole. By and-prefacing their talk, pilots present some new talk or task as connected (...) and relevantly next in a larger macro-sequence of work for their flight. And-prefacing is evidence of pilots’ orientation to a sense of sequence that can extend well beyond pairs of turns at talk and/or non-talk activities, or even a series of such paired sequences. It allows pilots to make salient the sequentiality of their work where the officially prescribed wordings they must use can leave this implicit. (shrink)

The Wisdom books of the Old Testament exhibit a pedagogy, but each one does so in a different way. The master-disciple relation appears especially in Proverbs and in Ecclesiasticus. In the Book of Wisdom, it is implicit. Job and Ecclesiastes are practically not interested in it at all. The master must acquire a competence so as to direct the disciple towards concrete values, and show him the inevitable consequences of a choice of life. The disciple is invited to listen to, (...) and then act on the teaching of the master, who manifests his authority through his experience and his own openness to Wisdom in person. Every book develops these themes in different ways. (shrink)

La linguistique saussurienne paraît avoir exercé, spécialement au cours des années 1951 à 1954, une influence assez considérable sur la pensée de Merleau-Ponty. Un travail de portée plus générale nous ayant amené à mesurer l'importance de la chose pour Pensemble de l'œuvre de ce philosophe, nous allons seulement essayer ici de prećiser un peu le rôle d'une telle influence en nous appuyant sur une analyse de l'interprétation de Saussure par Merleau-Ponty.Dans la Phénoménologie de la Perception, celui-ci avait déjà consacré un (...) chapitre à l'étude de la parole conçue comme gesticulation ou expression corporelle. Quand, en 1953–54, il abordera le Problème de la Parole, dans un cours au Collège de France, c'est à Saussure lui-même qu'il attribuera des vues assez voisines: “Le cours cherchait à illustrer et é étendre cette notion saussurienne de la parole comme fonction positive et conquérante. (shrink)

A Treasury of the Buddha's Words: Discourses from the Middle Collection. Translated by Nanamoli Thera, edited and arranged by Phra Khantipalo. 3 vols, Mahamakut, Bangkok, but available only from Wat Buddha-Dhamma, Ten Mile Hollow, Wisemans Ferry, NSW 2255, Australia.

Pali Buddhism. Edited by Frank J. Hoffman and Deegalle Mahinda. Curzon Press, Richmond 1996. 233 pp. £40. ISBN 0-7007-0359-4.

Theravada Buddhism. A Social History from Ancient Times to Modern Colombo. Richard F. Gombrich. Routledge, London 1988. x, 237 pp. Hbk £20.00, pbk £7.95.

Featuring essays originally published in La Nouvelle Revue Française, this collection clearly demonstrates why Maurice Blanchot was a key figure in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy.

The aim of this dissertation is to situate our reading of the Platonic dialogue Alcibiades Major among both ancient and modern readings of the dialogue. Since the nineteenth century the issue of authenticity has preoccupied most modern commentators of the dialogue, but from all reasonable evidence, commentators from the ancient world had no such qualms about attributing the authorship of Alcibiades Major to Plato. Our reading of Alcibiades Major is in line with modern commentators who take both the dialogue's dramatic (...) features and educative value seriously, while not ignoring that in some quarters Alcibiades Major's authorship is still in dispute. ;Our treatment of Alcibiades Major differs from the attention given to it by past and present commentators, because it is our desire to see the ideas---expressed in the dialogue with such enthusiasm by Socrates and Alcibiades---entertained in a number of different contexts. For this reason we have titled the dissertation Socratic Encounters: Plato's Alcibiades, with each chapter designed to facilitate a kind of cross-fertilization of ideas from a variety of intellectual perspectives. Looking at the dialogue from various perspectives has allowed us to cast some new light on the dialogue from which other commentators may benefit. ;The objective of the dissertation to highlight Alcibiades Major's timeless insights and enduring relevance to contemporary issues, has led us on a course that revolves around pedagogy. The Platonic dialogues are gold-mines of insight, but knowing this to be the case does not answer the fundamental question: 'What did Plato intend to teach us by writing Alcibiades Major?' The dissertation goes to great lengths to provide answers to the question, and the answers it provides take unusual approaches. For example, Plato invites us to consider five issues in Alcibiades Major: appropriate listening, priorities, tradition, hypothetical questions, and women's role in male achievement. The dialogue is not limited to these five issues, but the dialogue cannot be seriously dealt with without considering them. (shrink)