Ariès traces Western man's attitudes toward mortality from the early medieval conception of death as the familiar collective destiny of the human race to the modern tendency, so pronounced in industrial societies, to hide death as if it were an embarrassing family secret.

This remarkable book--the fruit of almost two decades of study--traces in compelling fashion the changes in Western attitudes toward death and dying from the earliest Christian times to the present day. A truly landmark study, The Hour of Our Death reveals a pattern of gradually developing evolutionary stages in our perceptions of life in relation to death, each stage representing a virtual redefinition of human nature. Starting at the very foundations of Western culture, the eminent historian Phillipe Aries shows how, (...) from Graeco-Roman times through the first ten centuries of the Common Era, death was too common to be frightening; each life was quietly subordinated to the community, which paid its respects and then moved on. Aries identifies the first major shift in attitude with the turn of the eleventh century when a sense of individuality began to rise and with it, profound consequences: death no longer meant merely the weakening of community, but rather the destruction of self. Hence the growing fear of the afterlife, new conceptions of the Last Judgment, and the first attempts (by Masses and other rituals) to guarantee a better life in the next world. In the 1500s attention shifted from the demise of the self to that of the loved one (as family supplants community), and by the nineteenth century death comes to be viewed as simply a staging post toward reunion in the hereafter. Finally, Aries shows why death has become such an unendurable truth in our own century--how it has been nearly banished from our daily lives--and points out what may be done to "re-tame" this secret terror. The richness of Aries's source material and investigative work is breathtaking. While exploring everything from churches, religious rituals, and graveyards (with their often macabre headstones and monuments), to wills and testaments, love letters, literature, paintings, diaries, town plans, crime and sanitation reports, and grave robbing complaints, Aries ranges across Europe to Russia on the one hand and to England and America on the other. As he sorts out the tangled mysteries of our accumulated terrors and beliefs, we come to understand the history--indeed the pathology--of our intellectual and psychological tensions in the face of death. (shrink)

"Tout en conservant et en perfectionnant son outillage scientifique de recherche, l'Histoire se conçoit comme un dialogue où le présent n'est jamais absent. Elle abandonne cette indifférence que les maîtres d'autrefois s'efforçaient de lui imposer.L'historien d'aujourd'hui reconnaît sans honte qu'il appartient au monde moderne et qu'il travaille à sa manière à répondre aux inquiétudes - qu'il partage - de ses contemporains. Son optique du passé demeure liée à son présent - un présent qui n'est pas seulement une référence de méthode. (...) Désormais, l'Histoire cesse d'être une science sereine et indifférente. Elle s'ouvre au souci contemporain dont elle devient une manière d'être dans le temps de l'homme moderne. A une civilisation qui élimine les différences, l'Histoire doit restituer le sens perdu des particularités."Philippe Ariès.Philippe Ariès (1914-1984) a écrit notamment L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien régime et L'Homme devant la mort. L'amitié de l'histoire Chapitre I. Un enfant découvre l'histoire Chapitre II. L'histoire marxiste et l'histoire conservatrice Chapitre III. L'engagement de l'homme moderne dans l'histoire Chapitre IV. L'attitude devant l'histoire : au Moyen Âge Chapitre V. L'attitude devant l'histoire : le XVIIIe siècle Chapitre VI. L'histoire « scientifique » Chapitre VII. L'histoireexistentielle Chapitre VIII. L'histoire dans la civilisation moderne Annexes. (shrink)

In his essay ‘Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin subjects violence to a critique in order to establish the criterion for violence itself as a principle. His starting point is the distinction between law-positing and law-preserving violence. However, these are for him inseparable and subjected to the law of historical change: the history of the law is nothing but the dialectical rising and falling of legal orders. Benjamin’s analysis of legal violence and his criticism of parliamentary democracies, this article advances, should (...) be related to the critical analysis of the possibilities for alternative politics in contemporary democratic rule of law states, as those advanced by Bernard Noël, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière. For Benjamin, it is only law-destroying divine violence, whose principle is justice, not power, that is able to break this circle and open up a new era. Divine violence is, however, not only a provocative but also an extremely problematic, even dangerous, concept, as Jacques Derrida, among others, has claimed. This article considers, therefore, whether the concept of divine violence has any real political relevance in the contemporary era. (shrink)

Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa al-Thānī al-Maḥbūbī (d. 747/1346) was the last major Māturīdī theologian of Transoxania. As he left no work of rational theology (kalām) proper, one of the chief sources of his theological thought is his book on legal theory, al-Tawḍīḥ fī ḥall ghawāmiḍ al-Tanqīḥ. Because the work served as a prominent reference for both legal theory and rational theol­ogy, an extensive commentary tradition on it emerged as it was transmitted from Transoxania to South Asia, Anatolia, and the Arab world. A (...) distinctive subfield of this commentary tradition consisted of glosses devoted exclusively to one specific section of al-Tawḍīḥ. Revolving around the nature of good and evil, and intimately linked to the question of human free will, this part of Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa’s text came to be treated as a separate work, commonly referred to as al-Muqaddimāt al-arbaʿ (“The four pro­legomena”). Due to its role as a highly sophisticated refutation of late Ashʿarī doctrine on human volition, al-Muqaddimāt al-arbaʿ eventually developed into a prime source for later Māturīdī scholars in their discussion of human volition and related topics. (shrink)

Although Philippe Ariès’s claims that death has been replaced by illness as our main obsession, I argue that illness is being replaced by wellness, an approach to living that encourages preemptive behavior. I review various critiques of “survivalism,” a view that both insists on our vulnerability and welcomes professional intervention in personal life. The resulting sense of anxiety, critics maintain, extends even to the “minutiae of human behavior,” including diet and fitness. I follow Jackson Lears in tracing these (...) therapeutic commitments to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and examine a novel set in that period: T. C. Boyle’s The Road to Wellville, a satire about the perils of healthy living. I conclude by adapting Michael Sandel’s arguments against genetic enhancement to the issue of health. (shrink)

In his seminal book on the historical periods of Western attitudes toward death, Philippe Aries describes four consecutive periods through which these attitudes evolved and transformed. According to him, the historical attitudes of Western cultures have passed through four major parts described above: “Tamed Death,” One’s Own Death,” “Thy Death,” and “Forbidden Death.” This paper, after exploring this concept through the lens of Persian Poetic Wisdom, concludes that he historical attitudes of Persian-speaking people toward death have generally passed through (...) two major periods. The first period is an amalgamation of Aries’ “Tamed Death” and “One’s Own Death” periods, and the second period is an amalgamation of Aries’ “Thy Death” and “Forbidden Death” periods. This paper explores the main differences and similarities of these two historical trends through a comparative review of the consecutive historical periods of attitudes toward death between the Western and Persian civilizations/cultures. Although both civilizations moved through broadly similar stages, some influential contextual factors have been very influential in shaping noteworthy differences between them. The concepts of after-death judgment and redemption/downfall dichotomy and practices like deathbed rituals and their evolution after enlightenment and modernity are almost common between the above two broad traditions. The chronology of events and some aspects of conceptual evolutions and ritualistic practices are among the differences. (shrink)

No estudo de Philippe Ariès observou-se que a partir do século XVII, houve uma crescente ênfase na instituição escolar que propunha a substituição da família, por profissionais da educação, no ensino dedicado à criança, que de depreciada, começava a receber destaque e se tornava figura central na família. A criança de filho passou a ser intuída como aluno e percebida como criança-aluno. Nesse contexto, Comenius, Pai da Pedagogia Moderna, um apologista da instituição escolar, ao propor sua organização escolar, (...) inicia pela escola materna e denomina-a de “escola da infância”, o que demonstra claro entendimento, de que o espaço familiar era uma das classes escolares essenciais em sua proposta de reformar e organizar a instituição escolar, uma vez que, dela dependeria todas as demais classes. Aos pais-professores era indispensável prover manuais para que soubessem ensinar a criança-aluno. No atendimento dessa demanda é que Comenius escreveu suas obras pedagógicas, dentre elas, A escola da infância , que delimita o presente artigo e, que por sua vez pretende identificar os conteúdos da educação religiosa cristã, a serem ensinados às crianças de zero a seis anos. Palavras-chave : Educação religiosa cristã. Pais-professores. Educação da primeira infância. John Amos Comenius. Família. Escola.According the study by Philippe Ariès it was noticed that from the XVII century on there was a growing emphasis in the kind of school institution that proposed the substitution of the family for professionals of the education. The child ceases to be depreciated and starts being valued, becoming the central figure within family. The son also came to be intuited as a student and perceived as a child-student. In this context, while proposing his school organization, Comenius, Father of the Modern Pedagogy, an apologist of the school institution, begins from the motherly school. named by him of “school of the childhood”, which demonstrates clear understanding that familiar space was one of the school essential classes in its proposal of reforming and organizing the school institution. In order to attend such demand, Comenius wrote some pedagogic works, among them "The school of the childhood", that delimits the present article and intends to identify the contents of the religious Christian education to be taught to children from birth to six years old. Keywords : Religious Christian education. Parents-teachers. Education of the early childhood. John Amos Comenius. Family. School. (shrink)

Some years ago a collection of historical and philosophical essays on sex was advertised under the slogan: Philosophers are interested in sex again. Since that time the history of sexuality has become an almost unexceptionable topic, occasioning as many books and articles as anyone would ever care to read. Yet there are still fundamental conceptual problems that get passed over imperceptibly when this topic is discussed, passed over, at least in part, because they seem so basic or obvious that it (...) would be time badly spent to worry too much about them. However, without backtracking toweard this set of problems, one will quite literally not know what one is writing the history of when one writes a history of sexuality.An excellent example of some of the most sophisticated current writing in this field can be found in Western Sexuality, a collection of essays that resulted from a seminar conducted by Philippe Ariès at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 1979-80.1 As one would expect, Western Sexuality is characterized by a diversity of methodological and historiographical approaches—social history, intellectual history, cultural history , historical sociology, the analysis of literary texts, and that distinctive kind of history practiced by Michel Foucault and also in evidence in the short essay by Paul Veyne. One perspective virtually absent from this collection is the history of science, and since I believe that the history of science has a decisive and irreducible contribution to make to the history of sexuality, it is not accident that I am going to focus on that connection. But the history of sexuality is also an area in which one’s historiography or implicit epistemology will stamp, virtually irrevocably, one’s first-order historical writing. It is an arena in which philosophical and historical concerns inevitably run into one another. 1. Philippe Ariès and Adnré Béjin, eds., Western Sexuality: Practice and Percept in Past and Present Times . Arnold I. Davidson, a coeditor of Critical Inquiry, is assistant professor of philosophy and member of the Committees on General Studies in the Humanities and on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, “How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis: A Reading of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” appeared in the Winter 1987 issue. (shrink)

For nearly twenty-five years medievalists have been raising their voices to defend the Middle Ages against Philippe Ariès and his claim that “the idea of childhood did not exist” in medieval society. From Urban Holmes to Shulamith Shahar scholars have marshaled what evidence they could to counter the “negative stereotype” of the medieval family first proposed by Ariès, then seconded by Jacques Le Goff and others, and to demonstrate that “medieval society knew the age of childhood.” Exhilarated (...) by the ease with which they were able to restore childhood to the Middle Ages, a number of writers have gone on to challenge a less famous claim of Ariès, that before the eighteenth century “people had no idea of what we call adolescence.” Medieval historians have contested this notion as well, arguing that “in the medieval period adolescence too was seen as a distinct life stage.”. (shrink)

This article challenges the false opposition between public and private spheres that is often imposed upon our historical understanding in the Old Regime in France. An analysis of the work of Jürgen Habermas, Reinhart Koselleck, Philippe Ariès, and Roger Chartier shows that the "authentic public sphere" articulated by Habermas was constructed in the private realm, and the "new culture" of private life identified by Ariès was constitutive of Habermas's new public sphere. Institutions of sociability were the common (...) ground upon which public and private met in the unstable world of eighteenth-century France. Having superimposed the "maps" of public and private spheres drawn by Habermas and Ariès upon one another, the article then goes on to examine recent studies by Joan Landes and Roger Chartier to show the implications of drawing or avoiding the false opposition between public and private spheres for our understanding of the political culture of the Old Regime and Revolution. (shrink)

Men have been talking of death from time immemorial - sometimes sublimely in prose and poetry, in painting and sculpture and in music - till silence seemed to fall in the recent past. Now men are again talking about death - interminably but colloquially. They talk on television, on the radio, in books and in pamphlets. Dr Kenneth Boyd therefore finds it entirely timely to offer this historical sketch of attitudes to death. The earlier part of his paper covers fairly (...) familiar ground but his final and longest section on the work of a social historian, Philippe Ariès, may be new to many. Ariès is reinterpreting the long history of attitudes to death in a form which may well interest those who today are concerned with helping modern man to accept his own death - death which still, for most people, is the death of another, not of oneself. (shrink)

The "history of mentalities" considers the attitudes of ordinary people to everyday life. The approach is closely identified with the work of the Annales school. However, whereas the Annales historians refer to the material factors which condition human life, historians investigating mentalities examine psychological underpinnings. Historians who first developed guidelines for the history of mentalities were Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, who were both concerned with collective systems of belief. Later, Philippe Ariès and Norbert Elias identified and developed (...) theories on early childhood. Finally, Michel Foucault considered the psychology of social deviants and nonconformists. This mode of interpretation provides a means of examining those aspects of life which the linear approach cannot address, such as the pressure of conformity, the sense of accelerating time, and the preoccupation with self. (shrink)

Fustel de Coulanges' thesis that ancient society was founded upon the cult of ancestral tombs has had, for a thoroughly self-contradictory argument, a remarkably successful career. Neither Fustel himself nor the many subsequent scholars who have quoted his views with approval faced clearly the difficulty of deriving a social structure dominated by corporate descent groups from the veneration of tombs placed in individually owned landed property. On the whole, historians have tended to play down Fustel's insistence on the relation between (...) ancestor-cult and property and to exaggerate the role of the corporate kin group. This tendency, which assimilates Fustel to Sir Henry Maine and other lawyers interested in the reconstruction of Indo-European institutions has in my view considerably impeded understanding of the role of kinship in early Greek society; it also obscures one of the most individual aspects of Fustel's work which, thanks to the researches of Philippe Ariès on the development of the modern tomb-cult in the nineteenth century, can now be placed in its historical context. (shrink)

This article explores Gerardus van der Leeuw’s view of phenomenology of religion. The phenomenological method he defended is basically a hermeneutical approach in which an observer relates personally and even existentially to the “phenomena” (s)he studies in order to determine their essence (Wesensschau). In his anthropology (that reflects on the basic structure of human beings) a similar way of relating to the world is discussed: the “primitive mentality” that is characterized by the “need to participate” (besoin de participation). Both phenomenology (...) and mentalité primitive imply a critique of modern scholarship. This fundamental criticism of the prevailing (historical) approach in the humanities including religious studies explains the growing distance between van der Leeuw and the majority of scholars of religion in the decades after his death in 1950. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.3 (2000) 90-104 [Access article in PDF] After Death Jonathan Strauss According to Philippe Ariès, the nineteenth century was a turning point in the history of death. On the one hand there emerged a new sense of the irreplaceability of individual people, of the finality of death and the immeasurable preciousness of a single life. On the other hand death, that which followed one's demise, became (...) conceptually more austere. For the first time since antiquity, perhaps ever, the belief that death is pure negativity or nothingness asserted itself with enough success to become a generally accepted cultural attitude. 1 This image of sheer nonexistence, this death stripped down to its ontological minimum, is the most extreme form of mortality that has arisen in the history of the West, the hardest perhaps to take, the most naked. In ways that could not have occurred before, these two developments in the history of death have worked with and against each other to create a new understanding of subjectivity, a set of theorizations about human individuality that, for all their diversity of detail, are bound together by a certain historical determinacy. Hegel's views on the relation between mortality and subjectivity, for instance, like Heidegger's or Blanchot's, have no precedent, but they do have endless repercussions. Whatever their causes, the newness and the effectiveness of these theories indicate that during the nineteenth century a unique cultural formation arose in relation to mortality. The moment still has not passed, since the basic elements of the new death continue to operate on contemporary imaginations and theorizations. What follows is an attempt to draw the portrait of the death that emerged for the first time in the nineteenth century: to critically and analytically examine formulations of the relation between death and identity in order to determine the value of absolute mortality as an individualizing principle. Often these formulations are most clearly articulated by post-nineteenth-century thinkers, but they are the products, and indeed the expressions, of that historical transformation that occurred sometime after the Revolution. When we read these texts and arguments, we are asking not merely whether they are valid as arguments, but about the value of the general attitude they reflect—the value not only of a specific kind of death, but of a kind of subjectivity that is unique to the last two hundred years. And since that subjectivity is probably the most significant product of those centuries, the most pervasive and the most intimately affecting, we are also, intentionally or not, asking about the value of a whole period.To read this relation between mortality and subjectivity, we must come to some understanding about the terms at issue, especially what death is or is not when considered in its most extreme form as simple nothingness. It may seem odd that this is an issue at all, but nonexistence has proven a difficult concept to integrate into theorizations [End Page 90] of human life. The first question to raise in this context is whether death can be considered a state, a divisive proposition on which much hangs. In the introduction to a recent collection of essays on metaphysics and death, John Martin Fischer baldly asserted that "being dead is a condition or a state" [4]. The philosopher Paul Edwards, however, has pointed to some of the "absurdities," as he puts it, of considering death as an ontological condition. To imagine death as a state is, he argues, to attribute to it some sort of being, but death, understood as the permanent loss of consciousness and experience, has no being and is simply absence. To imagine otherwise leads to attempts (made by such existentialist philosophers as Ferrater Mora [175-203] and Tillich) to understand death "from the inside"—that is, to imagine what it would be like to experience the absence of experience. 2 Edwards's approach does not deny the possibility or value of investigations into the psychological significance of that absolute privation (that is, the meaning of death for the living), but it does preclude any understanding of death as such. This is, undoubtedly, part of the... (shrink)

L'entrée des enfants médiévaux dans la collection de « La Vie Quotidienne » vaut reconnaissance. Ce petit ouvrage clot la polémique née il y a trente ans, quand Philippe Ariès avait avançé l'idée que la rareté des sources concernant l'enfance médiévale révélait un désintérêt des gens de cette époque pour leurs enfants. L'ouvrage que nous proposent ces deux spécialistes de l'enfance médiévale, Danièle Alexandre-Bidon et Didier Lett, offre une synthèse des connaissance acquises sur les...

AIDS has contributed to changes in how our society constructs its image of death. In the early 1980s Philippe Ariès argued that death and the symbols surrounding it had been “relegated to the secret, private space of the home or the hospital.” With the coming of AIDS, death demands its place in the public mind - and eye. Many artists have devoted their talents to making AIDS visible. In doing so, they have resurrected many questions about sexuality and (...) mortality. This paper discusses several examples of current AIDS art and places them in a wider cultural and historical context. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.3 (2000) 3-11 [Access article in PDF] Preface The State of Death Jonathan Strauss In reality, there is perhaps a greater distance between old age and youth than there is between decrepitude and death, for here one must not consider death to be something absolute.... Death is not armed with a blade, nothing violent accompanies it, life ends by imperceptible nuances.... (D. J.)We dare... to assert, on the (...) basis of a knowledge of the structure and properties of the human body and a large number of observations, that death can be cured. (m.) —Diderot and d'Alembert, Encyclopédie1But if Man is Action, and if Action is Negativity "appearing" as Death, Man, in his human or speaking existence, is only a more or less deferred death, and one that is conscious of itself.Therefore: to recognize Discourse philosophically, or to recognize Man as one who speaks, is to accept unambiguously the fact of death and to describe... its significance and reach. Now, this is precisely what philosophers before Hegel omitted to do. —Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de HegelDeath changed in the nineteenth century. The shift probably began during the Enlightenment, when, as Philippe Ariès has argued, people learned for the first time to fear their mortality—not just the terrors and uncertainties of their demise or the anguish over an eventual punishment for their sins, but extinction itself [1: 112-14, 125]. Within the space of a few decades, death became a sheer and unredeemable absence, an unconsolable loss, and a confrontation with pure negativity. During those years, death was transformed from a nuance between different states to an absolute. It became, in itself, infinite and sublime, a nothingness whose discovery, like that of the zero, unleashed unknown and limitless powers. These now had to be grappled with, to be grasped theoretically as well as practically, in both the intimacy of private fears and the communality of public legislation. And once death was recognized as an absolute it could be put to use as one, for both the individual and the social collective.Hegel, as Kojève taught, was the first to harness the new forces of mortality within an intellectual mechanism worthy of their scope. "Death," he wrote in the preface to the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, "... is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength" [19]. This power to grasp one's demise, to confront it and "tarry" with it, was what he called the Subject—at once the isolated unit of humanity confronted by the limits of its mortality and the key to the social orders that [End Page 3] depend on it, in a pragmatic sense. As justice and enfranchisement increasingly rely on the responsibility of single subjects, so does death rise in importance as the final determiner of socially answerable individuality. In this setting, where mortality is the limit of the subject, society becomes a state of death, a collective grounded in the transcendental absolute of a nothingness that intervenes regularly and practically within the events of life.In such a state, executions are not merely exercises of authority or purgings of unassimilable elements from the social body; they are also, and most significantly, spectacles of the transcendental grounds of the social itself. Here, death is democratic not merely because it is the universal leveler, not simply because it imposes a one hundred percent experience tax on all brackets of the population, but because it produces the uniform units of untransferable humanity, individuals, who at once suffer the obligation to conform to the state and enjoy the, at least theoretical, enfranchisement to transform it. Throughout our days, in the most insignificant details, we feel this mortal isolation organizing our legal relation to our social context, and in each case my death to come draws a line around me, saying: this is you. My metro pass and airline tickets will be valid, my response to the jury duty summons required, and my vote counted, unless I die. It does not matter that I have changed lovers, or... (shrink)

Crises have become a new normality. This normality is turned into grounds for the politics of fear. The hegemonic principle of the politics of fear is security. This politics, which invents objects of fear, is intimately linked to the nationalist identity politics shaped by a particular nationalist essence. Racism is an elemental part of the nationalist identity politics. In the text, racism is considered in relation to, on the one hand, fear and anxiety and, on the other hand, the imaginary (...) and symbolic orders and the structure of fantasy. This analysis shows how xenophobic images, nationalist signifiers and racist fantasies create the vicious circles of fear and hate that gives justification for the nationalist identity politics that raises security as the hegemonic organizing principle. To counter the nationalist identity politics, the nationalist and racist fantasy must be traversed. Therefore, an anti-racist politics cannot be based on any pre-given identity. It takes place only as emancipatory events that confront the racists and nationalist fantasy. (shrink)

行動経済学によって、さまざまに系統的な不合理さが見えてきた。手をかけることが高評価をもたらすIKEA効果、やる気をそいでいる高額ボーナス、自分で思いついた(と思わせられた)意見は好ましい、雑用は一気に 片づけるほうが楽...。行動経済学研究の第一人者が、わたしたちがなぜ、どのように不合理な行動をしてしまうのかをユニークな実験で紹介。わかりやすい数々の実例で経済の真の姿を解明し、よりよい決断へとつなげ る話題作。.

Cette thèse en impose par la masse de travail qu'elle représente, mais plus encore par les questions qu'elle pose à l'histoire des femmes et par l'éclairage nouveau qu'elle apporte sur les milieux populaires. La vie privée a reçu droit de cité en histoire grâce à la haute approbation de Philippe Ariès et de Georges Duby (ainsi que de leurs nombreux collaborateurs). Le concept de vie privée reste pourtant difficile à cerner. La première audace d'Anne Marie Sohn consiste à (...) donner une dé.. (shrink)

In these clear and concise yet comprehensive essays, the author examines over 100 contemporary issues highlighting their timely relevance from the perspective of halacha - Jewish law. Never shy of controversy and flavored with humor - readers are sure to enjoy this fresh outlook on our daily tasks. With over 1000 references to a variety of classical Jewish texts, Dalet Amot is appropriate for laymen and scholars alike and facilitates further exploration of the issues in their original sources.

_Violence: Probing the Boundaries around the World_ includes implicit and explicit contributions to the conceptualisation of violent processes across the world, the circumstances that enable them to exist and opens ways to think valuable interventions.

From 22-25 May, 1999, the University of Groningen hosted an international conference on 'The Book of Nature. Continuity and change in European and American attitudes towards the natural world'. From Antiquity down to our own time, theologians, philosophers and scientists have often compared nature to a book, which might, under the right circumstances, be read and interpreted in order to come closer to the 'Author' of nature, God. The 'reading' of this book was not regarded as mere idle curiosity, but (...) it was seen as leading to a deeper understanding of God's wisdom and power, and it culturally legitimated and promoted a positive attitude towards nature and its study. A selection of the papers which were delivered at the conference has been edited in two volumes. The first deals with the perception of the Book of Nature in Antiquity and the Middle Ages; the second volume is devoted to the history of the concept in early modern and modern history. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to shed some light on our current perception of death and our attitude towards it, focusing especially on the way in which death is approached in the practice and theory of medicine and health care. Instead of concentrating on details of particular questions, such as euthanasia, assisted suicide or withholding or withdrawing medical treatment, I will try to analyse our modern image of death from a wider perspective. Inspired by the view of Callahan , (...) I believe that we need to reflect on death itself, trying to find meaning in it, if indeed there is meaning to be found at all.It is my impression that, from a historical point of view, the way we deal with death in our modern society is quite new and unprecedented. In the first place, technological developments in modern medicine have provided us with the means to keep seriously ill individuals alive and to postpone death. In addition, the influence of what I would call “Western activism” has not only led to the tendency to postpone death, but also to hasten it in situations where natural death is apparently too slow in coming. History shows that there have been times when people have had entirely different attitudes towards death, forgotten, yet nonetheless meaningful, attitudes from which we have much to learn.In order to reach a better understanding of the phenomenon of death in modern society, I would first like to present some ‘images of death’ from the past using the framework of the French historian Philippe Ariès who has been among the best-known authors on this subject during the last two or three decades. Notwithstanding the fact that Ariès’ approach raises important methodological and historiographical questions , his analysis, in itself, provides a great deal of interesting material. After a presentation of Ariès’ view and a brief comment on his methodological approach, I will proceed to the problem of definitions of death and finally conclude with some comments concerning our modern image of death. (shrink)

This article explores Gerardus van der Leeuw’s view of phenomenology of religion. The phenomenological method he defended is basically a hermeneutical approach in which an observer relates personally and even existentially to the “phenomena” (s)he studies in order to determine their essence (Wesensschau). In his anthropology (that reflects on the basic structure of human beings) a similar way of relating to the world is discussed: the “primitive mentality” that is characterized by the “need to participate” (besoin de participation). Both phenomenology (...) and mentalité primitive imply a critique of modern scholarship. This fundamental criticism of the prevailing (historical) approach in the humanities including religious studies explains the growing distance between van der Leeuw and the majority of scholars of religion in the decades after his death in 1950. (shrink)

A saga “Campo Geral”, a primeira de Corpo de Baile (2016), fornece-nos relatos de atitudes diante da morte. Este trabalho versará especificamente sobre um ponto de vista recorrente na obra de Guimarães Rosa: o infantil. Para tanto, Miguilim e Dito, as crianças-poetas, nos proporcionarão ensinamentos que transcendem as dicotomias dos homens velhos, ilustrando o potencial poético da experiência da morte, seja a própria ou de outrem. Recorreremos aos estudos rosianos de Melo e Souza (2008) e a diversos pensadores da morte, (...) como Michel de Montaigne (2016) e Philippe Ariès (2017), além de pensadores da vida, como Miguel de Unamuno (2013), para analisar a experiência da morte não mais como um nefasto acontecimento, mas como parte essencial da vida que não cessa de brotar.Palavras-chave: Morte. Poesia. Infância. Guimarães Rosa. (shrink)

Zum 65. Geburtstag des Kolner und Brusseler Agyptologie-Professors Philippe Derchain gratulierten ihm seine Freunde Kollegen und Schuler mit 33 Beitragen aus dem Gebiet der Religions- und Geistesgeschichte des Alten Agyptens: H. Altenmuller, J. Baines, E. Blumenthal, W. Boochs, M. Broze, Fr. de Cenival, W. Decker, M. Derchain-Urtel, E. Doetsch-Amberger, E. Graefe, J.Gw. Griffiths, M. Heerma van Oss, W. Helck, M. Herb, J.M. Kruchten, D. Kurth, Fr. Labrique, A. Loprieno, M. Malaise, D. Meeks, H. De Meulenaere, J. Quaegebeur, B. Radomska, (...) U. Rossler-Kohler, H.J. Thissen, CL. Traunecker, U. Verhoeven, P. Vernus, M. Weber, W. Westendorf, W. Wettengel, E. Winter, J. Zandree (+). Ein Schriftenverzeichnis Philippe Derchains und diverse Indices beschliessen den Band. (shrink)

The Vatican recently published directives regarding “beginning of life” issues that explain the Catholic Church's position regarding new technologies in this area. We think that it is important to develop a response that presents the traditional Orthodox Jewish position on these same issues in order to present an alternative, parallel system. There are many points of commonality between the Vatican document and traditional Jewish thought as well as several important issues where there is a divergence of opinion. The latter include (...) the status of the zygote as produced during in vitro fertilization, the acceptable of procreation in a method other than through the conjugal act, and the permissibility of deriving benefit from the products of an illicit act. These points of agreement and disagreement are discussed in detail in this article. (shrink)

This article calls into question the charge that frequentist testing is susceptible to the base-rate fallacy. It is argued that the apparent similarity between examples like the Harvard Medical School test and frequentist testing is highly misleading. A closer scrutiny reveals that such examples have none of the basic features of a proper frequentist test, such as legitimate data, hypotheses, test statistics, and sampling distributions. Indeed, the relevant error probabilities are replaced with the false positive/negative rates that constitute deductive calculations (...) based on known probabilities among events. As a result, the ampliative dimension of frequentist induction—learning from data about the underlying data-generating mechanism—is missing. *Received August 2009; revised January 2010. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Economics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

This volume offers a critical analysis of one the most ambitious editorial projects of late Victorian Britain: the edition of the fifty substantial volumes of the Sacred Books of the East. The series was edited and conceptualized by Friedrich Max Müller, a world-famous German-born philologist, orientalist, and religious scholar. Müller and his influential Oxford colleagues secured financial support from the India Office of the British Empire and from Oxford University Press. Arie L. Molendijk documents how the series has become a (...) landmark in the development of the humanities-especially the study of religion and language-in the second half of the nineteenth century. The edition also contributed significantly to the Western perception of the 'religious' or even 'mystic' East, which was textually represented in English translations. The series was a token of the rise of 'big science' and textualized the East, by selecting their 'sacred books' and bringing them under the power of western scholarship. (shrink)

This paper first develops a theoretically motivated view of narrative as a special form of inferential, cooperative human communication, of the role that the past tense plays in the intersubjective coordination of narrators and readers, viz. that of ‘curtailing’ the immediate argumentative applicability of the represented situation, and of its relation to viewpoint management. In three case studies, it is subsequently shown how this helps to elucidate certain effects of present and past tense alternations in stories. While these effects are (...) multi-faceted and highly text-specific, there is a common denominator of the use of the past tense in the dimension of narrator-reader communication in the narratives. The analysis supports an independently motivated conception of intersubjectivity that assigns a special status to ‘coordination with other minds’, apart from senders and addressees. (shrink)

Kaplan claims in Demonstratives that no operator may manipulate the context of evaluation of natural language indexicals. We show that this is not so. In fact, attitude reports always manipulate a context parameter (or, rather, a context variable). This is shown by (i) the existence of De Se readings of attitude reports in English (which Kaplan has no account for), and (ii) the existence of a variety of indexicals across languages whose point of evaluation can be shifted, but only in (...) attitude reports. We develop an alternative account within an extensional framework with overt quantification over times, worlds and contexts. Various typological facts are discussed, esp. the distinction between English, Amharic and Ewe pronouns, and that between English and Russian tenses. (shrink)

We define in precise terms the basic properties that an ‘ideal propositional paraconsistent logic’ is expected to have, and investigate the relations between them. This leads to a precise characterization of ideal propositional paraconsistent logics. We show that every three-valued paraconsistent logic which is contained in classical logic, and has a proper implication connective, is ideal. Then we show that for every n > 2 there exists an extensive family of ideal n -valued logics, each one of which is not (...) equivalent to any k -valued logic with k < n. (shrink)

This essay examines Isaiah Berlin's ambivalent relationship with the ideas and practices of Jewish nationalism and the ways in which this ambivalence shaped some of the key premises of his political thought. Drawing upon extensive archival research in his unpublished letters from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, this essay reconstructs Berlin's attempt to reconcile himself with the national idea. This attempt forced him to enrich his liberalism, and pushed him to develop and adopt the Jewish normalization discourse. In the (...) course of those intra-Jewish debates Berlin also began to conceptualize freedom as an opportunity concept, an idea that would later become central both in Berlin's famous negative concept of freedom and in his pluralism. Adopting a dual perspective, which considers Berlin as both a British liberal and a Russian-Jewish émigré intellectual, I therefore offer to see the Jewish Zionist writings as complementary rather than secondary to Berlin's enterprise. (shrink)