scholarly journals Sto tváří, sto příběhů

Author(s):  
Lukáš Fasora ◽  
Jan Čermin ◽  
Jana Čerminová ◽  
Jiří Hanuš ◽  
Michaela Máliková

The book commemorating the centenary of the establishment of the Faculty of Arts is also a contribution to the anniversary of the whole Masaryk University. Its aim is to walk through the history of the faculty by means of a biographical method, i.e., using short biographies that introduce representative, prominent or interesting personalities whose fates and work were connected with the faculty. There was certainly no lack of biographical views in the research of the faculty history, still, such a complex set of biograms has not been collected so far. And the publication offers much more: the authors use a large set of biographical data to interpret the history of the faculty from the perspective of alternating academic generations and contemplate the formative generation experience as well as the phenomena that affected the lives of academics and students over the past 100 years. These include, as a matter of fact, both positive and negative phenomena, therefore, the publication is not just an overview of deserving personalities, respected scientists and charismatic teachers, but it also openly discusses the lives of controversial scholars. Thus, the collection of biograms provides a credible testimony to the one-hundred-year work of the faculty, continually blending studies, science and politics.

Author(s):  
Stefan Bauer

How was the history of post-classical Rome and of the Church written in the Catholic Reformation? Historical texts composed in Rome at this time have been considered secondary to the city’s significance for the history of art. The Invention of Papal History corrects this distorting emphasis and shows how history-writing became part of a comprehensive formation of the image and self-perception of the papacy. By presenting and fully contextualizing the path-breaking works of the Augustinian historian Onofrio Panvinio (1530–68), this book shows what type of historical research was possible in the late Renaissance and the Catholic Reformation. Historiography in this period by no means consisted entirely of commissioned works written for patrons; rather, a creative interplay existed between, on the one hand, the endeavours of authors to explore the past and, on the other hand, the constraints of patronage and ideology placed on them. This book sheds new light on the changing priorities, mentalities, and cultural standards that flourished in the transition from the Renaissance to the Catholic Reformation.


PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”


Think ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (60) ◽  
pp. 5-20
Author(s):  
Anna Marmodoro

The debate over whether and how philosophers of today may usefully engage with philosophers of the past is nearly as old as the history of philosophy itself. Does the study of the history of philosophy train or corrupt the budding philosopher's mind? Why study the history of philosophy? And, how to study the history of philosophy? I discuss some mainstream approaches to the study of the history of philosophy (with special focus on ancient philosophy), before explicating the one I adopt and commend.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (15) ◽  
pp. 67-107
Author(s):  
Ines R. Artola

The aim of the present article is the analysis of Concerto for harpsichord and five instruments by Manuel de Falla – a piece which was dedicated by the composer to Wanda Landowska, an outstanding Polish harpsichord player. The piece was meant to commemorate the friendship these two artists shared as well as their collaboration. Written in the period of 1923-1926, the Concerto was the first composition in the history of 20th century music where harpsichord was the soloist instrument. The first element of the article is the context in which the piece was written. We shall look into the musical influences that shaped its form. On the one hand, it was the music of the past: from Cancionero Felipe Pedrell through mainly Bach’s polyphony to works by Scarlatti which preceded the Classicism (this influence is particularly noticeable in the third movement of the Concerto). On the other hand, it was music from the time of de Falla: first of all – Neo-Classicism and works by Stravinsky. The author refers to historical sources – critics’ reviews, testimonies of de Falla’s contemporaries and, obviously, his own remarks as to the interpretation of the piece. Next, Inés R. Artola analyses the score in the strict sense of the word “analysis”. In this part of the article, she quotes specific fragments of the composition, which reflect both traditional musical means (counterpoint, canon, Scarlatti-style sonata form, influence of old popular music) and the avant-garde ones (polytonality, orchestration, elements of neo-classical harmony).


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yang Xu ◽  
Barbara Claire Malt ◽  
Mahesh Srinivasan

One way that languages are able to communicate a potentially infinite set of ideas through a finite lexicon is by compressing emerging meanings into words, such that over time, individual words come to express multiple, related senses of meaning. We propose that overarching communicative and cognitive pressures have created systematic directionality in how new metaphorical senses have developed from existing word senses over the history of English. Given a large set of pairs of semantic domains, we used computational models to test which domains have been more commonly the starting points (source domains) and which the ending points (target domains) of metaphorical mappings over the past millennium. We found that a compact set of variables, including externality, embodiment, and valence, explain directionality in the majority of about 5000 metaphorical mappings recorded over the past 1100 years. These results provide the first large-scale historical evidence that metaphorical mapping is systematic, and driven by measurable communicative and cognitive principles.


2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vilmos Benczik

Language emerges and changes primarily through communication; therefore communication technologies play a key role in the history of language change. The most powerful communication technology from this point of view is phonetic writing, which has a double effect on language: on the one hand it impoverishes suprasegmental linguistic resources; on the other hand it evokes in language a profound and sophisticated semantic precision, and also syntactic complexity. The huge progress in abstract human thought that has taken place over the past three or four centuries has come about on the basis of these linguistic changes. Today, when writing seems to be losing its earlier hegemony over communication, the question arises as to whether this will lead to the erosion of human language, and also of human thought.


1966 ◽  
Vol 98 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. R. Allchin

To the outside observer the history of Hindu sectarianism often appears as a disorganized tangle, lacking clarity and precision. The whole process is made if anything more complex by the ill-defined relationship of sect and non-sect. As Renou remarks: Though no statistics are available, even for the present day, we have grounds for supposing that the most active sects were themselves only isolated groups within the great body of believers. From another point of view, however, the history is more understandable. A considerable part of sectarian activity during the past 1,500 years has been concerned with the spread and regional development of a single great devotional movement. Seen from this position, the uniformity and theological coherence of the sects, whether they be called Vaiṣṇavite, Śaivite, or by some other name, is remarkable and often overrides the no less real disparities of doctrine or detail at another level. Again, in this process regional variations have arisen in no small measure as a result of the popular character of the writings of particular saints. Thus, for example, Basava or Purandara Dāsa hold pride of place in the Karnāṭka, the one Vīra Śaiva, the other Vaiṣṇava; in Mahārāṣṇra devotion has in no small part been moulded by the thought of Jāân Dev or Tukā Rām; in the Pañjāb by Nānak; and in the Hindī region by Kabīr Dās, Tulsī Dās, and Sūr Dās. Throughout north India the influences which lay behind the movement were largely, but by no means exclusively, Vaiṣṇavite; yet other streams contributed, Śaivite, Buddhist, Tāntrika, Yogī, etc.


Dialogue ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-66
Author(s):  
Thomas Mathien

Some writers about the history of philosophy in Canada have wondered why it should be studied. That is a worthy question, but it is not the one I want to discuss here. I am going to assume there are good reasons for doing so because I want to consider some general features of the subject of such studies and to determine what has to be done to establish certain descriptive claims about it. I will also point out some concerns I have about the proper explanation of certain interesting features of Canadian philosophic activity, and I will present a brief evaluation of one major study. I will do this with the aid of a contention that the study of the history of an intellectual discipline is a little like an evolutionary study of a biological species, but I will close by pointing out one reason for doing history which goes beyond description, and even explanation, of the past.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan M Kenyon

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in the Blue Nile town of Sennar, supported by archival and historical documentation, this article explores the history of Zar spirit possession in Sudan, and the light this throws on the interplay of religions over the past 150 years. Life history data supports the argument that contemporary Zar is grounded in forms and rituals derived from the ranks of the ninteenth-century Ottoman army, and these remain the basis of ritual events, even as they accommodate ongoing changes in this part of Africa. Many of these changes are linked to the dynamic interplay of Zar with forms of Islam, on the one hand, and Christianity, on the other. In the former colonial periods, political power resided with the British, and Khawaja (European) Christian Zar spirits are remembered as far more important. Today that authority in Zar has shifted to spirits of foreign Muslims and local holy men, on the one hand, and to subaltern Blacks, on the other. These speak to concerns of new generations of adepts even as changes in the larger political and religious landscapes continue to transform the context of Zar.


2012 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Giardina ◽  
Antonio G. Spagnolo

L’articolo delinea i momenti salienti nella storia della chirurgia, quali la scoperta dell’anestesia, dell’asepsi e antisepsi che ne hanno consentito l’ascesa dopo secoli di oscurità. Il desiderio di conoscenza appagato da tali scoperte si è spesso accompagnato a dilemmi etici da un lato e a resistenze ideologiche, da parte della comunità scientifica (spesso ostile alla genesi del nuovo nella medicina) dall’altro. È questo uno dei più forti ostacoli che i grandi del passato, coloro che hanno avuto il coraggio di andare controcorrente (rompendo i paradigmi esistenti), hanno dovuto superare. Questi uomini rappresentano uno stimolo per ricondurre il sapere scientifico ad un confronto attivo con l’etica al fine di sanare una dicotomia che ha radici antiche. L’antico, dunque, non è semplicemente passato ma rivive attraverso la narrazione storica di vite esemplari di medici. ---------- This article traces salient points in the history of surgery, such as the discovery of anesthesia, asepsis and antisepsis, which permitted surgery’s ascendancy after centuries of unimportance. Encouraged by such breakthroughs, the yearning to learn was often accompanied by ethical dilemmas on the one hand and on the other by ideological resistance on the part of the scientific community, which was often hostile to new medical findings. This was one of the greatest obstacles of the past for the distinguished individuals who had the courage to go against the tide, to break with existing paradigms, to overcome opposition to innovation. These men functioned as a stimulus to bring scientific knowledge head to head with ethics with the goal of healing ancient irreconcilable differences. The past is not simply the past; it lives on through the historical narrative of exemplary lives of certain physicians.


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