The critic and the visionary

1988 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-312
Author(s):  
F. Young
Keyword(s):  
Ivory Tower ◽  
Present Climate ◽  
Good Education ◽  
The Past ◽  
Inaugural Lecture ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

The first Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology was H. G. Wood. The subject of his Inaugural Lecture given in 1940 was The function of a Department of Theology in a modern University. Appropriately enough he took up the views of John Henry, Cardinal Newman, the one Birmingham theologian whose work is on the way to becoming classic. In the present climate, Newman's book The Idea of a University is worth looking at again. As he showed over a hundred years ago, purely utilitarian values cannot produce good education. Nor can a general acquaintance with a bit of everything. Specialisation and in-depth study is the only way to learn how to think rather than pick up information jackdaw-like. Scholarly grappling with the great minds of the past, the so-called ‘irrelevant’ and ‘ivory-tower’ occupation of those who inhabit an Arts Faculty, is essential for the formation of minds. ‘To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression’ – this Newman regarded as ‘an object as intelligible as the cultivation of virtue’.1 Society needs minds and not just technicians, and in an institution which is concerned with truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, theology is indispensable to the universality which a University should embrace.

Al-Rasm al-ʿUthmānī: Towards Correct Pronunciation and the Preclusion of Ambiguity

2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-171
Author(s):  
Nāṣir Al-Dīn Abū Khaḍīr
Keyword(s):  
Specific Pattern ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Different Ages ◽  
Correct Pronunciation ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind

The ʿUthmānic way of writing (al-rasm al-ʿUthmānī) is a science that specialises in the writing of Qur'anic words in accordance with a specific ‘pattern’. It follows the writing style of the Companions at the time of the third caliph, ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān, and was attributed to ʿUthmān on the basis that he was the one who ordered the collection and copying of the Qur'an into the actual muṣḥaf. This article aims to expound on the two fundamental functions of al-rasm al-ʿUthmānī: that of paying regard to the ‘correct’ pronunciation of the words in the muṣḥaf, and the pursuit of the preclusion of ambiguity which may arise in the mind of the reader and his auditor. There is a further practical aim for this study: to show the connection between modern orthography and the ʿUthmānic rasm in order that we, nowadays, are thereby able to overcome the problems faced by calligraphers and writers of the past in their different ages and cultures.

TARP DVIEJŲ KOLONŲ: XVIII A. PABAIGOS – XIX A. PRADŽIOS VILNIAUS MASONŲ KASDIENYBĖ SIMBOLIKOJE

2018 ◽  
pp. 144-163
Author(s):  
Daiva Milinkevičiūtė
Keyword(s):  
Daily Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Daily Routine ◽  
The Past ◽  
Secular World ◽  
National Characteristics ◽  
Conservative Christian ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Craft Guilds

The Age of Enlightenment is defined as the period when the universal ideas of progress, deism, humanism, naturalism and others were materialized and became a golden age for freemasons. It is wrong to assume that old and conservative Christian ideas were rejected. Conversely, freemasons put them into new general shapes and expressed them with the help of symbols in their daily routine. Symbols of freemasons had close ties with the past and gave them, on the one hand, a visible instrument, such as rituals and ideas to sense the transcendental, and on the other, intense gnostic aspirations. Freemasons put in a great amount of effort to improve themselves and to create their identity with the help of myths and symbols. It traces its origins to the biblical builders of King Solomon’s Temple, the posterity of the Templar Knights, and associations of the medieval craft guilds, which were also symbolical and became their link not only to each other but also to the secular world. In this work we analysed codified masonic symbols used in their rituals. The subject of our research is the universal Masonic idea and its aspects through the symbols in the daily life of the freemasons in Vilnius. Thanks to freemasons’ signets, we could find continuity, reception, and transformation of universal masonic ideas in the Lithuanian freemasonry and national characteristics of lodges. Taking everything into account, our article shows how the universal idea of freemasonry spread among Lithuanian freemasonry, and which forms and meanings it incorporated in its symbols. The objective of this research is to find a universal Masonic idea throughout their visual and oral symbols and see its impact on the daily life of the masons in Vilnius. Keywords: Freemasonry, Bible, lodge, symbols, rituals, freemasons’ signets.

The Frontiers of Memory: What the Marathas Remembered of Vijayanagara

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 269-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUMIT GUHA
Keyword(s):  
Historical Memory ◽  
Southern India ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Tradition ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe past two decades have seen a dramatic renewal of interest in the subject of historical memory, its reproduction and transmission. But most studies have focused on the selection and construction of extant memories. This essay looks at missing memory as well. It seeks to broaden our understanding of memory by investigating the way in which historical memory significant to one historical tradition was slighted by another, even though the two overlapped both spatially and chronologically. It does this by an examination of how the memory of the Marathi-speaking peoples first neglected and then adopted the story of the Vijayanagara empire that once dominated southern India.

Radical Tense-Indexical Historicality and the De Se

KronoScope ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-27
Author(s):  
Carl Humphries
Keyword(s):  
Alternative View ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
De Se ◽  
Temporal Expressions ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Self Reference ◽  
A Current ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract “Being is said in many ways,” claimed Aristotle, initiating a discussion about existential commitment that continues today. Might there not be reasons to say something similar about “having been,” or “having happened,” where these expressions denote something’s being located in the past? Moreover, if history – construed not only as an object of inquiry (actual events, etc.) but also as a way of casting light on certain matters – is primarily concerned with “things past,” then the question just posed also seems relevant to the question of what historical understanding amounts to. While the idea that ‘being’ may mean different things in different contexts has indisputable importance, the implications of other, past-temporal expressions are elusive. In what might any differences of substantive meaning encountered there consist? One starting point for responding – the one that provides the subject matter explored here – is furnished by the question of whether or not a certain way of addressing matters relating to the past permits or precludes forms of intelligibility that could be said to be ‘radically historical.’ After arguing that the existing options for addressing this issue remain unsatisfactory, I set out an alternative view of what it could mean to endorse or reject such an idea. This involves drawing distinctions and analogies connected with notions of temporal situatedness, human practicality and historicality, which are then linked to a further contrast between two ways of understanding the referential significance of what is involved when we self-ascribe a relation to a current situation in a manner construable as implying that we take ourselves to occupy a unique, yet circumstantially defined, perspective on that situation. As regards the latter, on one reading, the specific kind of indexically referring language we use – commonly labelled “de se” – is something whose rationale is exhausted by its practical utility as a communicative tool. On the other, it is viewed as capturing something of substantive importance about how we can be thought of as standing in relation to reality. I claim that this second reading, together with the line of thinking about self-identification and self-reference it helps foreground, can shed light on what it would mean to affirm or deny the possibility of radically historical forms of intelligibility – and thus also on what it could mean to ascribe a plurality of meanings to talk concerning things being ‘in the past.’

Alessandro Gavazzi: a barnabite friar and the risorgimento (Presidential Address)

1975 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 303-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Basil Hall
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Address ◽  
Memento Mori ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Mind

Think nowHistory has many cunning passages, contrived corridorsAnd issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,Guides us by vanities. Think nowShe gives when our attention is distractedAnd what she gives, gives with such supple confusionsThat the giving famishes the craving. Gives too lateWhat’s not believed in, or if still believed,In memory only, reconsidered passion.Historians no doubt have problems enough without setting before themselves that ‘memento mori’ from Eliot, who, though he was describing an old man seeking to understand his own past, leaves nevertheless an echo in the mind disturbing to those who practise the historian’s craft. We assume a confidence which in our heart of hearts we do not always, or should not always, possess. Eliot’s words not only demonstrate the difficulty of one man understanding his own past, but also the historian’s difficulty in understanding those whom they select for questioning from among the vast multitudes of the silent dead, whose deeds, artifacts, ideas, passions, hopes and memories have died with them. We dig into the past, obtain data from archives, brush off the objects found, collect statistics, annotate, arrange, describe, establish a chronology – but do we effectively understand the dead, especially since we are affected by our own beliefs, customs and ideologies? We are, of course, all aware of this: we silently scorn the lecturer who raises these diffident hesitations. For we know our duty: we examine all that we can, we describe our findings, we annotate them, we draw conclusions, or leave our demonstrations to speak for themselves. There are reasons, as I shall hope to show, that these considerations – Eliot’s ominous words and our determination not to be disquieted by them – bear upon the subject of this paper, the almost forgotten Alessandro Gavazzi.

What is a “difficult poem”? Towards a definition

2008 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Iris Yaron
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Text Comprehension ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Communicative Acts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Poetic Texts ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

AbstractModern poetry developed and transformed difficulty into a prominent aesthetic norm of poetry. The abundance of difficult poetic texts necessitates a study of the corpus. After differentiating between the way difficulty is perceived in poetry and in other communicative acts, I present the approach that I have adopted for the purpose of studying difficult poetry. In contrast to other studies which have examined difficulty from the author's perspective and, as a consequence, described factors that cause textual difficulty, I propose to examine the subject from the reader's point of view. The reader, after all, is the one who feels or does not feel the difficulty. The concept ‘difficult poem’ is necessarily interdisciplinary and the question of what is “difficult” involves cognitive psychology and its models of text comprehension. Following a discussion of these domains, I present the “definition” that I propose for the ‘difficult poem’.

scholarly journals Editorial: The impact of technology on certain historiographic issues

Artnodes ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Rodriguez Granell
Keyword(s):  
International Society ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
Media Archaeology ◽  
Great Pleasure ◽  
The Past ◽  
Common Thread ◽  
The One ◽  
Impact Of Technology ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

It gives us great pleasure to present the 23rd issue of the magazine as a heterogeneous collection that brings together selected articles submitted in response to three different calls for contributions. On the one hand, we bring the volume focusing on media archaeology to a close with this second series of texts. The section on Digital Humanities also comprises an interesting series of contributions related to the 3rd Congress of the International Society of Hispanic Digital Humanities. The last section of this issue brings together another set of articles submitted in response to the magazine’s regular call for contributions, including different perspectives on issues that fall within the magazine’s scope of interest. All the sections and research contained here are unavoidably disparate from each other, yet, when taken as a whole, the reader will realise that there is a common thread throughout this issue, focusing on the impact of certain technologies have had on the way we view the past. The historical scope of technologies does not only operate in a single direction, but rather throughout time in its entirety.

Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi al-Din (1164–1240)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neal Robinson
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Inner Experience ◽  
Divine Essence ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Creation ◽  
One And Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Southeast Spain ◽  
The Way

Ibn al-‘Arabi was a mystic who drew on the writings of Sufis, Islamic theologians and philosophers in order to elaborate a complex theosophical system akin to that of Plotinus. He was born in Murcia (in southeast Spain) in AH 560/ad 1164, and died in Damascus in AH 638/ad 1240. Of several hundred works attributed to him the most famous are al-Futuhat al-makkiyya (The Meccan Illuminations) and Fusus al-hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom). The Futuhat is an encyclopedic discussion of Islamic lore viewed from the perspective of the stages of the mystic path. It exists in two editions, both completed in Damascus – one in AH 629/ad 1231 and the other in AH 636/ad 1238 – but the work was conceived in Mecca many years earlier, in the course of a vision which Ibn al-‘Arabi experienced near the Kaaba, the cube-shaped House of God which Muslims visit on pilgrimage. Because of its length, this work has been relatively neglected. The Fusus, which is much shorter, comprises twenty-seven chapters named after prophets who epitomize different spiritual types. Ibn al-‘Arabi claimed that he received it directly from Muhammad, who appeared to him in Damascus in AH 627/ad 1229. It has been the subject of over forty commentaries. Although Ibn al-‘Arabi was primarily a mystic who believed that he possessed superior divinely-bestowed knowledge, his work is of interest to the philosopher because of the way in which he used philosophical terminology in an attempt to explain his inner experience. He held that whereas the divine Essence is absolutely unknowable, the cosmos as a whole is the locus of manifestation of all God’s attributes. Moreover, since these attributes require the creation for their expression, the One is continually driven to transform itself into Many. The goal of spiritual realization is therefore to penetrate beyond the exterior multiplicity of phenomena to a consciousness of what subsequent writers have termed the ‘unity of existence’. This entails the abolition of the ego or ‘passing away from self’ (fana’) in which one becomes aware of absolute unity, followed by ‘perpetuation’ (baqa’) in which one sees the world as at once One and Many, and one is able to see God in the creature and the creature in God.

scholarly journals The pathos formulae and their survival (ENG/ESP)

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (12) ◽  
pp. 7-21
Author(s):  
Victoria Cirlot
Keyword(s):  
Photographic Image ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Aby Warburg ◽  
The Way

This article attempts to set out and understand what art historian Aby Warburg called Pathosformel (pathos formulae), a key concept in his studies, though he never expressly offered a definition, nor explained what his understanding of it was. The emergence of the concept is traced in his work, deciphering its meaning and its implications for the analysis of images, also from the most significant and recent bibliography on the subject. Finally, the Pathosformel concept is applied to a contemporary photographic image which enables us to better understand its effect in the way it is received by its viewers, thus establishing a dialogue between the iconographic tradition of the past and the present.

The Kingdoms in Illyria Circa 400–167 B.C.

1966 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 239-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. G. L. Hammond
Keyword(s):  
Political Organization ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Almost All

The positions and the extent of these kingdoms have been disputed in the past, especially by Droysen, Zippel, Meyer, and Beloch, and they are the subject now of an interesting and well-documented paper by F. Papazoglou, entitled ‘Les origines et la destinée de l'état Illyrien: Illyrii proprie dicti’. His conclusions are that there was a specific political ‘Organization’ called ʾΙλλυριοί that almost all the known kings of Illyria—he gives fifteen of them between 400 and 167 B.C.—were rulers of this organization; and that this organization was not the one and only tribal organization known by this specific name, the ‘Illyrii proprie dicti’ of Pliny, HN iii. 144 and P. Mela ii. 55. In the course of the paper he does not mention any use of the term ʾΙλλυριοί before 423 B.C.; he shows no knowledge of the topography of the areas and little concern with topography; and he makes some statements which are erroneous, at least in part, e.g. that when Glaucias took the title ‘king of the Illyrians’ the Taulantii disappeared for ever from history—yet he quotes from Livy the terms given to the Taulantii by Rome in 168 B.C. Moreover, his conclusions do not seem to me to be probable.

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