THE SOLAR MODEL IN JOSEPH IBN JOSEPH IBN NAHMIAS'LIGHT OF THE WORLD

2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT G. MORRISON

In an influential article, A. I. Sabra identified an intellectual trend from twelfth and thirteenth-century Andalusia which he described as the ‘‘Andalusian revolt against Ptolemaic astronomy.” Philosophers such as Ibn Rushd (d. 1198 C. E.), Ibn Tufayl (d. 1185), and Maimonides (d. 1204) objected to Ptolemy’s (fl. 125–50) theories on philosophic grounds, not because of shortcomings in the theories' predictive accuracy. Sabra showed how al-Bitrūjī's (fl. 1200) Kitāb al-Hay'a (The Book of Astronomy) attempted to account for observed planetary motions in a way that met the philosophic standards of those philosophers and others. In Nūr al-‘ālam (Light of the World), the subject of this article, Joseph ibn Joseph ibn Nahmias (fl. ca. 1400) endeavoured to improve upon al-Bitrūjī’s models. Levi Ben Gerson's (1288–1344) Hebrew writings on astronomy criticized al-Bitrūjī, but Ibn Nahmias did not mention them. Nūr al-‘ālam deserves attention, too, because it is the first Arabic text on theoretical astronomy by a Jewish author to come to light. In the body of this article, I will describe and analyze Ibn Nahmias’ theory, from Nūr al-‘ālam, for the motion of the sun.

2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted Toadvine

In a 1951 debate that marked the beginnings of the analytic-continental divide, Maurice Merleau-Ponty sided with Georges Bataille in rejecting A. J. Ayer’s claim that “the sun existed before human beings.” This rejection is already anticipated in a controversial passage from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, where he claims that “there is no world without an Existence that bears its structure.” I defend Merleau-Ponty’s counterintuitive position against naturalistic and anti-subjectivist critics by arguing that the world emerges in the exchange between perceiver and perceived. A deeper challenge is posed, however, by Quentin Meillassoux, who argues that the “correlationism” of contemporary philosophy rules out any account of the “ancestral” time that antedates all subjectivity. Against Meillassoux, and taking an encounter with fossils as my guide, I hold that the past prior to subjectivity can only be approached phenomenologically. The paradoxical character of this immemorial past, as a memory of the world rather than of the subject, opens the way toward a phenomenology of the “elemental” past. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the absolute past of nature and the anonymity of the body, as well as Levinas’ account of the elements at the end of the world, I argue that our own materiality and organic lives participate in the differential rhythms of the elements, opening us to a memory of the world that binds the cosmic past and the apocalyptic future.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-138
Author(s):  
Marie A. Valdes-Dapena

It is apparent that we are still woefully ignorant with respect to the subject of sudden and unexpected deaths in infants. Only by continual investigation of large series of cases, employing uniform criteria to define such deaths and using the investigative procedures outlined above as well as others which will undoubtedly suggest themselves, can we hope to understand and possibly prevent the deaths of some 15,000 to 25,000 infants in the United States each year. These lives, to say nothing of those in other countries throughout the world might provide some of the leadership which is necessary to maintain and advance the human race in the years to come.


Author(s):  
Oyuna Tsydendambaeva ◽  
Olga Dorzheeva

This article is dedicated to the examination of euphemisms in the various-system languages – English and Buryat that contain view of the world by a human, and the ways of their conceptualization. Euphemisms remain insufficiently studied. Whereupon, examination of linguistic expression of the key concepts of culture is among the paramount programs of modern linguistics, need for the linguoculturological approach towards analysis of euphemisms in the languages, viewing it in light of the current sociocultural transformations, which are refer to euphemisms and values reflected by them. The subject of this research is the euphemisms in the English and Buryat languages, representing the semiosphere “corporeal and spiritual”. The scientific novelty consists in introduction of the previously unexamined euphemism in Buryat language that comprise semiosphere “corporeal and spiritual” into the scientific discourse. The analysis of language material testifies to the fact that in various cultures the topic of intimacy and sex is euphemized differently. The lexis indicating the intimate parts of the body is vividly presented in the West, while in Buryat language – rather reserved. The author also determines the common, universal, and nationally marked components elucidating the linguistic worldview of different ethnoses and cultures.


Author(s):  
Caroline Walker Bynum

In this chapter the renowned medievalist scholar Caroline Walker Bynum brings our attention to a striking historical occurrence: in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe the concern with and attachment to Eucharistic devotion was overwhelmingly female. Why this gender bias, and at that time? Christian women were predominantly “inspired, compelled, comforted and troubled by the Eucharist” and in many different forms—from miraculous apparitions, to experiences of ecstasy connected to the attendance and ingestion of the Eucharist, to the showing of sensorial excesses in its presence. Bynum shows how material and physical receptions of the body of Christ were expressed not only as forms of ecstasy but also as gendered modes of living the Imitatio Christi. This thirteenth-century corporeal, female experience of the Eucharist is connected to a particular moment in the life of Christ—the transition between life and death. Positioned as “brides” and hence as the erotic counterparts of Christ, women and female mystics exploited the full potential of Christ’s own corporeality rather than his otherworldly nature. Bynum’s work constitutes a formative reference point for scholars of Catholicism across a range of disciplines for the obvious reason that it deals so elegantly with themes of substance, gender, bodies, and devotional forms of Catholic practice. Her work continues to be an original source of inspiration for anthropologists because of its remarkable sensitivity to religion as an embodied, practice-generative engagement with the world. Bynum should also be considered as important for the “new” anthropology of Catholicism for her pioneering work on the gymnasticity of gender and for the attention it draws to the sublimated erotic tension that exists between institutional doxa and mystical aesthetics.2 In Bynum’s work, gender is not presented as merely one among a number of potential analytical foci for elaboration of Catholicism; rather, it is the very ontological architecture of the religious, and hence an essential topic for scholars seeking to understand Catholicism as a translocal force.


Author(s):  
Adam J. Davis

This epilogue reflects on the manifold ways that charitable institutions benefited from commerce—whether from their own commercial activities or those of their patrons. Church reformers criticized hospitals for accepting donati, who were permitted to receive room and board without taking vows. The reality, however, was that the donati at times brought in valuable resources that could be used to serve the poor and sick. In addition, the increased commercialization of late twelfth- and thirteenth-century society, particularly in a region like Champagne, may have contributed to the idea of a moral economy, including the obligation of charitable giving and service. The twelfth- and thirteenth-century social conditions that created a conducive environment for the flourishing of commerce were also advantageous for fostering charity and pious giving more generally. During a period of urban transformation, which created greater prosperity for some but also increasing poverty and insecurity for many others, the medieval hospital opened up new opportunities for social reciprocity and mutual assistance. For those with various kinds of needs, the hospital served as a source of physical, social, and material support in this earthly world, with all of its vagaries and vulnerabilities. In addition, though, the medieval hospital held out the promise of spiritual redemption in the world to come.


2019 ◽  
pp. 105-120
Author(s):  
David Wood

This chapter describes things at the edge of the world as sites at which events of reversal and transformation take place. It looks at three examples of reversals: people's experience of the sun; the nonhuman animal; and that of the other human, which is divided into three—the sexual other, the stranger, and the enemy. In each case, a thing that begins as an object of experience becomes the site of an event of reversal and transformation in which not only the subject is implicated in an unexpected way but the world, or a part of it, is poised for restructuration and for the proliferation of new chains of possibility. The chapter then suggests that the entire domain marked by these events of reversal and transformation is generated by the combined operation of three different phenomena. These include (1) the primordial constitution of selfhood, (2) variable modes of identification with that self, and (3) the projection of modes of otherness consistent with one's manner of self-relatedness.


Author(s):  
Sara H. Lindheim

The conclusion takes a final, closer look at empire’s toll on the subject in elegy. The juxtaposition of the puella of erotic elegy with the exiled Ovid in Chapter 5 highlights the differences between the ways that the aggressive pressure on Roman fines affect our textual characters. For the puellae, from Catullus to Ovid, the encounter, without fail, has consequences at the level of the body, although the specific manifestation is different in each text (or set of texts). The effects are not the same for the masculine subject. His corporeal self escapes the pressures, but as a subject he comes, or threatens to come, unhinged, incoherent, unstable.


Author(s):  
James Higginbotham

An idiolectal conception of language is compatible with a substantive role for external things — objects, including other people — in the characterization of idiolects. Illustrations of this role are not hard to come by. The point of looking outward from the individual is pretty evident for the case of reference to perceptually encountered objects: had the world been significantly different, a person with the same molecular history would have acquired, and called by the same familiar names, different physical and other concepts. An idiolectal conception of language is by no means committed, and has some reason to be opposed, to internalism, and to individualism in Burge's sense; that is, to the view that the organization of the body, abstracting from external things, is constitutive of any linguistically significant aspect of language.


Author(s):  
Heike Peckruhn

Chapter 2 investigates the manner in which feminist theologies employ experience as a source for theology, particularly sensory experience. It highlights scholarly work that seeks to overcome body-mind dualisms by appealing to perception and analyzes where and how these attempts fall short. Perception in the theological works surveyed is either conceived in an empiricist or intellectualist fashion, which upholds the very body-mind dualism sought to move beyond. The chapter proposes that we are our bodies, and we experience the world as we are in the world through our bodies, as body-subjects. This leaves no room for an ontological separation of the subject “I” and the body of the subject.


2014 ◽  
Vol 107 (4) ◽  
pp. 425-446
Author(s):  
Ayelet Even-Ezra

In the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul writes: It is doubtless not profitable for me to boast. I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord: I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago—whether in the body I do not know, or whether out of the body I do not know, God knows—such a one was caught up to the third heaven. And I know such a man—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows—how he was caught up into Paradise and heard inexpressible words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. Of such a one I will boast; yet of myself I will not boast, except in my infirmities. (2 Cor 12:1–5 nkiv) This brief and enigmatic account is caught between multiple dialectics of power and infirmity, pride and humility, unveiling and secrecy. At this point in his letter Paul is turning to a new source of power in order to establish his authority against the crowd of boasting false apostles who populate the previous paragraphs. He wishes to divulge his intimate, occult knowledge of God, but at the same time keep his position as antihero that is prevalent throughout the epistle. These dialectics are enhanced by a sophisticated play of first and third person. The third person denotes the subject who experienced rapture fourteen years ago, while the first person denotes the narrator in the present. Only after several verses does the reader realize that these two are in fact the same person. This alienation allows Paul the intricate play of boasting, for “of such a one I will boast, yet of myself I will not boast.”


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document