Intellectual Disability in the European Middle Ages

Author(s):  
Irina Metzler

This investigation of intellectual disability in the Middle Ages uncovers narratives of this perceived condition in the historical sources. Authors of normative texts, for instance, medical, legal, and natural-philosophical authorities, were the medieval equivalent of modern scientific experts with regard to defining, assessing, and controlling notions of intellectual disability. This new and specific discussion seeks to reframe the paradigm of what constituted intellectual disability at different periods in both medieval and modern times. Philosophically, and subsequently judicially, medieval intellectual disability was considered the absence of reason, representing the irrational, which contrasted the mentally disabled with the Aristotelian concept of the human being as the rational animal. Medieval terminology employed a fluidity of definitions, which highlights the constructedness of terms revolving around intellectual disability. Analyses of the culturally specific constructions of intellectual disability enhance our knowledge of the intellectual heritage underpinning current concepts of cognitive and mental pathologies.

10.33287/1191 ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 6-16
Author(s):  
В. М. Калашников ◽  
І. С. Накашидзе

The article is devoted to the research of the use of the forecasting method. Examples of the application of this method in historical science of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and modern times are given. The significance of the forecasting method for the formation of a national idea and consciousness in the United States is given. The historical development of the United States provides ample opportunities for scientifically based prediction of the future fate of the leading world. Historical studies use such pairs of methods as reversing and presenting forecast and eschatology and futurology. It is determined that methods of reversible and predictive forecasting can yield data that fill the gaps in historical sources. The forecasting method is often associated with an analogy, which in the broadest sense is the basis of science. Areas of sharing the methods of forecasting and analogy from inventive activity to political technologies and to stimulating the creative process. The method of forecasting can be applied not only in scientific, but also in pedagogical work during the teaching of historical disciplines. The method of analogy in connection with forecasting in the educational process should be used in considering the issues of the formation and decline of Ukrainian statehood.


Author(s):  
T. Pouyet

This paper will focus on the technical approaches used for a PhD thesis regarding architecture and spatial organization of benedict abbeys in Touraine in the Middle Ages, in particular the abbey of Cormery in the heart of the Loire Valley. Monastic space is approached in a diachronic way, from the early Middle Ages to the modern times using multi-sources data: architectural study, written sources, ancient maps, various iconographic documents… Many scales are used in the analysis, from the establishment of the abbeys in a territory to the scale of a building like the tower-entrance of the church of Cormery. These methodological axes have been developed in the research unit CITERES for many years and the 3D technology is now used to go further along in that field. <br><br> The recording in 3D of the buildings of the abbey of Cormery allows us to work at the scale of the monastery and to produce useful data such as sections or orthoimages of the ground and the walls faces which are afterwards drawn and analysed. The study of these documents, crossed with the other historical sources, allowed us to emphasize the presence of walls older than what we thought and to discover construction elements that had not been recognized earlier and which enhance the debate about the construction date St Paul tower and associated the monastic church.


Moreana ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 46 (Number 176) (1) ◽  
pp. 175-190
Author(s):  
Bernard Bourdin

The legacy from Christianity unquestionably lies at the root of Europe, even if not exclusively. It has taken many aspects from the Middle Ages to modern times. If the Christian heritage is diversely understood and accepted within the European Union, the reason is essentially due to its political and religious significance. However, its impact in politics and religion has often been far from negative, if we will consider what secular societies have derived from Christianity: human rights, for example, and a religious affiliation which has been part and parcel of national identity. The Christian legacy has to be acknowledged through a critical analysis which does not deny the truth of the past but should support a European project built around common values.


Author(s):  
E. Yu. Goncharov ◽  
◽  
S. E. Malykh ◽  

The article focuses on the attribution of one gold and two copper coins discovered by the Russian Archaeological Mission of the Institute of Oriental Studies RAS in the ancient Egyptian necropolis of Giza. Coins come from mixed fillings of the burial shafts of the Ancient Egyptian rock-cut tombs of the second half of the 3rd millennium B.C. According to the archaeological context, the coins belong to the stages of the destruction of ancient burials that took place during the Middle Ages and Modern times. One of the coins is a Mamluk fals dating back to the first half of the 14th century A.D., the other two belong to the 1830s — the Ottoman period in Egypt, and are attributed as gold a buchuk hayriye and its copper imitation. Coins are rare for the ancient necropolis and are mainly limited to specimens of the 19th–20th centuries. In general, taking into account the numerous finds of other objects — fragments of ceramic, porcelain and glass utensils, metal ware, glass and copper decorations, we can talk about the dynamic nature of human activity in the ancient Egyptian cemetery in the 2nd millennium A.D. Egyptians and European travelers used the ancient rock-cut tombs as permanent habitats or temporary sites, leaving material traces of their stay.


2021 ◽  
pp. 60-73
Author(s):  
Dmitriy M. Abramov ◽  

Historical sources and evidence of the eyewitnesses of the 4th crusade in many respects reflect the complexity and sharpness of the contradictions between the Western and Eastern Christendom at the turn of the 12th – 13th centuries. The evidence and narrations proceed from the most direct participants in the military events, broke out on the shore of the Bosporus in 1203–1204. The authors of those materials belonged to the two opposing camps, and therefore the analysis of those sources represents a sufficiently complete and detailed picture of the occurred tragedy. A thorough analysis of the sources makes it possible to at least partially see and comprehend the causes of the military confrontation between the Western and Eastern Christians, who represented – just a while ago, in the first half of the 11th century – the united Ecumenical Church. The sources vividly reflect the mood that prevailed in the crusaders’ encampment in April, 1204, hesitation and doubt of the bulk of the Cross Warriors who were not sure of the rightness of their actions in the preparation for the assault of Constantinople. Many of them understood that they would have to raise the sword against their fellow believers – the Christians of the East. But the most tragic outcome of the 1202–1204 Crusade was the crushing defeat of Constantinople by the Cross Warriors. For the Romans (Byzantines) that became the reason for the disintegration of the Roman Empire. For all Eastern Christians it indicated the demise of the capital of the Orthodox Christendom.


Author(s):  
Therese Scarpelli Cory

This chapter explores the fundamental vision of the human being at the core of Aquinas’ anthropology. Aquinas has typically been construed as defending a fundamentally ‘Aristotelian’ vision of the human being. I show that this label has generated a skewed reading of Aquinas. Accordingly, this chapter does not lay claim to identify what it would take for an anthropology to be authentically ‘Thomistic’. Instead, it makes a proposal concerning what I argue is the ‘guiding vision’ of Aquinas’ anthropology: namely the ‘distinctive unity of the human’. Aquinas prioritizes this notion of distinctive unity in the different areas of his anthropology. I explore how this distinctive unity is expressed (a) in Aquinas’ account of the human soul as the ‘horizon’ of the bodily and spiritual worlds, and (b) in his definition of the human being as ‘rational animal’.


1990 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Jensen

One of the most remarkable changes to take place at German Protestant universities during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first twenty years of the seventeenth century was the return of metaphysics after more than halfa century of absence. University metaphysics has acquired a reputation for sterile aridity which was strengthened rather than diminished by its survival in early modern times, when such disciplines are supposed deservedly to have vanished with the end of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, this survival has attracted some attention this century. For a long urne it was assumed that German Protestants needed a metaphysical defence against the intellectual vigour of the Jesuits. Lewalter has shown, however, that this was not the case.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 430-442
Author(s):  
I Dvorkin

This article represents an analysis of the Jewish philosophy of the Modern and Contemporary as the holistic phenomenon. In contrast to antiquity and the Middle Ages, when philosophy was a rather marginal part of Jewish thought, in Modern Times Jewish philosophy is formed as a distinct part of the World philosophy. Despite the fact that representatives of Jewish philosophy wrote in different languages and actively participated in the different national schools of philosophy, their work has internal continuity and integrity. The article formulates the following five criteria for belonging to Jewish philosophy: belonging to philosophy itself; reliance on Jewish sources; the addressee of Jewish philosophy is an educated European; intellectual continuity (representatives of the Jewish philosophy of Modern and Contemporary Periods support each other, argue with each other and protect each other from possible attacks from other schools); working with a set of specific topics, such as monism, ethics and ontology, the significance of behavior and practical life, politics, the problem of man, intelligence, language and hermeneutics of the text, Athens and Jerusalem, dialogism. The article provides a list of the main authors who satisfy these criteria. The central ones can be considered Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza, Moshe Mendelssohn, Shlomo Maimon, German Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Josef Dov Soloveichik, Leo Strauss, Abraham Yehoshua Heshel, Eliezer Berkovich, Emil Fackenheim, Mordechai Kaplan, Emmanuel Levinas. The main conclusion of the article is that by the end of the 20th century Jewish philosophy, continuing both the traditions of classical European philosophy and Judaism, has become an important integral part of Western thought.


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