A Bedouin Principle of Freedom for the Risorgimento d’Italia: Michele Amari Integrates Ibn Khaldūn with Vico’s filologia

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-96
Author(s):  
Markus Messling

Abstract In the New Science (1744), Giambattista Vico defined filologia as “the doctrine of all the institutions that depend on human choice” of the mondo civile. When nineteenth-century European nationalism was on the rise, supported by narratives of cultural homogeneity and specificity, philological comparatism was the state-of-the-art and it, often, legitimated the obsessions with the purity of origins and genealogies. Italy, characterized by internal plurality and its Mediterranean entanglements, is a model case. Whereas many discourses of the Risorgimento aspired to shape a new Italian nation after the classical model, Michele Amari’s History of the Muslims of Sicily (1854–1872) marked an astonishing exception. For him, going back to Islamic-Sicilian history, its literary, rhetorical and linguistic culture, meant to resume, on a higher level of incivilmento (Vico), what had been obscured by cultural decline: the spirit of freedom and equality, which Ibn Khaldūn had attributed to the Bedouins and their dynamics in history.

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-112
Author(s):  
Anatoly Liberman

Henry Fox Talbot, the father of photography, was a polymath, and among his many publications we find works on mathematics, physics, astronomy, chemistry, archeology, ancient history, mythology, and Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions. He was also at home in botany. In 1847 he brought out a thick book titled English Etymologies. His archive at Cambridge allows one to trace the preparatory stages for this work. Talbot’s book is instructive as an example of how some talented, brilliantly educated, and industrious Englishmen in the forties of the nineteenth century went about discovering the origin of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English words. Talbot was aware of sound correspondences but did not feel bound by them. A list of his sources gives a good idea of the state of the art in England. Talbot’s etymologies are interesting only from this point of view. They should be studied as we study the efforts of much earlier researchers, that is, as part of the history of science.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 180-190
Author(s):  
Rajkumar Bind

This paper examines the development of modern vaccination programme of Cooch Behar state, a district of West Bengal of India during the nineteenth century. The study has critically analysed the modern vaccination system, which was the only preventive method against various diseases like small pox, cholera but due to neglect, superstation and religious obstacles the people of Cooch Behar state were not interested about modern vaccination. It also examines the sex wise and castes wise vaccinators of the state during the study period. The study will help us to growing conciseness about modern vaccination among the peoples of Cooch Behar district.   


1990 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl F. Kaestle

The History of Education Quarterly has done it again. Despite many scholars' previous attempts to summarize the state of the art in historical studies of literacy, this special issue will now be the best, up-to-date place for a novice to start. It should be required reading for everyone interested in this subfield. The editors have enlisted an impressive roster of prominent scholars in the field, and these authors have provided us with an excellent array of synthetic reviews, methodological and theoretical discussions, and exemplary research papers.


Author(s):  
Seyed Mostafa Assi

The history of lexicography in Iran dates back to more than 2,000 years ago, to the time of the compilation of bilingual and monolingual lexicons for the Middle Persian language. After a review of the long and rich tradition of Persian lexicography, the chapter gives an account of the state of the art in the modern era by describing recent advances and developments in this field. During the last three or four decades, in line with the advancements in western countries, Iranian lexicography evolved from its traditional state into a modern professional and academic activity trying to improve the form and content of dictionaries by implementing the following factors: the latest achievements in theoretical and applied linguistics related to lexicography; and the computer techniques and information technology and corpus-based approach to lexicography.


Author(s):  
Tim Miller ◽  
Jinzhong Niu ◽  
Martin Chapman ◽  
Peter McBurney

The rise of online commerce has led to an emerging discipline at the intersection of economics and computer science, a discipline which studies the properties and dynamics of automated trading in online marketplaces. The CAT Market Design Tournament was created to promote research into the design and deployment of economic mechanisms for such online marketplaces, particularly mechanisms able to adapt automatically to dynamic competitive environments. This research competition, which ran from 2007 to 2011), was won by four different teams and had entrants from thirteen countries. This chapter describes the motivation and history of the tournament and presents research that has arisen from it. The winners were experimentally “played off” to evaluate whether the state of the art in automated mechanism design improved during the CAT competition. The results show a clear and consistent improvement, supporting the belief that the competition has encouraged research in the field.


Author(s):  
Theodore M. Porter

This chapter discusses statistics as social science. The systematic study of social numbers in the spirit of natural philosophy was pioneered during the 1660s, and was known for about a century and a half as political arithmetic. Its purpose, when not confined to the calculation of insurance or annuity rates, was the promotion of sound, well-informed state policy. Political arithmetic was, according to William Petty, the application of Baconian principles to the art of government. Implicit in the use by political arithmeticians of social numbers was the belief that the wealth and strength of the state depended strongly on the number and character of its subjects. Political arithmetic was supplanted by statistics in France and Great Britain around the beginning of the nineteenth century. The shift in terminology was accompanied by a subtle mutation of concepts that can be seen as one of the most important in the history of statistical thinking.


1968 ◽  
Vol 72 (686) ◽  
pp. 187-190
Author(s):  
I. H. Culver

All of us know the history of the helicopter, but certain facets of this history need to be repeated in the framework of the development of the rigid rotor helicopter. It was in 1919, I believe, that Juan de la Cierva, shocked from the death of his brother in a spin accident, reasoned that the best way to build an aeroplane was to build one that made use of the spin as a fundamental. He put a bearing between the spinning wings and the fuselage so that the wings could spin without spinning the fuselage. This was a great advance in the state of the art and created an aeroplane with some rather good low-speed characteristics.


2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-42
Author(s):  
Soni

AbstractTo this day, the history of indigenous orphans in colonial India remains surprisingly understudied. Unlike the orphans of Britain or European and Eurasian orphans in the colony, who have been widely documented, Indian orphans are largely absent in the existing historiography. This article argues that a study of “native” orphans in India helps us transcend the binary of state power and poor children that has hitherto structured the limited extant research on child “rescue” in colonial India. The essay further argues that by shifting the gaze away from the state, we can vividly see how non-state actors juxtaposed labour and education. I assert that the deployment of child labour by these actors, in their endeavour to educate and make orphans self-sufficient, did not always follow the profitable trajectory of the state-led formal labour regime (seen in the Indian indenture system or early nineteenth-century prison labour). It was often couched in terms of charity and philanthropy and exhibited a convergence of moral and economic concerns.


2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-311
Author(s):  
Giorgio (Georg) Orlandi

Abstract The book under review serves as a significant contribution to the field of Trans-Himalayan linguistics. Designed as a vade mecum for readers with little linguistic background in these three languages, Nathan W. Hill’s work attempts, on the one hand, a systematic exploration of the shared history of Burmese, Tibetan and Chinese, and, on the other, a general introduction to the reader interested in obtaining an overall understanding of the state of the art of the historical phonology of these three languages. Whilst it is acknowledged that the book in question has the potential to be a solid contribution to the field, it is also felt that few minor issues can be also addressed.


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