Book Review: The Other Spanish Christ: A Study in the Spiritual History of Spain and South America

1933 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-478
Author(s):  
W. O. Carver
Author(s):  
Tom Conley

Michel de Certeau, a French philosopher trained in history and ethnography, was a peripatetic teacher in Europe, South America and North America. His thought has inflected four areas of philosophy. He studied how mysticism informs late-medieval epistemology and social practice. With the advent of the Scientific Revolution, the affinities the mystic shares with nature and the cosmos become, like religion itself, repressed or concealed. An adjunct discipline, heterology, thus constitutes an anthropology of alterity, studying the ‘other’ and the destiny of religion since the sixteenth century. De Certeau opens the hidden agendas that make representations of the past a function of social pressures, so that sometime histories are rearticulated in mirrored or subversive forms. This subversion makes accessible a general philosophy of invention that works within and against the strategic policies of official institutions. De Certeau’s writings also belong to activism, the history of ideological structures, psychoanalysis, and post-1968 theories of writing (écriture) as defined by Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard.


Author(s):  
◽  
VALTERS ZARIŅŠ ◽  

Book review focuses on two books by Gunther Neumann, dedicated to the thought of Heidegger and Leibniz. If one of the books deals specifically with the understanding of freedom in both of the two philosophers, then the other one deals more with Heidegger’s three approaches to Leibniz’s thought: (1) Interpretation of Leibniz in the context of the making of fundamental ontology and in Being and Time, as well as the reading of Leibniz after Being and Time; (2) Interpretation of Leibniz during the transition to Ereignis thought; (3) Interpetation of Leibniz in the framework of Ereignis thought. Author’s scrupulous close reading approach allows to show the changes in Heidegger’s approach to Leibniz’s philosophy, as well as sketch out the placement of Leibniz’s great themes on the horizon of Heidegger’s history of the truth of being. Author also shows that from metaphysics there stems a certain view in the modern philosophical discussions oriented on neurosciences—a certain view on the human being and on the freedom of will. On this background Heidegger appears as a thinker who has looked beyond the alloy of metaphysics and sciences, in which the concept of freedom has been greatly restricted. Heidegger manages (thanks to the radical questioning of Being) to turn the view on the problem of freedom, which appears in G. Neumann’s books as the main problem of philosophy—through the contact of Leibniz’s thought and Heidegger’s.


2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Padfield

Charles Waterton was the eccentric “Lord of Walton Hall” near Wakefield in Yorkshire. His Wanderings in South America was first published in 1826; translated into French, German and Spanish, it was a best seller. He brought back wourali used by the Macoushi natives of British Guiana (now Guyana) for killing prey; there is a piece of it in the Wakefield Museum. This paper traces the history of wourali which paralyses its victims; its attempted medical use for rabies and tetanus and, though different from curare, its belated use in modern anaesthesia.


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