scholarly journals Insignia Summorum Principum. Using symbols of power in pursuit of higher rank and status by German prince-electors and Polish-Lithuanian princes

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 55-78
Author(s):  
Jakub Rogulski

In 1680 an anonymous Polonus Borussus composed a treatise suggesting the equal status between the German imperial princes and the Polish-Lithuanian princely families in terms of their symbolism. Using it as a starting point, the article investigates the way in which these elites expressed their real power and political ambitions in a similar manner. By comparing the Electors of Brandenburg and the houses of Radziwiłł, Wis´niowiecki and Sanguszko it shows that, first, Polonus Borussus did not exaggerate too much when he hinted at the ‘symbolic’ equality of the German electors and the Polish-Lithuanian princes; and second, that these elites differed from each other in two aspects: the primary audiences of their symbolic practices (peers in the case of the German princes as opposed to the middling nobility, the antagonist of the Polish-Lithuanian princes) as well as the potential to exploit symbols (the ‘symbolic audacity’ of the Polish-Lithuanian princes contrasting with the ‘confirmative’ use of the German princes).

Author(s):  
Lucas Champollion

Why can I tell you that I ran for five minutes but not that I *ran all the way to the store for five minutes? Why can you say that there are five pounds of books in this package if it contains several books, but not *five pounds of book if it contains only one? What keeps you from using *sixty degrees of water to tell me the temperature of the water in your pool when you can use sixty inches of water to tell me its height? And what goes wrong when I complain that *all the ants in my kitchen are numerous? The constraints on these constructions involve concepts that are generally studied separately: aspect, plural and mass reference, measurement, and distributivity. This work provides a unified perspective on these domains, connects them formally within the framework of algebraic semantics and mereology, and uses this connection to transfer insights across unrelated bodies of literature and formulate a single constraint that explains each of the judgments above. This provides a starting point from which various linguistic applications of mereology are developed and explored. The main foundational issues, relevant data, and choice points are introduced in an accessible format.


2021 ◽  
pp. 194277862110000
Author(s):  
Sheila Margaret McGregor

This article looks at Engels’s writings to show that his ideas about the role of labour in the evolution of human beings in a dialectical relationship between human beings and nature is a crucial starting point for understanding human society and is correct in its essentials. It is important for understanding that we developed as a species on the basis of social cooperation. The way human beings produce and reproduce themselves, the method of historical materialism, provides the basis for understanding how class and women’s oppression arose and how that can explain LGBTQ oppression. Although Engels’s analysis was once widely accepted by the socialist movement, it has mainly been ignored or opposed by academic researchers and others, including geographers, and more recently by Marxist feminists. However, anthropological research from the 1960s and 1970s as well as more recent anthropological and archaeological research provide overwhelming evidence for the validity of Engels’s argument that there were egalitarian, pre-class societies without women’s oppression. However, much remains to be explained about the transition to class societies. Engels’s analysis of the impact of industrial capitalism on gender roles shows how society shapes our behaviour. Engels’s method needs to be constantly reasserted against those who would argue that we are a competitive, aggressive species who require rules to suppress our true nature, and that social development is driven by ideas, not by changes in the way we produce and reproduce ourselves.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roseane Santos Mesquita ◽  
Késia Dos Anjos Rocha

The present text bets on the power of reflections on a pedagogy guided by cosmoperception. It is a collective call for the enchanted ways of perceiving and relating to the other. “Ọrọ, nwa, ẹkọ”, the talk, the look, the education, insurgent forces that grow in the cracks, just like moss, alive, reborn. That is the way we think about education, as a living practice, turned to freedom. Freedom understood as a force that enables us to question certain hegemonic truths entrenched in our ways of being, thinking and producing knowledge. In dialogue with the criticisms on the decolonial thought and by authors and authoresses who are putting themselves into thinking about an epistemology from a diasporic place, from the edges of the world, we will try to problematize the effects of the epistemic erasures promoted by the colonial processes and how that has affected our educative practices. The look at the educational experience that happens in the sacred territory of candomblé, will be our starting point to think about politically and poetically transformative educational practices.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-145
Author(s):  
André Luiz Cruz Sousa

The aim of this paper is to study a set of three issues related to the understanding of partial justice and partial injustice as character dispositions, namely the distinctive circumstance of action, the emotion involved therein and the pleasure or pain following it. Those points are treated in a relatively obscure way by Aristotle, especially in comparison with their treatment in the expositions of other character virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics. Building on the expression ‘capacity towards the other’ (δύναμις ἐν τῷ πρὸς ἕτερον), the paper highlights the interpersonal nature of the circumstances of just and unjust actions, and points how such nature is directly related to notions such as ‘profit’ (κέρδος) or ‘getting more’(πλεονεκτεῖν) as well as to the unusual conception of excess, defect and intermediacy in Nicomachean Ethics Book V. The interpersonal nature of just and unjust actions works also as the starting-point for the interpretation both of the pleasure briefly mentioned in 1130b4 as characterizing the greedy person and of the emotion involved in acting justly or greedy, which is mentioned in an extremely elliptical way in 1130b1-2: the paper argues, on the one hand, that the pleasure felt in acting justly or unjustly concerns not only the goods that are the object of just or unjust interactions, but also the way such interactions affect the people involved; on the other hand, it argues that the emotion actuated in just or unjust interactions relates to the agent’s concern or lack of concern with the good of those people.


Nuncius ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 584-609
Author(s):  
Simona Valeriani

This article takes as a starting point amateur architects in 17th-century England. It considers architectural writings including Henry Wotton’s Elements of Architecture (1624), Sir Balthasar Gerbier’s Councel and Advice to All Builders (1663) as well as Sir Roger Pratt’s and Sir Roger North’s notes on architecture and several building manuals. It enquires into the different kinds of knowledge and professional figures associated with architecture in the period. The paper scrutinizes how being a lover of architecture influenced the actors’ approach to other branches of knowledge such as garden design and agriculture. Did being an amateur shape the way in which one went about apparently more trivial aspects of life such as managing one’s estate? Comparing Roger Pratt’s unpublished notes with other contemporary sources on agriculture and estate management, it provides an insight into distinctive ways in which “amateurs” approached the subject.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michiel De Muynck ◽  
Diederik Bruloot

AbstractIn February 2014 the European legislator adopted a directive on credit agreements for consumers relating to residential immovable property, which had to be implemented by the member states by March 2016. This paper starts with some fundamentals on the policy objectives underlying this so-called „Mortgage Credit Directive” (MCD) and further provides an overview of the specific regulatory framework that has been developed for credit intermediaries. This serves as the starting point for an assessment of the level of consumer protection that has been established while regulating the activities of credit intermediaries. Particular risks for credit intermediaries’ clients stem from incentives caused by the way in which they are traditionally remunerated by consumers and/or creditors. Whereas information disclosure obligations included in the MCD are an insufficient means to mitigate some potentially harmful consequences of intermediary compensation, the authors argue for the introduction of targeted remuneration regulation.


1994 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 81-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Schiesaro

1. If I had to sum up as concisely as I possibly can the subject matter of this paper, I would probably say that it was originally stimulated by the attempt to understand how Lucretius articulated his didactic plot. What is the plot of a poem that presents itself as analysing nothing less than ‘the nature of things’? It is safe to assume as a starting-point that a didactic poem which intends to revolutionize each and every principle of perception and evaluation of reality cannot remain unaffected by the theoretical views it tries to prove, and that the persuasive impact of those theories on the reader will inevitably be strengthened or weakened by the way the text situates itself in respect to those theories: the poem itself will be the most effective or the most damning example of its own theories.


2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-119
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. Bell

For those familiar with the work of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari, it might at first seem unwise to pursue a Deleuze and Guattarian philosophy of history. After all, is it not Deleuze who, in an interview with Antonio Negri, argues that ‘What history grasps in an event is the way it’s actualized in particular circumstances; the event's becoming is beyond the scope of history'? (Deleuze 1995 : 170). And more damningly, Deleuze adds, ‘History isn’t experimental, it's just the set of more or less negative preconditions that make it possible to experiment with something beyond history' (Deleuze 1995 : 170). History, in short, is a starting point for experimental work, but it is precisely history ‘that one leaves behind in order to “become,” that is, to create something new’ (1995: 171). Similarly in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that ‘History is made by those who oppose history (not by those who insert themselves into it, or even reshape it)’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 : 295). In the very first line of his book, Lampert recognizes the possible conclusion these citations might lead one to, namely, ‘Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of becoming seems at times opposed to the very idea of historical succession' (1); and yet, as Lampert adeptly demonstrates, it would be a mistake to conclude that opposing history to ‘create something new’, ‘something beyond history’, necessarily entails being hostile to history, to the ‘idea of historical succession’, and thus to a philosophy of history.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 251-267
Author(s):  
Anneloek Scholten ◽  
Sophie van Os

Abstract ‘You Must Cultivate the Heathland’. The Society of Benevolence and the cultivation of soil in the nineteenth-century press. In the nineteenth century, debates surrounding the cultivation of Dutch soil and processes of civilisation were inextricably linked. This article examines the discourse surrounding cultivation of heathlands in newspaper reports about the Society of Benevolence in the 1820s and 1840s. It considers the way the cultivation of heathland in Drenthe is framed as a civilizing force and reflects on the tensions between nation and region in reporting on this issue, as local economic and cultural interests conflicted with nationalist visions of progress and the interests of urban investors. Comparing Dutch and British reports on the Society, the article also forms a starting point for a transnational perspective on this topic.


2019 ◽  
pp. 283-286
Author(s):  
James Lindley Wilson

Democracy and equality are intimately linked. We cannot understand or properly respond to one ideal without the other. Democracy’s value stems in significant part from the way it manifests and sustains citizens’ equal status. Social equality requires democratic institutions and practices, because part of what it is for people to relate as equals is to share authority over what they do together. The design of democratic institutions—and our conduct of democratic practices—should be guided by this egalitarian ideal of sharing authority as civic friends. We ought to orient our efforts to establish and maintain equal relations with the democratic constituents of equality in view. We treat people as equals in part by sharing with them authority over how we treat one another. There is risk in granting authority to others. But a society of equals is a great reward....


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