scholarly journals The Humanist at the Table

Author(s):  
Dawid Barbarzak

Italian humanists’ discoveries of ancient texts and printed editions of such ancient works as Lucretius’ De rerum natura, Plato’s Symposium or Apicius’ De re coquinaria strongly influenced the renewal of the Epicurean category of pleasure (voluptas) and created a new approach to eating. Many Italian humanists began emphasizing bodily needs and stressed their importance. We can find these ideas in the works of Lorenzo Valla (De voluptate, 1431), Marsilio Ficino (De voluptate, 1457) or Bartolomeo Platina (the author of the first printed cookbook De honesta voluptate et valetudine, ca. 1465-68) who recognized that food could be also consumed for pleasure. The phenomenon of the philosophical and literary banquet became common practice among Italian, and later also Polish, humanists. Such associations as the Roman Academy, Florentine Academy, or Polish Sodalitas litteraria Vistulana were the place of humanistic discussion, which was valued more than luxurious food. It is reflected in 16th-century Polish poetry (Filippo Buonaccorsi „Callimachus”, Conrad Celtis; Paweł z Krosna; Jan Dantyszek „Dantiscus” and others) and philosophical treaties such as Mikołaj Rej’s Wizerunek własny, 1558, inspired by Palingenius’ Zodiacus vitae, or Łukasz Górnicki’s Dworzanin polski, 1566, inspired by Baldassare Castiglione’s Il corteggiano. The quoted authors recommend moderation in drinking and criticize Polish and German drunkenness. Dining with friends could also serve as remedy for vanitas or all kinds of sorrow, according to the tradition of Anacreontic and Horatian poetry. We can see it clearly in Foricoenia of Jan Kochanowski (1584), where the joy of drinking wine and singing at the table interweaves with reflection on the human condition and vanishing.

Author(s):  
L.E. Murr ◽  
V. Annamalai

Georgius Agricola in 1556 in his classical book, “De Re Metallica”, mentioned a strange water drawn from a mine shaft near Schmölnitz in Hungary that eroded iron and turned it into copper. This precipitation (or cementation) of copper on iron was employed as a commercial technique for producing copper at the Rio Tinto Mines in Spain in the 16th Century, and it continues today to account for as much as 15 percent of the copper produced by several U.S. copper companies.In addition to the Cu/Fe system, many other similar heterogeneous, electrochemical reactions can occur where ions from solution are reduced to metal on a more electropositive metal surface. In the case of copper precipitation from solution, aluminum is also an interesting system because of economic, environmental (ecological) and energy considerations. In studies of copper cementation on aluminum as an alternative to the historical Cu/Fe system, it was noticed that the two systems (Cu/Fe and Cu/Al) were kinetically very different, and that this difference was due in large part to differences in the structure of the residual, cement-copper deposit.


Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

The analysis in this chapter focuses on Christine Jeffs’s Rain as evidence of a shift that had occurred in New Zealand society whereby puritan repression is no longer perceived as the source of emotional problems for children in the process of becoming adults, but rather its opposite – neoliberal individualism, hedonism, and the parental neglect and moral lassitude it had promoted. A comparison with Kirsty Gunn’s novel of the same name, upon which the adaptation is based, reveals how Jeffs converted a poetic meditation on the human condition into a cinematic family melodrama with a girl’s discovery of the power of her own sexuality at the core.


Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Damiano Benvegnù

From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think the connections between death, humanness and animality. This article explores how these connections have been represented by Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi (1908–79) and Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–92). Specifically, it investigates how the death of a nonhuman animal is portrayed in two works: ‘Mani’, a short story by Landolfi collected in his first book Il dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies) (1937), and D'Arrigo's massive novel Horcynus Orca (Horcynus Orca) (1975). Both ‘Mani’ and Horcynus Orca display how the fictional representation of the death of a nonhuman animal challenges any philosophical positions of human superiority and establishes instead animality as the unheimlich mirror of the human condition. In fact, in both stories, the animal — a mouse and a killer whale, respectively — do die and their deaths represent a mise en abyme that both arrests the human narrative and sparks a moment of acute ontological recognition.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 454-473
Author(s):  
Rachel Zellars

This essay opens with a discussion of the Black commons and the possibility it offers for visioning coherence between Black land relationality and Indigenous sovereignty. Two sites of history – Black slavery and Black migration prior to the twentieth century – present illuminations and challenges to Black and Indigenous relations on Turtle Island, as they expose the “antagonisms history has left us” (Byrd, 2019a, p. 342), and the ways antiblackness is produced as a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about Black life.While the full histories are well beyond the scope of this paper, I highlight the violent impossibilities and afterlives produced and sustained by both – those that deserve care and attention within a “new relationality,” as Tiffany King has named, between Black and Indigenous peoples. At the end of the essay, I return briefly to Anna Tsing’s spiritual science of foraging wild mushrooms. Her allegory about the human condition offers a bridge, I conclude, between the emancipatory dreams of Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty.  


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-124
Author(s):  
Alexander Pschera

"Neben der Industrie hat die Digitalisierung auch die Natur ergriffen. Die Tatsache, dass Tausende von Tieren mit GPS-Sendern aus- gerüstet und überwacht werden, erlaubt, analog zur Industrie 4.0 auch von einer Natur 4.0 zu sprechen. Dieses Internet der Tiere verändert den Begriff, den der Mensch von der Natur hat. Er transformiert die Wahrnehmung vor allem der Natur als etwas fundamental An- deren. Neben den vielen kulturellen Problematisierungen, die das Internet der Tiere mit sich bringt, lassen sich aber auch die Umrisse einer neuen, ganz und gar nicht esoterischen planetarisch-post-digitalen Kultur aufzeigen, die die conditio humana verändert. In addition to industry, digitalization has also taken hold of nature. The fact that thousands of animals are provided and monitored with GPS transmitters allows to speak of nature 4.0 by way of analogy to industry 4.0. This internet of animals changes our idea of nature. Most of all, it transforms the perception of nature as something fundamentally other. Beside the many cultural problems that the internet of animals implies, it can also outline a new, not at all esoteric planetary post-digital culture that is about to change the human condition. "


Author(s):  
Leticia Flores Farfán

Assuming with Georges Bataille that men is a being who is not in the world “like water within the water”, that is to say, in an immanent and lack of distinction state, but that its destiny is shaped in the permanent significant joint or logos to which its unfinished nature jeopardizes him, we analyze the form in which the mythical story, characterized like a sacred word with symbolic and ontological quality within the perspective of Mircea Eliade, gives account of the wound or the original tear that constitutes the human condition.


Author(s):  
Michael C. Rea

This book is the first of two volumes collecting together the most substantial work in analytic theology that I have done between 2003 and 2018. The essays in this volume focus on the nature of God, whereas the essays in the companion volume focus on humanity and the human condition. The essays in the first part of this volume deal with issues in the philosophy of theology having to do with discourse about God and the authority of scripture; the essays in the second part focus on divine attributes; and the essays in the third part discuss the doctrine of the trinity and related issues. The book includes one new essay, another essay that was previously published only in German translation, and new postscripts to two of the essays.


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