scholarly journals On Restoring the Centrality of Prudentia (Phronēsis) for Living Well: Pathways and Contemporary Relevance

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 792
Author(s):  
Fáinche Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Moral Code ◽  
World War ◽  
Moral Philosophies ◽  
Living Well ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Philippa Foot ◽  
Second World ◽  
Theology And Philosophy

The aftermath of the Second World War saw some radical rethinking in both theology and philosophy on what it is to live well as a human being. In philosophy two of the key thinkers were Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. In theology two key thinkers were Thomas Deman, a French Dominican, and somewhat later an English Dominican, Herbert McCabe. A key feature in all four thinkers was a recovery of the work of Aristotle and Aquinas, in particular the concept of phronēsis (prudentia). The paper’s close analysis of the virtue of prudentia demonstrates the insufficiency of modern moral philosophies that are committed to portraying morality as a moral code. A correlative argument is made within theology: the virtue of prudentia fortified by the gift of counsel is central for good Christian living.

scholarly journals At home with New Zealand in the 1960s

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Richard Thomson
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Advanced Technology ◽  
World War ◽  
European Settlement ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Second World ◽  
At Home

<p>Published by A H & A W Reed to immediate success late in 1961, New Zealand in Colour was the first of many large-format books of colour photographs of New Zealand. While they belonged to a tradition of scenic reproduction as old as European settlement, technological changes and the social and economic disruptions of the Second World War intensified the importance of the image in print culture. Drawing on recent historiographic approaches that seek to decentre New Zealand across transnational and city-hinterland relationships, this thesis argues that reproduction, through photography but also as a cultural practice, was intrinsic to a Pakeha conception of place. Looking at scenery was an activity thought to be peculiarly suited to New Zealand, but it was also a prime form of tourist consumption and was therefore essential to New Zealanders’ successful participation in modernity, which required ‘seeing ourselves’ but also awareness of recognition from other moderns. During the decades after the Second World War, modernity took on a more international character with greater mobility of people and goods and a strengthening consumer culture. The complex kinds of looking involved in being modern were increasingly expressed as a tension between modern and anti-modern impulses. The colour pictorial displayed New Zealand as a cultural landscape of cameras, cars, and holidays, but also as a refuge from modernity. The ‘coffee table book’ was a luxury consumer object of advanced technology, but the gift was the preferred method for its circulation. To be at home with this New Zealand may require a move to the suburbs, but it offers a view of nation and nationalism in which mobility, leisure, and consumption have become the chief explanatory tools.</p>

The Diaries of King Chulalongkorn

1968 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 382-385
Author(s):  
David K. Wyatt
Keyword(s):  
Fine Arts ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
National Library ◽  
Free Distribution ◽  
Final Volume ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Second World

More than 40 years ago, the private libraries built up by kings chulalong korn (1868–1910)and vajiravudh (1910–25) were handed over by King prajadhipok to the National Library of Thailand; and included in the gift were 10 large volumes countaining a typewritten transcript of manuscript diaries of chulalongkorn which had been made for vajiravudh in 1917. After the abolition of the a absolute monarchy in 1932, the Thai Fine Arts Department, created to take charge of the National Library and associated institutions, began to offer to inquirers seeking books to publish for free distribution at the cremations of their relative and friends portions of these diaries, the size of the portion tailored to meet theit budgets for this purpose. The first portion, of 74 printed pages, was distributed to guests at the cremation of Princess Arunawadī, a daughter of King Mongkut, in 1933. Nineteen parts were so published before the second World War, followed by volumes in 1944 and 1946; but it was not until the early 1960's that the project was resumed and the final volumes published, one in 1963 and two in 1965, the twenty-fourth and final volume appearing for the cremation of mm čhao Čhongkonnī Watthanawong, a grand-daughter of king Chulalongkorn.

scholarly journals Hopeless Didacticism: Archival Sources and Spectatorial Address in ‘I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians’

2019 ◽  
pp. 174387211988031
Author(s):  
Diana Popa
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Narrative Film ◽  
Heterogenous Media ◽  
Second World

This paper examines “Îmi este indiferent dacă în istorie vom intra ca barbari” / “I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians” (Radu Jude, 2018) (hereafter “Barbarians”), a film that explores the persistence of problematic official narratives about the Romanian participation in Second World War. I argue that this is a narrative film akin to conceptual art, in which formal elements combine with a variety of heterogenous media, such as archival still and moving imagery, to provide ‘evidence’ about the past while also reflecting on historical truth’s fragility to propagandistic manipulation and on the role that media, film included, can play in it. Through close analysis and drawing on recent theorising on the cinematic dispositif, this article examines the ways in which “Barbarians” encourages complex text–viewer relationships and eventually thwarts spectators’ expectation of being presented with a ‘final truth’. It ultimately reveals the inevitable multitude of perspectives about the past, highlighting the risks of failure that any pedagogical attempt to ‘fix memory’ will face.

Trouble at the Explosive Plant: Ceri Richards and Dylan Thomas

2019 ◽  
pp. 157-178
Author(s):  
Leo Mellor
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
War Poetry ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Art Works ◽  
Dylan Thomas ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Second World ◽  
Organic As

This chapter analyses Thomas’s Second World War poetry within a comparative context; it reads it alongside – and also through – the art of Ceri Richards, another individual who combined a Swansea-lineage, some European aesthetic influences, and a compulsive – if horrified – fascination with beauty-in-destruction. The wartime works of both Richards and Thomas repeatedly return to representations of the organic as a way of capturing moments of intense violence. In doing so, they raise a number of vital questions. If these works aim to capture the incendiary horrors and transformative energy of the moment when all is in flux, how can they do this using the organic? If a violent moment is knowable through a version of the natural world, how then is destruction changed? What other kinds of temporalities are imported into such a ‘timeless second’ – to use William Sansom’s phrase? And, concomitantly, how is the idea of nature and the natural changed if it is being utilised to portray blast and terror? The chapter proceeds through close analysis of a number of Thomas’s wartime poems – including ‘Deaths and Entrances’ and ‘A Refusal to Mourn’ – and sets them alongside art works by Richards such as Blossoms (1940) and Cycle of Nature (1944).

scholarly journals At home with New Zealand in the 1960s

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Richard Thomson
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Advanced Technology ◽  
World War ◽  
European Settlement ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Second World ◽  
At Home

<p>Published by A H & A W Reed to immediate success late in 1961, New Zealand in Colour was the first of many large-format books of colour photographs of New Zealand. While they belonged to a tradition of scenic reproduction as old as European settlement, technological changes and the social and economic disruptions of the Second World War intensified the importance of the image in print culture. Drawing on recent historiographic approaches that seek to decentre New Zealand across transnational and city-hinterland relationships, this thesis argues that reproduction, through photography but also as a cultural practice, was intrinsic to a Pakeha conception of place. Looking at scenery was an activity thought to be peculiarly suited to New Zealand, but it was also a prime form of tourist consumption and was therefore essential to New Zealanders’ successful participation in modernity, which required ‘seeing ourselves’ but also awareness of recognition from other moderns. During the decades after the Second World War, modernity took on a more international character with greater mobility of people and goods and a strengthening consumer culture. The complex kinds of looking involved in being modern were increasingly expressed as a tension between modern and anti-modern impulses. The colour pictorial displayed New Zealand as a cultural landscape of cameras, cars, and holidays, but also as a refuge from modernity. The ‘coffee table book’ was a luxury consumer object of advanced technology, but the gift was the preferred method for its circulation. To be at home with this New Zealand may require a move to the suburbs, but it offers a view of nation and nationalism in which mobility, leisure, and consumption have become the chief explanatory tools.</p>

scholarly journals A Polish Approach for German Cities? Cement Old Towns and the Search for Rootedness in Postwar Leipzig and Frankfurt/Main

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-127
Author(s):  
Andrew Demshuk
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
German Cities ◽  
Second World

This essay explores the consequences of a hunger for history amid the architectural desolation that had blighted most German cities by the 1970s. After sweeping demolitions had wrought a so-called ‘second destruction’ that eclipsed the scale of wartime losses, Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain steadily identified Poland as a model for humane reconstruction. Not just historic preservation but even historic replicas long rejected by preservationists as inauthentic were demanded as a way out of modernist anonymity and ugliness to make ‘home’ in an invented history. It was a trend as thoroughly comprehensible as it was problematic – for which history would one privilege? If modernism had encouraged an escape from the past, preservation or reproduction of choice monuments threatened to instill selective forgetting, a reinvention of the past that could marginalize or twist the lessons of wartime destruction. To grapple with these quandaries, this essay begins with an exposition of the increasingly lauded Polish solution through close analysis of the old town in Wrocław, the very ‘capital’ of so-called ‘Recovered Territories’ acquired from Germany after the Second World War. Having reviewed the genesis, realization, and shortcomings of Poland’s nationalized reinscription of urban space, German disappointment with modernist erasure will be examined in Leipzig and Frankfurt, each leading cities in their respective Cold War successor states that roughly paralleled each other in their increasing interest in Polish methods. After timid attempts at preservation and replicas in each city before the mid-1960s failed to satisfy the public longing for hominess, debates intensified about whether to replicate a sweeping array of monuments lost to war and demolition. Alienated in ‘their own’ cities, residents in Frankfurt and Leipzig incited discourse with contemporary ramifications about how to appropriate one’s surroundings as home.

Border Trouble: Ethnopolitics and Cosmopolitan Memory in Recent Polish Cinema

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 522-549 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Cultural Trauma ◽  
World War ◽  
East European ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Post War ◽  
Polish Culture ◽  
Spatial Imagination ◽  
Second World

The border shifts and population exchanges between Central and East European states agreed at the 1945 Potsdam Conference continue to reverberate in the culture and politics of those countries. Focusing on Poland, this article proposes the term “border trouble” to interpret the politicized split in memory that has run through Polish culture since the end of the Second World War. Border trouble is a form of cultural trauma that transcends binaries of perpetrator/victim and oppressor/oppressed; it is also a tool for analyzing the ways in which spatial imagination, memory, and identity interact in visual and literary narratives. A close analysis of four recent feature films demonstrates the emergence of a visual grammar of cosmopolitan memory and identity in relation to borderland spaces. Wojciech Smarzowski’s Róża (“Rose,” 2011) and Agnieszka Holland’s Pokot (“Spoor,” 2017) are both set in territories that were transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945. Wołyń (“Volhynia,” released internationally as “Hatred,” 2016) and W ciemności (“In Darkness,” 2011), also directed by Smarzowski and Holland respectively, are set in regions that were under Polish administration before the war but were transferred to Soviet Ukraine in 1945. All four productions break new ground in the memorialization of the post-war legacy in Poland. They deconstruct hitherto dominant discourses of simultaneity and ethnic homogeneity, engaging in Poland’s wars of symbols as a third voice: anti-nationalist, but also refusing to essentialize cosmopolitan identity. They show the evolution of border trouble in response to contemporary political and cultural developments.

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