scholarly journals Kristendom og hellenisme - en skæbnesvanger konstruktion

Author(s):  
Anders Klostergaard Petersen

This essay - representing an elaborated version of the author's inaugural lecture as an associate professor at the Department of the Study of Religion - is a critical survey of the classical scholarly discussion of Hellenism that particularly focuses on the Judaism-Hellenism dichotomy. By an exposition of the intellectual history of the background to the debate (notably Droysen), the author argues that the discussion has to a great extent been subject to the influence of a perceptual filter, representing a Christian apologietic concern - the scope of which is not fully recognised. Hellenism has served as a significant flottant capable of being attributed almost any meaning, but ultimately the category itself stems from a Christian concern, i.e. to construct a period serving as a legitimising cultural and religio-historical foilage for the appearance of early Christianity.Although some important cultural changes do occur subsequent to Alexander the Great (an increased tendency towards urbanisation, important military innovation, for example), they do not constitute tendencies that may be extended to include a universal sultural watershed common to the entire Mediterranean and extra-Mediterranian world and uniting it across the centuries. In addition to that, the discussion is suffering from a deficient interpretation of culture and identity. tghe meeting of different cultures and the confusions of different cultural traditions are perceived in terms of 'pure cultures'. Culture is ontologised or naturalised to the exten that a meeting of cultures is conceived of in terms of separate and fundamentally different cultures that are simultaneously understood to be internally homogenous. Each person is thought to be a carrier or container of his or her culture, thus for instance the Jew incarnating or representing Judaism in its entirelt. From this perspective divergent, modes of dultures are perceived in  terms of cultural or religious contaminataion. Culture, however, does not exist - except as an abstraction - in such pure forms. It is per definition a messy affair.In conclusion I think that in future research we should refrain from using the category of Hellenism is the all-sweeping manner in which it has been used. In fact we should be very careful, when using Judaism, Hellenism or any other taxonomic abstraction, not to commit an 'ontological dumping', reifying concepts which exist only by virtue of scholarly categorisations. Rather than to continue to use a misunderstandable term and an ideologically biased category strongly dependent on a Christian perceptual filter, we should begin looking for the decisive innovations, the important cultural and religious changes, which at particular places and in specific periods may allow us to construe cultural watersheds.

Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson

The book is devoted to the intriguing post-war activity called—with different terms—futurism, futurology, future research, or futures studies. It seeks to understand how futurists and futurologists imagined the Cold War and post-Cold War world and how they used the tools and methods of future research to influence and change that world. Forms of future research emerged after 1945 and engaged with the future both as an object of science and as an object of the human imagination. The book carefully explains these different engagements with the future, and inscribes them in the intellectual history of the post-war period. Futurists were a motley crew of Cold War warriors, nuclear scientists, journalists, and peace activists. Futurism also drew on an eclectic range of repertoires, some of which were deduced from positivist social science, mathematics, and nuclear physics, and some of which came from new strands of critical theory in the margins of the social sciences or sprung from alternative forms of knowledge in science fiction, journalism, or religion. Different forms of prediction lay very different claims to how, and with what accuracy, futures could be known, and what kind of control could be exerted over coming and not yet existing developments. Not surprisingly, such different claims to predictability coincided with radically different notions of human agency, of morality and responsibility, indeed of politics.


Author(s):  
Ivan V. Leonov ◽  
◽  
Vaida L. Solovеva ◽  
David Hallbeck ◽  
◽  
...  

The article is devoted to the delineation of the subject framework and conceptualization of ge-stalt culturology as an independent scientific direction, that can unite many spheres of knowledge, including theories that have no clearly expressed disciplinary status, or are characterized as “distinc-tive” and “original”. The basis of this direction are proceedings of O. Spengler, oriented to the organic approach of Goethe, in which the problem of peculiarities of perception and uniqueness of representa-tions of reality within separate cultures is put as core. Developing this problem, Spengler carried out a detailed and thorough analysis of gestalts of the world of various “cultural organisms”, devoting the greatest part of the “The decline of the West”. Also considered as fundamental the work of H. von Ehrenfels, which became a kind of foundation for the formation of gestalt psychology. Special attention is paid to the works of G.D. Gachev, who worked in Spengler’s tradition and created a series of books devoted to the disclosure of the specifics of the “national images of the world”. The basic parameters of the invariant of the world images, allowing to compare gestalts, born in the space of different cultures, are designated. The text raises the question of interrelations between psychology and culturology in the field of Gestalt-researchers. The specificity of their subject frameworks and intersec-tion points, making cooperation of these sciences in the study area prospective, are shown. Attention is paid to the sphere of exploration of “multilayered” artifacts, material structures and “semantic aura” of which reflect signs of influence of many periods of history. These complex monuments appear as a kind of historical and cultural gestalts that require special methods of study, conservation practices, restoration and exhibiting. The works of T. Kuhn in the field of philosophy of science, the essential aspects of which are based on the understanding of paradigms as a kind of gestalts, in a special way “refractive” reality for the scientific community, are touched upon. The text considers several author’s concepts and basic scientific spheres, intersecting with the subject field of gestalt culturology, among which is distinguished the theory of sociocultural dynamics of P.A. Sorokin, engaged in the analysis of mental structures of different types of culture; cultural-historical psychology, including a whole range of researchers in this field; cultural-intellectual history; cognitive culturology, etc. Attention is paid to the prospects for the development of gestalt culturology in modern science. The text outlines the prob-lem of an adequate translation into Russian of the scientific term “gestalt”, what makes, in fact, all attempts to monosyllabic translation of this term insufficient.


How do emotions change over time? When is hate honorable? What happens when “love” is translated into different languages? Such questions are now being addressed by historians who trace how emotions have been expressed and understood in different cultures throughout history. This book explores the history of feelings such as love, joy, grief, nostalgia as well as a wide range of others, bringing together the latest and most innovative scholarship on the history of the emotions. Spanning the globe from Asia and Europe to North America, the book provides a crucial overview of this emerging discipline. It reviews the field's current status and variations, addresses many of its central debates, provides models and methods, and proposes an array of possibilities for future research. Emphasizing the field's intersections with anthropology, psychology, sociology, neuroscience, data-mining, and popular culture, this ground-breaking book demonstrates the affecting potential of emotions history.


1997 ◽  
pp. 33-36
Author(s):  
Anatoliy Moskovchuk

Ukraine is the motherland of not only Ukrainians but also of many national minorities with different cultures and traditions. Ukraine is a Christian country in general, with non-Christian and non-Christian religions and confessional currents, along with traditional churches - Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant - rooted and actively developing non-traditional Ukrainian culture and spirituality. In Ukraine there is a complex process of spiritual revival, especially in the intellectual environment. Many are written and talk about the preservation of cultural heritage. Everywhere, monuments of architecture, art, which testify to the generally recognized historical contribution of Christianity to the development of spirituality and morality of the Ukrainian people, are restored. In our eyes, there are changes in social and religious relations.


Author(s):  
David Randall

The changed conception of conversation that emerged by c.1700 was about to expand its scope enormously – to the broad culture of Enlightenment Europe, to the fine arts, to philosophy and into the broad political world, both via the conception of public opinion and via the constitutional thought of James Madison (1751–1836). In the Enlightenment, the early modern conception of conversation would expand into a whole wing of Enlightenment thought. The intellectual history of the heirs of Cicero and Petrarch would become the practice of millions and the constitutional architecture of a great republic....


Author(s):  
Durba Mitra

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. This book shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. The book reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. The book demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Reframing the prostitute as a concept, the book overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.


Author(s):  
Roman S. Motulsky

Peculiarities of Belarus libraries' development in the context of political, religious and cultural traditions of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth are considered. It is told about history of monastic libraries, and also about private collections and libraries of educational institutions.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darren Rhodes

Time is a fundamental dimension of human perception, cognition and action, as the perception and cognition of temporal information is essential for everyday activities and survival. Innumerable studies have investigated the perception of time over the last 100 years, but the neural and computational bases for the processing of time remains unknown. First, we present a brief history of research and the methods used in time perception and then discuss the psychophysical approach to time, extant models of time perception, and advancing inconsistencies between each account that this review aims to bridge the gap between. Recent work has advocated a Bayesian approach to time perception. This framework has been applied to both duration and perceived timing, where prior expectations about when a stimulus might occur in the future (prior distribution) are combined with current sensory evidence (likelihood function) in order to generate the perception of temporal properties (posterior distribution). In general, these models predict that the brain uses temporal expectations to bias perception in a way that stimuli are ‘regularized’ i.e. stimuli look more like what has been seen before. Evidence for this framework has been found using human psychophysical testing (experimental methods to quantify behaviour in the perceptual system). Finally, an outlook for how these models can advance future research in temporal perception is discussed.


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