Omnis determinatio est negatio

Omnis Determinatio est Negatio. On Habermas, Myth, and Truth With his monumental genealogy of Western philosophy Jürgen Habermas delivers an achievement that is worthy of great praise. In carefully constructed arguments he presents in detail the close connection between, and the mutual indebtedness of, religion and philosophy as they developed in the West for more than two millennia. With regard to the current state of affairs he acknowledges that we should continue to engage with subjects such as purpose, meaningfulness, and how to behave. He proposes that where religion is withdrawing, philosophy should take its place. In spite of its great merits, there are some fundamental shortcomings in the overall image Habermas wishes to convey. By suggesting that Western religion and philosophy have been the major driving forces not only of cognitive but also of ethical progress, he underestimates the moral value of pre-Socratic and other holistic world views that radically differ from the idiosyncratic Western one. For example, he perceives Homer’s mythological thinking as nothing but a primitive state of mind against which the ethical and intellectual progress of later developments could come to the fore. This paper proposes that we should give much more weight to the difference between the ‘cognitive’ and the ‘ethical’ than Habermas does. In principle, as a form of argumentative reasoning, philosophy belongs to the (cognitive) domain of truth. As such, it is not a suitable successor to religion. On the other hand, provided they operate primarily within their own domain – which is the domain of meaningfulness –, religion (in whatever form), literature and the arts, ancient myth, friendship, love, and humour may still be best equipped to sharpen our sense of justice and help us deal with feelings of moral disorientation and fragmentation.

Darwin and Inequality

Charles Darwin during his travels on the Beagle noted the wretched primitive state of natives from Tierra del Fuego. He attributed it to their being egalitarians and to the lack of a leader among them. The Gini Index of inequality suggests strong inequality today in the richest, more developed countries. The paper discusses whether equality and civilization are really incompatible.

A new species of Rangabradya (Copepoda, Harpacticoida, Ectinosomatidae) from a cave in Satun Province, southern Thailand

A representative of the family Ectinosomatidae was discovered in a temporary pool in a cave in the Satun Province, southern Thailand. Based on the characteristics of the antennary exopod, armature of the female fifth leg, and configuration of the male sixth leg, a new species of the genus Rangabradya was identified, representing the first record of the genus in the continental waters of Thailand and in Southeast Asia. The new species can be distinguished from Rangabradya indica by the configurations of the fifth and the sixth legs in both sexes, the body ornamentation of the urosomite, and the armature of the mouthparts. These structures show a more primitive state in the new species. Accordingly, a new subgeneric rank in the genus Rangabradya, Siamorangabradyasubgen. nov, was established to accommodate the Thai species and Rangabradya (Siamorangabradya) wongkamhaengaesubgen. et sp. nov. was described. Also, the key to all 23 genera of the family was updated.

Handicap theory is applied to females but not males in relation to mate choice in the stalk-eyed fly Sphyracephala detrahens

Handicap theory explains that exaggeratedly developed sexual traits become handicaps but serve as honest signals of quality. Because very weak signals are less likely to provide benefits than to simply incur costs, it is interesting to elucidate how sexual traits are generated and developed during evolution. Many stalk-eyed fly species belonging to tribe Diopsini exhibit marked sexual dimorphism in their eye spans, and males with larger eye spans have larger bodies and reproductive capacities, which are more advantageous in terms of contests between males and acceptance for mating by females. In this study, we investigated the role of eye span in a more primitive species, Sphyracephala detrahens, in tribe Sphyracephalini with less pronounced sexual dimorphism. Male-male, female-female, and male–female pairs showed similar contests influenced by eye span, which was correlated with nutrition and reproductive ability in both sexes. During mating, males did not distinguish between sexes and chose individuals with larger eye spans, whereas females did not choose males. However, males with larger eye spans copulated repeatedly. These results indicate that, in this species, eye span with a small sexual difference does not function in sex recognition but affects contest and reproductive outcomes, suggesting the primitive state of sexual dimorphism.

CHARACTERIZATION AND PROPOSALS FOR RECOVERY OF TRADITIONAL TAMANG CONSTRUCTION IN NORTHERN NEPAL

This article is the result of the work of four years of field trips (2016-2019) to the village of Gatlang (Nepal) and visits to some of the surrounding villages in the Rasuwa district. This area is mainly inhabited by Tamang, of Buddhist culture and of distant Mongolian origin. The architecture of the Tamang ethnic group is unique although shares some common characteristics with other mountain or isolated architectures around the world. Due to its difficult access and remote location of these communities, the architecture uses mostly local materials (stone and wood). Although this characteristic is common to many other communities of the Himalayan mountain range, even today it is possible to differentiate architectural styles associated with ethnic groups in different regions. The primitive state of these constructions is progressively altered by the inclusion of new materials, especially in areas affected by earthquakes, such as this one, where the urgency and need to guarantee the safety of new constructions has resulted in disparate and uncontrolled reconstructions. The article aims to identify and analyze Tamang vernacular architecture constructions, their invariants, and gain in-depth knowledge of their general behavior when faced with environmental factors, as well as conservation possibilities. The final objective is to promote the recovery of this architecture, guaranteeing its structural safety and adapting it to the current habitability needs, but trying to maintain the typological invariants that preserve its value as a set of historical, cultural and tourist interests, which form part of the Tamang Heritage Trail.

D.YA. TELEHIN AND EPOCH OF CULTURAL DISTINGUISHING IN MESOLITHIC OF UKRAINE

At the beginning of the 20th century the West European Scholars O. Spengler and А. Toynbee introduced a new мultichoice vision of the World history. In the western archaeology of the interwar period it resulted in rejection of the global stages of the development of the primitive state and mass distinguishing of the numerous local cultures. Іn the course of time the stage-schematic concepts of the culture development have progressively shown a trend to a concept of the locality not only in Western but in Eastern Europe too. The 1970s is notable for a start of the cultures distinguishing boom in the Mesolithic history of the European part of the Soviet Union. Rapid process of distinguishing of the local cultures spread all over European continent having fundamentally changed cultural-historical map of the Mesolithic Europe. The 70s are marked by publishing of numerous monographs dedicated to cultural differentiation and periodization of some regions of the Central-East Europe. These problems have come to dominate at the international congresses and conferences. Congress in 1973 in Warsaw or conference in Leningrad in 1974 might serve as examples. As a result of new cultural-periodizational researches the Mesolithic map of Europe has become extremely variegated and subject to changes almost every year. The process of cultural distinguishing in the Mesolithic studies in Ukraine and Russia was especially stimulated by the achievements of the Polish and the Lithuanian scholars in 1960—70s. A head of Stone Age department of Archaeology Institute of NAS of Ukraine prof. D. Ya. Telehin take active part at distinguishing of the local Mesolithic cultures of Ukraine. The final transfer of D. Ya. Telehin to the positions of locality is demonstrated in his main work, generalizing monograph on the Ukraine Mesolithic in 1982. The researcher in this work has already distinguished near 20 original cultures and types of the monuments developed within two chronological both early and late stages of the Mesolithic in Ukraine. Developing periodization of the Mesolithic of the Ukraine D. Telehin stimulated regional researches directing the youth to study the Mesolithic of separate regions or cultural communities.

Seven correlations between interpersonal violence and the progression of organised religion

While the majority of organised religions determine the origins of religion itself in an act of divine revelation, social science literature takes an evolutionary perspective. Without engaging the question of origin of religion from either perspective, this article proposes seven correlations between interpersonal violence and the progression of organised religion by suggesting that interpersonal violence plays a significant role in the institutionalising process of organised religion. Although interpersonal violence does not necessarily cause the structuring of faith, it reinforces and provides solutions to the existing patterns of threat faced by the community, which together lead to the organisation of religion. The first part of this article (stages 1–4) surveys the psychology of violence by focusing on the theories of frustration–aggression, mimetic rivalry, triangulation and the genesis of scapegoating and guilt. The second part (stages 5–6) marks the transition from personal to social psychology and surveys violence in the primitive religion, as manifested in the ritualising process of the scapegoat, and the genesis of sacrifice. The third part (stage 7) highlights the complexity of ritual, ethics and doctrine, in the evolution of religion from a primitive state to an advanced organised institution.

Lucretius Renaissance Thought

Even before its celebrated rediscovery by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417, Lucretius’s didactic Epicurean epic De rerum natura was famous as a Roman masterpiece celebrated by Virgil and Ovid, and infamous as a capsule of dangerous, irreligious paganism ferociously denounced by Arnobius and other Christian apologists. The manuscript remained in the sole possession of Niccolò Niccoli until his death in 1437 when his library was acquired by Cosimo de Medici and numerous copies began to circulate in Florence and, soon thereafter, in Venice and the Veneto region, then Rome, Naples, and Iberia. A total of fifty-four manuscripts survive from the Renaissance, and thirty editions of the poem were printed by 1600, including commentaries by Albertus Pius (1512), Denys Lambin (1563), and Hubert van Giffen (Gifanius, 1565–1566). The diversity of subjects treated in the De rerum natura has invited a broad range of scholarly approaches. Philological study of the text’s transmission has been extensive, and for many years work on the stemma of Lucretius manuscripts served as a model for transmission studies in general. Historians of science frequently examine Lucretius’s influence on atomism, materialism, corpuscular theory, and ideas of generation, especially from the 17th century on. Scholarship on his influence on poetry, literature, language, and art has concentrated on Italian and English contexts, though his influence in France and Iberia is also extensive. Others have concentrated on Lucretius’s influence on ethics and political thought; his Epicurean celebration of pleasure and his account of how human society and government developed gradually out of a less complicated primitive state greatly influenced Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Thomas Hobbes. Lucretius is also a lynchpin in current debates over the modernity of the Renaissance and is often invoked in narratives that portray Renaissance humanism as a modernizing, secularizing force, characterized by a turn toward rationalism and away from Christian orthodoxy—such narratives are common but also controversial, and much scholarship has been devoted to advancing and to refuting such readings of the Renaissance Lucretius. Other figures often examined in a Lucretian context include Pomponio Leto, Marsilio Ficino, Poliziano, Bartolomeo Scala, Botticelli, Pierre Gassendi, Edmund Spenser, Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, John Dryden, and Girolamo Fracastoro.

Secularism, race, religion and the Public Instruction Act of 1880 in NSW

PurposeThrough a political genealogy, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the institutionalisation of the so-called “secular principle” in NSW state schools in the late-nineteenth century, which is commonly assumed to be a historical moment when religious neutrality was enshrined in public education, was overdetermined by the politics of racialisation and ethno-nationalism.Design/methodology/approachThe historiographical method used here is labelled “political genealogy”. This approach foregrounds how every social order and norm is contingent on political struggles that have shaped its form over time. This includes foregrounding the acts of exclusion that constitute any social order and norm.FindingsThe secular principle institutionalised in the NSW Public Instruction Act of 1880, far from being the “neutral” solution to sectarian conflict, was in fact a product of anti-Catholic sentiment fuelled by the racialisation of Irish Catholicism and ethno-nationalist anxieties about its presence in the colony.Originality/valueThis paper makes clear that “the secular” in secular schooling is neither a product of historical and moral “progress” from a more “primitive” state to a more progressive one, nor a principle of neutrality that stands outside of particular historical and political relations of power. Thus, it encourages a more pragmatic and supple understanding of “the secular” in education. It also invites both advocates and critics of secular education to adapt their arguments based on changing historical circumstances, and to justify the exclusions that such arguments imply without recourse to transcendent principles.