Famous Scholars Research Articles

The contribution of prof. Tadeusz Lewicki (1906–1992) to Islamic and West African studies

Prof. Tadeusz Lewicki (the member Académie des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, Association Internationale d’Études des Civilisations Méditerranéennes, Royal Asiatic Society) was not only one of the most famous scholars of Oriental studies in Poland 20th century but also one of the top experts on the history of the Ibadites. For example, he has gathered exhaustively all the references to Ibadites and placed with a certain amount of commentary of his own (Études ibadites nord-africaines, part 1. Warsaw 1955). He has studied and published Arabic sources (mostly Ibāḍī) on the history of the Ibadites and of the Slavic peoples and cataloged eighth- and ninth-century Arab coins found on Polish territory (Arabic External Sources for the History of Africa to the South of Sahara, Wrocław 1969; Polska i kraje sąsiednie w świetle “Księgi Rogera” geografa arabskiego z XII w. al-Idrīsī’ego, parts 1–2. Warsaw, 1945–54; Źródła arabskie do dziejów słowiańszczyzny, vols. 1–2. Wrocław 1956–69). Professor Tadeusz Lewicki attempts to reconstruct also the economic base of West African society between the 10th and 16th centuries (West African Food in the Middle Ages: According to Arabic Sources, London 1974). His basic sources are 15 Arab authors, all of whom noted the diet of the countries they described.The purpose of this paper is to provide a review and critical analysis of Lewicki’s researches and answer which of his interpretations and philological speculations still have found acceptance. This paper also respect to how Lewicki supports, extends, and qualifies the previous literature on West African, Islamic and Ibadites study, and how gives directions for future research.

The Narrative Express of the Concept of Structure - <i>Pagoda in the Fantian Temple</i> of Shen Kuo as Example

Through the narrative express of the stories on how to solve structural problems, the concept of structure can be more easily analyzed. In the story Pagoda in the Fantian Temple written by Shen Kuo, a famous scholar in Northern Song Dynasty China, ancient Chinese analyzed the stability of structure by analogy. That kind of analogy often led to uncertainty if without the complementary validity of fact. Shen Kuo laid out an excellent scientific reasoning on the stability of structure in the text narrating.

How Famous is Theodor Grotthuss in Lithuania?

With the encouragement of Theodor Grotthuss Fund in Vilnius, the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences published a bibliographical index of works by and about Theodor Grotthuss (1996). The work, compiled by bibliographers Kulikauskienė and Vitkauskienė was the first attempt ever to register references not only by the famous scholar, but also publications about him and his creative work in one edition. The index was compiled using the works by F. Recke, K. Napiersky, A. Žvironas, J. Stradinš, J. A. Krikštopaitis, also the holdings of the major libraries in Lithuania. A biography of T. Grothuss with an extensive list of literature was published by J. A. Krikštopaitis (2005). A bibliographical work to register all information about T. Grothuss including a list of important dates in his life and his scientific activities as well as the list of dates commemorating the name of T. Grotthuss is still ongoing at the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences.

Early Contributions to the Theory of Islamic Governance: lhringAbd al-Rahman al-Awzalhringi

This paper deals with the political understanding of one of the early masters of fiqh, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Awzāʿī (d. 157/773), as manifested in his biography and what can be substantiated of his legal scholarship. It argues that, although the principles of Islamic governance were systematically formulated and laid down by later generations, the corresponding concepts were well established and acted upon in the generation of this famous Syrian scholar. The paper draws on primary historical source material that has hitherto been largely underused. It sheds light on the scholar and his time, his evaluation of political events, his attitude to and relationship with people in power and his views on the legitimacy of rulers.

Selection of imperial doctors by the Qing court in 1880

In the 6(th) year of the Guangxu Period (1880), Queen Mother Ci Xi was in poor health and the court looked for famous doctors everywhere. Eight doctors were selected by governors and sent to Beijing. After a 3-month long assessment, XUE Fuchen, WANG Shouzheng and MA Wenzhi were selected to help with the treatment of Queen Mother Ci Xi's disease. The Queen Mother was cured and doctors were rewarded twice in the 2(nd) and the 3(rd) year. Giving up medicine, XUE Fuchen and WANG Shouzheng took advantage of this opportunity to participate in politics, but did not realize their aspirations in the end. MA Wenzhi refused to be an official with the excuse of health problems and received the permission to go home, where he worked for patients, wrote medical books and finally became a famous medical scholar.

Preface

Preface Michael C. Jordan, Editor As though pointing to the veracity of the claim made by Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman in The Idea of a University that the circle of knowledge is “mutilated” and in need of reform when theology is dropped from it, there have been several recent claims that in postmodern thinking the category of the theological “has now returned with a vengeance,” and that we are witnessing in several notable contemporary philosophers a “‘turn to religion’ and to monotheism in particular.”1 Few participants in the contemporary discourse concerning the nature of the human person and the origin and idea of human culture have reasserted the continuing vitality of Christianity more powerfully than René Girard. Girard’s publications have been primarily in the area of literature, mythology, and anthropology, beginning with a book in 1961 on Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, and Proust, translated into English in 1965 as Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. In 1999, looking back at the course of his career, Girard observed: “Great literature literally led me to Christianity. This itinerary is not original. It still happens every day and has been happening since the beginning of Christianity.”2 But that [End Page 5] itinerary does not describe the path travelled by the most famous scholars of literature during the rise of literary theory in the 1960s and 1970s, making Girard’s academic accomplishments all the more remarkable. He has been actively engaged with many of the most prominent intellectual movements in the humanities from the 1960s through today, but throughout that time he has become increasingly direct and persuasive in his assertion of the truth of biblical revelation in our efforts to understand all areas of human culture and to find salvation from the violence that is deeply ingrained in it. In this engagement, Girard has shown himself to be an important proponent of the Catholic intellectual tradition. We can trace Girard’s engagement with contemporary thinking in the humanities back to his position as one of the coorganizers of an important international conference in Baltimore in 1966 while he was a professor at Johns Hopkins University. That conference, titled “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” marked the academic ascendance of French structuralism and the establishment of the hope that the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure could provide a new basis for the humanities as the interdisciplinary study of all of human culture understood as a structure of signs. Such an approach promised nothing less than a new basis for the production and organization of knowledge in the human sciences, offering a new system of thought on the basis of which the various disciplines in the humanities could become cooperative partners in explaining all of culture as a vast semiotic system. Since the basis for this new understanding of the human sciences resided in the capability of the human person to make and use signs in accord with the recently discovered structuralist principles of sign systems, a new understanding of all claims to truth made by texts and other cultural products throughout cultural history, including religions and religious rituals, could now be pursued. Jacques Derrida gave a brilliant presentation at this conference in an essay titled “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Derrida claims that the new understanding of [End Page 6] all of culture as a semiotic system has introduced a new historical epoch, indicating in a historicist mode that the emergence of this new knowledge of the human person as inevitably caught within the production of semiotic systems that had no ground or foundation outside of the operation of the system itself has inevitably changed the possibilities of human knowledge. Derrida speaks in a prophetic mode at the conclusion of this essay as he ponders the emergence of a radically new cultural epoch now that we have finally come to understand ourselves as in a sense both producers and products of the systems of signs through which all of human culture has always been generated: Here there is a sort of question, call it historical, of which we are only glimpsing today the conception, the...

The Philosophy of Richard Rorty

Richard Rorty was a seminal figure in philosophy, transforming the discipline during the last quarter of the 20th century and setting it on a new path for the 21st. An early, implacable critic of the widespread preoccupation with questions of truth, representation, and the foundations of knowledge, Rorty promoted a new type of philosophical pragmatism with great persuasive power, and many have credited him with inspiring the renewed interest in the thought of classical American philosophy, especially his hero John Dewey. Always controversial, Rorty's books and essays were read as carefully by his critics as by his admirers. This book includes in its nearly 1,000 pages Rorty's intellectual autobiography, 29 previously unpublished critical and descriptive essays by famous scholars, Rorty's replies to most of them, and a complete bibliography of his published works. Since Rorty passed away in 2007, his contributions to this volume have a special importance as among his final writings.

From Twelfth-Century Schools to Thirteenth-Century Universities: The Disappearance of Biographical and Autobiographical Representations of Scholars

Learned men of the twelfth century, especially the first half, frequently wrote about themselves and each other. Well-known examples of autobiographical writing include Guibert of Nogent's De vita sua or Monodiae, Rupert of Deutz's defense of his theological career in his Apologia attached to his commentary on the Benedictine rule, Peter Abelard's Historia calamitatum, and Gerald of Wales's De rebus a se gestis. Examples of biographical narrative are easily found: the life of St. Goswin included an account of Goswin defeating Abelard in disputation; Baudri of Bourgueil wrote a poem about famous schools and scholars; the anonymous Metamorphosis Goliae provided characterizations of many masters; John of Salisbury's Metalogicon described the teaching methods of Bernard of Chartres and, in an autobiographical account of his own education, offered sketches of many of the leading masters in northern France, while Otto of Freising's Gesta Friderici I Imperatoris recounted parts of the academic careers of Abelard...

Igor M. Diakonoff's “Kirkenes Ethics”: The Moral Credo of a Great Scholar

During the seven years that I worked at the Institute of Oriental Studies (Leningrad Branch, 1965–1972) I was happy to be associated with an outstanding senior colleague, a wonderful scholar, and an even more wonderful person Igor Mikhailovich Diakonoff, a world famous scholar in many areas of history, philology, and linguistics. In this essay it is not his professional activity that interests me but rather his moral attitude as expressed in his short meditation on ethics.

An International Debate on the Status of the Quaternary as a Formal Chronostratigraphical Unit and the Final Ratification of the Quaternary System/Period

The term Quaternary' has been widely used in the Earth Sciences,representing the youngest time span in the geological history of the Earth. Quaternary research has attracted much attention as it is one of the most important scientific fields for understanding global environmental change. However,a long-running debate over both the status of the Quaternary as a formal chronostratigraphical unit and its base ( 1. 8 Ma versus 2. 6 Ma) has existed since the coining of the term in the 18th century. In 2004,the term Quaternary' was even abandoned by some famous scholars and organizations,leading to a heated international debate. Finally in 2009,a proposal for establishing Quaternary as a formal international Period/System with its base at 2. 6 Ma was formally ratified by the International Union of Geological Sciences. Here we first review the history of the term Quaternary',and then celebrate the historic contribution which the Chinese loess community have made in the effort to retain the term Quaternary' and to assign it a formal rank in the Geologic Time Scale.

The missing link in the history of urology: A call for more efforts to bridge the gap

With few exceptions, most of the current publications on history of urology still ignore the scientific and technological events of the more than a thousand years between the Greco-Roman times and the modern era. This has broken an important link in the globally continuous line of progress and evolution of world civilizations. Another aggravation of that missing-link problem in the history of urology, and history of medicine, in general, is the large number of articles based, only, on copying from secondary sources without checking the primary sources (the edited and published original manuscripts). Such articles easily propagate omissions, deficiencies, misunderstandings, distortions, and unfounded claims. On the other hand, in the Arabic and Islamic world, though many original authentic medical manuscripts written by famous scholars of the Islamic era were authoritatively edited and published during the twentieth century, the number of primary source studies based on them by historians or medical researchers remained few and were limited to individual efforts. Therefore, we focused on this missing-link era and performed several primary source studies of the published medical works of ten scholars who lived and practiced between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries and whose Latinized books were available in Europe as early as the twelfth century with their influence lasting until the eighteenth century. Our results confirm that those scholars of the Islamic era were not mere compilers or sheer transmitters of Greco-Roman medical literature. On the contrary, they critically reviewed the translated heritage of previous civilizations rejecting what is superfluous and accepting only what proves to be true. They added original contributions to the progress of urology and pioneered new fields of medical knowledge and practice such as medical ethics, medical education, medical certification, health education, preventive medicine, hospitals and hospital training, medical-practice quality control, clinical medicine, differential diagnosis, experimental medicine, experimental surgery, beginnings of specialization, pharmacology, use of anesthetics, and many other new discoveries in anatomy, physiology, pathology, therapeutics, surgical instruments, and surgical techniques.

Knowledge as a Way of Living: In Dialogue with Daya Krishna

Knowledge as a Way of Living:In Dialogue with Daya Krishna Daniel Raveh A month has passed. I still cannot grasp the fact that he is really no longer in this world. That I will not drive to see him on my scooter, stopping on the way for a mālā of flowers, namkeen, lemon tart from Bake-hut, café latté from Barista, pan from the corner shop near Niro's. I used to reach Dayaji's home around seven-thirty in the evening, to always find him reading. I would sit quietly not to disturb him, until he suddenly noticed me and exclaimed: "Kaun? Daniel?" And then we would sit and discuss everything under the sun: Advaita, Nyāya, Kant, beauty, mathematics, music, art, thinking itself, Patañjali's Yogasūtra, the , cricket. "Did you write anything?" he would ask with shining eyes, or tell me of his unbelievable discoveries, about a new book or article he had read earlier in the day, about his own writing; or he would dictate a letter to me, to be sent the next morning via e-mail. "May I have more ice?" he would ask with a smile, pointing at his glass of beer or soda, and then carefully, accurately, formulate another argument, encouraging me to ask a question, to disagree, to take issue with him. Last year, at the Interim World Philosophy Congress in Delhi, Dayaji met Sengaku Mayeda. These famous scholars, acquainted with each other's work, met for the first time. "What is your philosophy?" asked Mayeda. Dayaji laughed. "We are thinking" he said in reply. What he actually meant was that his interest knows no boundaries; that his mind constantly produces doubts and queries; that he cannot leave any convention-axiom-postulation unquestioned; that he is appreciative and critical at the same time toward every position-argument-text; that he wants to read with and through a text, rather than taking for granted, abiding, repeating. "Perhaps we could think of Kant in another way," he wrote recently to Professor Bhuvan Chandel, "not as a philosopher to be 'understood' by other thinkers in the last two hundred years, but as a starting point for carrying the Kantian enterprise further. This can be done in the context of other philosophers also, instead of wasting time in 'understanding' what they 'really' said. We might profit from their insights and carry them further to the best of our ability. This would bring diverse and multiple aspects of a thinker to our notice which seldom are seen and other strains which exist only as a tendency in his thought." Over the years, Dayaji "fought" (at least) two great "philosophical battles." The first was against what he referred to as "myths" about Indian philosophy, and primarily the so-called distinction, unfortunately still prevailing in many circles, between "Western philosophy" and "Eastern wisdom." Dayaji struggled to show that Indian philosophy is not less philosophical than its Western counterpart. At the same [End Page 431] time he highly respected and was immensely interested in Chinese and Japanese philosophies. The reduction of Indian philosophy to a "spiritual" or endeavor simply enraged him. On this subject see his famous article "Three Myths about Indian Philosophy," in his magnum opus Indian Philosophy: A Counter Perspective (recently published in a revised and enlarged edition by Sri Satguru Publications, Delhi). "The interests of Western Indological studies combined with the search for a spiritual self-identity in the face of overwhelming Western superiority in all fields of knowledge," he wrote in his preface to this intriguing collection of articles, "seemed to have led to the creation of a certain picture of India's philosophical past which has become fixed in the minds of successive generations both in India and abroad, through innumerable textbooks which render it almost impossible to question the picture or build a different one." He further wrote that the second objective of his book and of his work in Indian philosophy in general was to "re-establish a living continuity with India's philosophical past to make it relevant to the intellectual concerns of the present." The final objective of the book, he explained, "is to take a close...

The Ribat of Arsuf and the Coastal Defence System in Early Islamic Palestine

Early Muslim governors and army commanders of Bilād al-Shām (Greater Syria) were aware of the strategic importance of the coastal frontiers of their territories along the eastern basin of the Mediterranean. With the ascent of the Umayyads and the transfer of the capital from Kufa (Iraq) to Damascus, the Syrian region was fortified with ribāṭs and miḥrāses. The purpose was both to protect the coast from outside attacks and to protect Umayyad rule in its first years from internal as well as external threats, and to guard trunk routes on land and maritime trade routes within the territorial waters of the Islamic provinces. There were three types of ribāṭs in the Muslim world. The first may be called ribāṭ towns, which included coastal and port towns. Their importance was not only economic and cultural but also military and strategic. These were fortified towns surrounded by watchtowers, often with inner forts, and garrisoned with cavalry troops to defend the coast from hostile raids. The second type was the military fortress, Sūsa and Monastir in Tunisia, for example, and Azdūd, Māḥūz Yubnā and Kafr Lām in Palestine. These fortresses, generally situated outside the town limits, in front of it and facing the enemy, are of the central courtyard type with round watchtowers at the corners and two semicircular towers protecting the main gate. The courtyards were surrounded by arms and food warehouses, stables for cattle and horses, larger and smaller rooms, as well as prayers niches. The third type was a military lookout tower manned by at least five horsemen, equipped with defensive and deterrent arms. Arsūf is thought to be one of the seven ribāṭs that protected the capital Ramla until the Crusader conquest. Like the others, Arsūf was a walled town (probably backed up by a fort) and linked to Ramla by a line of watchtowers. The overwhelming majority of its citizens were Muslims, some of them famous scholars and even qāḍīs who served in the defence of Jund Filasṭīn as also of Muslim frontiers beyond Bilād al-Shām. Those stationed in the ribāṭ of Arsūf earned their living from crafts, industry, farming, and trade. The proximity to Ramla made it necessary for regular soldiers and volunteers to relieve the jihād warriors several times a year. The memorial structure (maqām), widely known as Maqām Sayyidunā ʿAlī, appears to have been built in the eleventh century ce, and is said to be the work of Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn ʿUlaym or ʿUlayl, a descendants of the second caliph, ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb.

A Mirror Image of Sigmund Skard? Paul Knaplund and the Role of the Historian between European and American Cultures

1. IntroductionPaul Knaplund (1885-1962), long -time Professor of History and Chair at the University of Wisconsin, was one of the great and famous scholars of the British Empire. Yet, a significant amount of his time and energy as a scholar was devoted to historical issues in Norway and to Scandinavian immigrant culture in the US Midwest. This article consider’s Knaplund’s Norwegian background and his role as cultural intermediary between Norway and the United States. Knaplund was not alone ...

Irony in a judicial debate: analyzing the subtleties of irony while testing the subtleties of an annotation scheme

Irony has been studied by famous scholars across centuries, as well as more recently in cognitive and pragmatic research. The prosodic and visual signals of irony were also studied. Irony is a communicative act in which the Sender’s literal goal is to communicate a meaning x, but through this meaning the Sender has the goal to communicate another meaning, y, which is contrasting, sometimes even opposite, to meaning x. In this case we have an antiphrastic irony. So an ironic act is an indirect speech act, in that its true meaning, the one really intended by the Sender, is not the one communicated by the literal meaning of the communicative act: it must be understood through inferences by the Addressee. The ironic statement may concern an event, object or person, and in this case, the Addressee, or a third person, or even the Sender itself (Self-irony). In this paper we define irony in terms of a goal and belief view of communication, and show how the annotation scheme, the Anvil-Score, and illustrate aspects of its expressive power by applying it to a particular case: ironic communication in a judicial debate.

The Evolution of a Confucian Landscape in the Andong Cultural Region of Korea: Universalism or Particularism?

It is generally known that (private) academies are heavily concentrated in the so-called Andong cultural region, or in the upper reaches of the Naktong River. This region is the ancestral home of many yangban families that not only influenced the locality but also the whole country. From the Neo-Confucian perspective, there were many sites in the region suitable for studying Confucianism through self-reflection. The physical (topographical) conditions and the sage named T’oegye were responsible for the relative concentration of academies in the region. Depending on the spatial pattern of diffusion, the developmental process of academies in the region can be divided into three stages: the original, transformative and restorative. In the original stage, the main way to justify the location of an academy was to infuse the site with meaning by linking the famous scholars both in space and time. The geographical connections of the scholars to the sites of study or retreat often justified the location of academies. It is the enshrined scholars who added sacredness to the site. In the transformative and restorative stages, increasingly, lineage connection rather than geographical connection and scholarly achievement became an important factor in the foundation of academy shrines. In the construction of an academy, therefore, the religious and intellectual justification for shrine-building sometimes became a controversial issue. Instances of contention also occurred among different groups over the same site that eventually led to territorial division. Neo-Confucianism, as it has been practiced in academies in the Andong cultural region, seems to share characteristics in common with those religions that bind people firmly to a place. The academy has eventually turned from a place open to any lineage groups into a place only open to one or more lineage groups. Neo-Confucianism, which originally claimed to be a universal ideology, has been increasingly practiced as a particularism within regional and local boundaries. Neo-Confucianism is a place-bound religion that has encouraged love for one’s own lineage and hostility to others. The academy is a landscape of high visibility and public significance that has served to enhance a sense of lineage identity. It has encouraged the lineage’s loyalty to its own territory.

Experimentelle Arbeiten russischer Mediziner an der Leipziger Universität in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts

The aim of the treatise is the proof of educational stays of Russian physicians at the university of Leipzig in the second half of the 19th century. At that time famous scholars of the university of Leipzig like Carl Ludwig, Paul Flechsig,Wilhelm His, Julius Cohnheim and Felix Marchand made an important contribution to the development of physiology, pathology, physiological chemistry and pharmacology.Therefore their institutes were attended by many student trainees.Among them were a lot of Russian physicians too.They went to Leipzig with fellowships from their government to prepare themselves for a professorship in Russia. A bibliography of their experimental works is given.The findings are based on an investigation in German medical magazines.

Writing from Disaster: Two Autobiographies

Writing from Disaster:Two Autobiographies Françoise Meltzer (bio) Victor H. Brombert . Trains of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth. New York: Norton, 2002. Pp. 334. Marcel Reich-Ranicki . The Author of Himself: The Life of Marcel Reich Ranicki. Translated from the German by Ewald Osers. Mein Leben. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Pp. viii + 407. Life, Nietzsche noted in The Use and Abuse of History, "is absolutely impossible without forgetting." An apparently contrary declaration appears at the entrance to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem: "Memory is Redemption." And yet, one can argue that both are true with respect to memories of horror. The right to amnesia is undeniable, if only for the sake of preserving some sense of humanity and sanity for the victim. At the same time, the right to testify—to record so that history is not rewritten, often in the hope that the same horrors are not repeated—is equally forceful. "Who will witness for the witness?" asked the poet Paul Celan. The Holocaust holds no monopoly on human horror. But when Jesse Jackson, for example, says he is "tired of hearing about the Holocaust" (a comment for which he later apologized), and when there are still "historians" arguing that it never occurred or was greatly exaggerated, and when in the general populace there are some who view the catastrophe with scandalous and ignorant skepticism (Mel Gibson's father comes to mind), it is clear that, in the words of Lawrence Langer, "every future generation will have to be educated anew in how to face the historical period we call the Holocaust."1 In this sense, the Holocaust is not to be relegated to that which must be told to future generations of Jews only, as if an addendum [End Page 107] of horror to the Passover story. I take Langer's "every future generation" to mean just that. Geoffrey Hartman notes that the Holocaust may be an event "that has ruptured our sense of what human nature is."2 It is hardly surprising that some survivors choose to repress their experience, finding life without such forgetting impossible. And there are those, as we know, who, through the retelling of their experience, attempt a kind of healing, or unburdening, or registering of the events as they lived them. But, as Hartman also points out, "it is getting late." Perhaps because it is getting "late" for the survivors, a large spate of Jewish memoirs from the Second World War, including the two under review here, have recently appeared. But I want to be careful here: several years ago I argued in one of my books that Paul Celan, though he had taken his life some twenty years after the end of the war, was nonetheless (for complicated reasons I won't go into here) a Holocaust victim. I was taken to task by a scholar of the Holocaust who wrote to me that Holocaust victims could only be defined as those who actually died in the camps. Accordingly, then, the two autobiographical memoirs that I will consider here are not strictly speaking written by Holocaust survivors. The first, Trains of Thought: Memories of a Stateless Youth, is by the famous scholar of French literature Victor Brombert. His is the story of a Jewish refugee from occupied Nazi Paris. The second, by the German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, is his account of the Warsaw Ghetto, which he managed quite incredibly to survive. Given the conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto, it seems to me to be permissible to call those few who escaped with their lives Holocaust survivors. Indeed, the cover of the Reich-Ranicki memoir cites the Times Literary Supplement's opinion of the book: ". . . an unforgettable piece of Holocaust literature." I bring up this problem of definition, not in order to quibble over lexical details, a tactic which would be at best inappropriate in this context. I bring it up as a mode of respect for those who did, in fact, survive the camps, so that their stories will be in no way belittled, cheapened, or otherwise lessened through neutralizing or dehistoricizing analogies. There can be no analogies for the Nazi death...

<strong>Editing as Intellectual Community:</strong> A Retrospective Manifesto

Editing as Intellectual Community:A Retrospective Manifesto Alan Mintz IT WAS NOT ONLY TO ADVANCE the body of knowledge that Prooftexts was founded but also to create an invisible intellectual community. After the heady experience of graduate school and study in Israel, many of us found ourselves in our first jobs in the academy feeling dispersed and isolated. While members of English departments seemed to have an abundance of colleagues with whom to chat and dispute, we students of Jewish literatures, especially Hebrew, were sequestered in fractious Middle Eastern departments and often preoccupied with remedial language pedagogy. Although we were well warned that journal editing would add little to our chances for tenure, the urge to connect with other young scholars was too strong to renounce. Yes, we wanted to see our work published, but even more than that, we wanted to see our work paid attention to. And that attention, it turned out, was largely to come before our articles appeared in print. From the outset, we saw the essential function of Prooftexts's small editorial board to serve as a forum in which manuscripts of the editors' own work would be circulated for substantive comment. We realized that we could no longer depend—and, in some cases, did not wish to depend—upon the kindness (or distemper) of our graduate directors and senior colleagues for response to our scholarship. We had to rely instead on one another, and forming an editorial board became a way of entering into a kind of covenant of mutual assistance. The sort of critique we sought was frank, substantive, and supportive; and in return for this precious, if not always pleasant, gift, we committed [End Page 273] ourselves to rewriting and revising as a matter of course. As a reified object, then, the published article that would appear many months later was in many ways less interesting, at least for its author, for its obscuring the give-and-take that had gone into its final formulation. Not all of the early editors realized that this was the process that they had signed on for. Critique and the exposure it entailed were not to the liking of some, and they departed. The organization of Prooftexts owes much to the American generation during which it was founded. We had well observed, and experienced, the rancor that had characterized relations among some of the eminences in the field, and we wanted to conduct our collegial business in a different mode. We did not mind acknowledging the fact that as scholars, we were perhaps less eminent, if it meant that we could get on with one another more respectfully and agreeably. The sum product of our collective work, enriched through mutual critique and comment, might compensate for the lack of near-total mastery possessed by some of our teachers. We hoped, after the manner of American pragmatism, that the reasoning of several minds would give us a decent chance of getting closer to the truth. In putting together the editorial apparatus of Prooftexts, moreover, we sought to avoid what we saw on the mastheads of many another journal: long lists of famous scholars who, in fact, had little active and vital connection to the journal and who had merely condescended to contribute the glitter of their reputations. That was the only contribution these journals were likely to receive from these scholars; and in the case when a submission was indeed forthcoming, it would have to be accepted whether it was of the first quality or not. We strove for an American voice also in matters of style. When it came to the shaping and formulating of academic writing about Jewish literature, we had grown up with two different models. The Israeli model came with the provenance of Wissenschaft des Judentums and Russian Formalism and reflected the concentrated and intensely contentious cultural world in which it was produced. It was marked by careful attention to texts, exhaustive and often exhausting references, polemical exuberance—and sometimes license—and, in its Tel Aviv incarnation, an aspiration to scientific formulation. The other model was the Anglo-American essay, which took seriously the idea of an essay as an essai, an...

WS3-1 相似則と対数則

Meaning of similarity is discussed from rather wide point of view that is from philosophical point it is recognized as a useful tool of recognition. Symbol is considered a unification of a similarity of an object and some representative of it, which is used by human being. In fluid mechanics discovery of novel similarity law means always new development of the research. Law of the wall is one of the cornerstone of such a similarity laws and the log law contained it is the impressible law for every one who learns turbulence at the first time. While which can be derived from various methods and confirmed from very many experiments, but questions about its validity are raised by some researches. Very active controversy on it appeared in recent years by famous scholars. In this report, a personal over view of the history of the law will be given and some comments are presented for the future development of it.