Intellectual Climate Research Articles

The Jealous God of Ancient Greece: Interpreting the Classical Greek Notion of Φθόνος Θεῶν between Renaissance Humanism and Altertumswissenschaft

The description of god as phthoneros (‘envious’, ‘jealous’, ‘grudging’) in the works of Pindar, Aeschylus, and Herodotus has played an important role in the later understanding of archaic and classical Greek religion. This paper explores the genesis and development of several interpretations of the Greek concept of φθόνος θεῶν that have arisen since the Renaissance, and how these relate to wider debates on the relationship between Christianity and ‘paganism’, including the ‘jealous God’ of Scripture. I outline three principal approaches to the topic. First, a Platonizing or Christianizing interpretation whereby divine phthonos is god’s moral disapproval of human ‘hubris’, impiety, or arrogance and thus a form of ‘divine justice’; second, a ‘Paganizing’ interpretation, whereby divine phthonos is an immoral resentment of human success or simply a hostility towards humanity, and represents an essential difference between the ‘moral’ theology of Christianity and ‘amoral’ pagan theology; third, a ‘developmental’ explanation posited in the late Enlightenment (and later popularized in a different form by anthropologists and philologists) as part of a thesis for the religious development of mankind as a whole. In this third view, divine phthonos was initially an ‘amoral’ emotion, felt by the gods of ‘primitive’ religious systems, but the concept was ‘purified’ in the course of the Greeks’ theological development, so that divine phthonos became a ‘moral’ response to hybris. By exploring the intellectual climate which gave rise to each of these interpretations, I trace the origins of the tacit but total disagreement over the meaning of ‘divine phthonos’ in classical scholarship today, and encourage a return to the long-standing debates about a theme at the heart of Herodotus’s Histories and our understanding of Greek religion more generally.

Raising New Orleans: Historical Analogs and Future Environmental Risks

Raising New Orleans: Historical Analogs and Future Environmental Risks

Improving the quality of architectural learning outcomes in Iraq

The research is concerned with the development of the quality of the learning outcomes through the development of a general system and a road map in order to make a qualitative leap in these outputs. This requires knowledge of the nature of the contemporary global intellectual climate (the climate of globalization) In the developed world. If specialized architectural knowledge is one of this economic knowledge, the graduates of this specialization are a feature of that knowledge that characterizes the country and carry cultural characteristics in addition to the qualities of their architectural specialization in order to practice their profession and provide the local labor market and then the world with their skills and expertise of the quality of excellence Scientifically and practically. This requires the knowledge of the nature of educational thought with its different philosophies and theories, which contribute effectively to the creation of an environment of architectural learning and the formation of those skills and specialized architectural expertise, and then to identify the quality features in architectural education, which is an integral part of the quality of higher education. The problem of research was to determine the quality requirements of the architectural learning outcomes in Iraq within a temporal space compatible with the contemporary intellectual climate, assuming a comprehensive strategic system for the different intellectual contexts affecting the architectural education under one intellectual umbrella to achieve the objective of research in building the ground for the development of architectural education. Which outlines the requirements for the quality of these outputs, and this is what the research done specifically through the development of a general framework for it. To come up with a set of conclusions and recommendations that emphasize the importance of taking into account the impact of global thought and educational thought and the conditions and standards of quality of architectural education by placing them within one system of development that takes into account the conditions of specialization and local culture and market needs.

Improving the quality of architectural learning outcomes in Iraq

The research is concerned with the development of the quality of the learning outcomes through the development of a general system and a road map in order to make a qualitative leap in these outputs. This requires knowledge of the nature of the contemporary global intellectual climate (the climate of globalization) In the developed world. If specialized architectural knowledge is one of this economic knowledge, the graduates of this specialization are a feature of that knowledge that characterizes the country and carry cultural characteristics in addition to the qualities of their architectural specialization in order to practice their profession and provide the local labor market and then the world with their skills and expertise of the quality of excellence Scientifically and practically. This requires the knowledge of the nature of educational thought with its different philosophies and theories, which contribute effectively to the creation of an environment of architectural learning and the formation of those skills and specialized architectural expertise, and then to identify the quality features in architectural education, which is an integral part of the quality of higher education. The problem of research was to determine the quality requirements of the architectural learning outcomes in Iraq within a temporal space compatible with the contemporary intellectual climate, assuming a comprehensive strategic system for the different intellectual contexts affecting the architectural education under one intellectual umbrella to achieve the objective of research in building the ground for the development of architectural education. Which outlines the requirements for the quality of these outputs, and this is what the research done specifically through the development of a general framework for it. To come up with a set of conclusions and recommendations that emphasize the importance of taking into account the impact of global thought and educational thought and the conditions and standards of quality of architectural education by placing them within one system of development that takes into account the conditions of specialization and local culture and market needs.

Keynes, Bloomsbury and method

Maynard Keynes’s precocious upbringing in Cambridge (including as a member of the Apostles) and, later, his involvement in the Bloomsbury group, allowed important methodological controversies to be acknowledged – initially through his father’s sympathy towards anti-economistic ways of knowing. This burgeoned into an interdisciplinary distinctiveness, which easily sustained some later radicalisms in Keynesian and post-Keynesian political economy. The intellectual climate at the time additionally included European modernist movements in literature, the arts, philosophy, other social sciences and morals. We now know that many of the controversies characterising heterodox political economy had emerged in scholarly discussion generally; they became implanted (if contentiously) into social enquiry and political economy as they matured throughout the nineteenth century.

Beyond Being There: Practices that Establish Presence, Engage Students and Influence Intellectual Curiosity in a Structured Online Learning Environment

To fully understand teaching presence and its implications for the intellectual climate of an online classroom it is necessary to explore the phenomenon from the perspective of the instructors who experience it. Informed by the theoretical perspective of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model, the actions, intentions and perceptions of instructors were investigated through a collective case study. The goal of this study was to examine the decision processes employed in establishing teaching presence in a structured online environment in order to make a contribution to the body of knowledge from a practical pedagogical perspective. Using the lived experiences of instructors enabled the exploration of the influence pedagogical choices had on the creation of an intellectual climate in the online context. Using semi-structured interviews as the main source of data, the study utilized the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) method as an analytical tool to address concerns of rigor in the qualitative interpretation of experiential data. Results of the collective case revealed student engagement and intellectual curiosity were influenced most greatly by an instructor’s active interest and passion for teaching, an ability to identify the relevance of course topics to the student, and the encouragement for a shared responsibility in the learning process. The findings showed that the shared goal of learning extended beyond the stated learning objectives and expected outcomes of a course and served as a foundation in the creation of authentic relationships between instructor and students. In addressing the overarching research question of how instructors establish teaching presence and inspire intellectual curiosity in a structured teaching environment, the findings of this study contribute to knowledge related to the nature of teaching presence and its role in setting an academic climate in an online classroom.

Science at the court of the cosmocrat: Mughal India, 1531–56

The present article studies a number of texts produced at the court of the Mughal Emperor Humayun in order to argue that there was a rise in prestige for various fields of knowledge such as mathematics, geography and astronomy. While these texts certainly fulfilled a political function (elucidating the cosmos for Mughal universalist claims), they also reflected aspects of the intellectual climate and practices of the sixteenth century that were undergoing a realignment with the expansion of royal authority throughout much of the globe.

State, Nation, and Sociology

The sociological science must be employed in the amelioration of society. The intellectual climate of a nation is a determinant feature for the success of sociology. Actually, there are areas in which the frame seems more favourable. The establishment of new electronic journals, regional and national associations and sociological societies reflects the expanding range of interests and professional specialization.

Classification Along the Color Line: Excavating Racism in the Stacks

This paper contends that systemic violence is fundamentally a classification problem. The interrogation of the production of racialized library subjects in relation to one another and in relation to political and social conditions may shed light on the intensely complex problems of racism in the United States today. I discuss the ways that sections of library classifications were constructed based on ideas about African Americans in relation to American social and political agendas. My claim is that the structures that were written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are deeply embedded in our libraries and have participated in the naturalization of certain racialized assumptions and associations. In the 21st century we continue to maintain, apply, and refine a flawed structure. My aim is to provide a window into how epistemic violence affects American consciousness about race by revealing some of the ways that our library classifications have been woven together by a group of men who cited and informed one another and ultimately, organized and universalized American history. These classifications are structured around assertions about timeless and fixed national values constructed out of progressive conceptualizations of the nation and its citizenry. A reliance on racial exclusion was necessary for this grand narrative, and scientific theories and classifications provided legitimacy and fuel for racist programs. One of key ways that exclusion was legitimated and supported was through the application of evolutionary theory and principles. Social engineering, white supremacy, and conquest were justified and propelled by beliefs in the evolutionary superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. It is not by accident that these ideas became foundational to classificatory practice in libraries. In fact, Thomas Dousa has drawn attention to the intellectual climate in which late 19th century library classificationists worked - particularly, the theories and classifications of the sciences and nature as devised by Auguste Compte, Herbert Spencer, and Charles Darwin - and argues that these ideas and systems inspired the introduction of evolutionary principles into bibliographic classifications.[i] The present paper is in agreement with Dousa's claim and argues that such a conclusion carries critical implications for understanding libraries' classifications of race and ethnicity. Emphasis is placed is on the legacy of the classification of books about people of African descent as variously named and conceptualized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The last section of the paper examines the classifications as performatives to examine some of the processes by which racism has become systemic on library shelves. [i] Thomas M. Dousa, "Evolutionary Order in the Classification Theories of CA Cutter and EC Richardson: Its Nature and Limits." NASKO 2, no. 1 (2011): 76.

Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority: Platonists, Priests, and Gnostics in the Third Century C.E by Heidi Marx-Wolf

Reviewed by: Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority: Platonists, Priests, and Gnostics in the Third Century C.E by Heidi Marx-Wolf David B. Levy KEYWORDS David Levy, Heidi Marx-Wolf, Platonism, Gnosticism, Plotinus, Origen, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Ancient philosophy, Ancient magic, POPI, Greek magic, Coptic magic, Neo-Platonism, Egyptian magic heidi marx-wolf. Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority: Platonists, Priests, and Gnostics in the Third Century C.E. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. 216. This academic, scholarly, and thoughtful book makes a positive contribution to a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, the history of religion (particularly late ancient religion), broad cultural history, esotericism, and mysticism. It is a well written, riveting, and fascinating book that many readers will be unable to put down, but it deserves careful reflection and even multiple readings. The book focuses on how four third-century Platonic philosophers—namely, Plotinus, Origen, Porphyry, Iamblichus (POPI)—developed spiritual [End Page 261] taxonomies (including the ordering of the divine sacred realms of angelology, the lower realms of embodied demonology, the exemplary realms of heroes, the construction of theogonies, and the cosmic ordering of spirits), theurgic praxis, and soteriologies (doctrines of salvation) in a hierarchical, moral, and ontological manner. In our myopic age of narrow academic specialization, it is refreshing to see that Marx-Wolf widens the scope of her analysis to include how the above four philosophers fit into a broader religious third-century Mediterranean historical context. She is to be applauded for her ambitious broad scope of evidence. She marshals not only the primary texts of POPI, but ups the ante by including certain Nag Hammadi texts and Greek and Coptic ritual magic papyri. Marx-Wolf thus insightfully reveals the connections between the above four philosophers and local Christians, pagan Neoplatonists, Egyptian ritual clerical experts, and Gnostic writers (particularly Sethian Gnostics)—all at a time when these groups' religious identities were still under construction. Marx-Wolf maps POPI's relationship to other competing groups of the time, and convincingly shows (as also noted by Heidi Wendt in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, October 27, 2016) that Platonist philosophers, Christian and non-Christian priests, Hermeticists, and Gnostics were "far more interconnected socially, educationally, and intellectually" than previously recognized (3). Thus, POPI did not develop their spiritual taxonomies in isolation, or ex nihilo, but systematized the realm of spirits within a broader social context. POPI's esoteric knowledge was thus embedded and indeed entangled in a social web that Marx-Wolf attempts to trace across disciplinary and religious boundaries. What emerges in Marx-Wolf's portrait of the Mediterranean in the third century is an intellectual climate that is quite vibrant, and more integrated than factional—far from the stereotypical characterization of much previous historiography on this period, which saw this century as marking the onset of "the dark ages." She thus joins a trend in recent scholarship that attempts to recast the third century not as a period of cultural decline, mayhem, and descent into superstition—a dark age between evanescent philosophic speculation and the triumphant rise of the Church—but of creative intellectual exchange and religious innovation. Marx-Wolf also lets us see the familiarity of POPI with the existing medical and religious literature and other domains of knowledge of their time. In reading Marx-Wolf's wonderful book, this reviewer was reminded of Nietzsche's remark that "Christianity is merely watered down Platonism." The book is divided into four main chapters that bring together evidence ranging from the writings of Origen (including his Biblical homilies), to the [End Page 262] work of philosophers responsible for the transmission of Plotinus, Gnostic tractates, and magical handbooks. In keeping with her historicist method, Marx-Wolf begins with an engaging introduction that gives a survey of the recent scholarly literature on demonology and angelology, particularly as it pertains to the religious and historical contexts of late antiquity. Chapter 1 is a tour de force that examines the ascetic impulse of thirdcentury debates about animal sacrifice, particularly with respect to Porphyry's On Abstinence from Killing Animals, as a vehicle for revealing Porphyry's understanding of the mechanism by which blood sacrifices fix or embody demonic forces in this world...

МЕЧТАЮТ ЛИ ЗАПАДНЫЕ МАРКСИСТЫ О РЕВОЛЮЦИИ СЕГОДНЯ?

There is a point of view according to which “Western Marxism” after the collapse of the USSR and the disappearance of the Communist regimes ceased to be a political project and concentrated instead on the study of culture. In this article, the author argues that this is a wrong perception. Many con-temporary Marxist philosophers do study culture a lot, but they continue to exert serious influence if not on political process, then at least on intellectual climate. In the 1990s certain authors changed their discourse concerning the USSR, but today many left philosophers who still stick to Marx’s ideas continue to talk about the necessity of revolution, besides they provide political criticism of contemporary culture of capi-talism and even try to rehabilitate Lenin as a political figure. Something in the discourse of Western Marxists has really changed: as a result of the decline of faith into the linearity of History, Marxists from now on talk about revolution in the context of utopia rather than in the context of progress.

A Prototypical Case in the Making? Challenging Comparative Perspectives on French Aid

The comparative literature presents a mixed picture of French development assistance, with qualitative studies portraying this as a ‘deviant’ case while variable-led analyses view it as broadly ‘representative’. Both sets of studies ignore the possibility that French aid might be ‘prototypical’, laying down ideas and practices for other donors. Drawing upon a conceptual framework and over twenty interviews, this article challenges these comparative perspectives and paves the way for wider consideration of French ideas on international development. It argues that French assistance has undergone ‘mainstreaming’ and developed prototypical features since Prime Minister Jospin’s reforms of the late 1990s. It attributes these prototypical characteristics to France’s continuing ambivalence towards international aid norms, its more strategic approach to promoting French ideas and the emergence of a more propitious intellectual climate for those ideas. It concludes by reconciling different perspectives on French assistance and exploring the implications of these findings for Northern aid.

Kobiety niepokorne, czyli o liderkach Narodowej Organizacji Kobiet. Szkic do portretu zbiorowego działaczek Narodowej Demokracji (1919–1929)

The significance and scale of Endek influence in the nineteenth and twentieth century were not the outcome of stricly party organizations. A social movement, which had been built up since the partition era, reflected the strength of the nationalist camp. Vigorous associations – both secret and conspiratorial – united both men and women of various social backgrounds, economic positions, and professionial affiliations. This included the National Organization of Women (NOK) – founded in 1919 – which was one of the largest and most influential women’s groups in the Second Polish Republic. The following article is an attempt to present selected aspects of the biographies of NOK leaders, which collectively make up a collective portrait of Natinal Democratic women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The analysis includes such elements as: the intellectual climate of the era, the significance of the partitions in female political activism in indepent Poland, and the role of the Catholic faith (both in its individual and social dimensions). It is also indispensable to discuss the circumstances of the NOK’s founding and the motives propelling Polish women toward activism in the public sphere: first, in the electoral campaign to the Constituent Diet (1919) on behalf of the National Democratic movement, and, secondly, through involvement in the association’s actitivities. In this context, it is wortwhile to pose a question about the roles of men and women in the ranks of the National Democratic movement. This is an issue that deserves to be investigated since the members of NOK, in response to the needs of a newly-independent Polish state, rejected the notion of gender conflict, aiming instead to build a community in which the activism of men and women could be mutually complementary.

Danto as Educator

From the title as Educator (1874)1 it would be natural to expect Nietzsche to offer us a detailed account of how Schopenhauer's philosophical system influenced his own thought, or perhaps at a minimum how the sage of Frankfurt's work was crucial for his development as a thinker. After all, Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation clearly left a profound mark on Nietzsche's earliest published work, The Birth of Tragedy. But Nietzsche frustrates these reasonable expectations in the essay, as he is almost entirely silent on Schopenhauer's actual philosophical system. By the point in time of writing as Educator, Nietzsche has apparently taken for granted that this post-Kantian's version of transcendental idealism, his will-less aesthetics, the ethics of compassion, and the praise of asceticism as redemption from the will-to-life are just plain wrongheaded. So why would Nietzsche call Schopenhauer his educator, if Schopenhauer's oeuvre was not particularly educational?Nietzsche focuses on the man as educator. He lauds Schopenhauer as an example of how to be a true philosopher for one's time and culture. Most impressive to him was Schopenhauer's manner of living: independent, free from the dominant religious, political and social thinking of his day; free from the need to draw an income; and, accordingly, free from a formal academic environment. Above all, what was most worthy of emulation, according to Nietzsche, was Schopenhauer's quest for the truth and the suffering he undertook for truth's sake. He suffered in part because of the intellectual climate in which he philosophized that favored Hegelian currents rather antithetical to Schopenhauer's peculiar mixture of Plato, Kant, Vedic thought and attention to contemporary natural science. Ultimately, it is the example of the free, truth-seeking and suffering genius that creates a philosophy with the capacity to disturb that makes Schopenhauer his educator.2Arthur Danto was one of my most important educators. He is responsible, for better or for worse, for putting me on the intellectual and academic path I've been pursuing for the past 20 years, that is, to reconstruct many facets of Schopenhauer's thought, especially his metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics for contemporary use. Unlike Schopenhauer's influence on Nietzsche, however, it is both Danto's work and his personal example as an engaged philosopher and art critic that educated me. Further, Danto's model as a philosophical educator is anything but that of a solitary, untimely sufferer for the sake of the truth, though he did exemplify a kind of freedom from traditional academic style and freedom from the oftentimes-sterile academic concerns of his day. While Danto certainly sought out the truth about the nature and importance of art, history, and many other philosophically rich topics, he was no solitary sufferer. On the contrary, Danto was a very sociable and even joyful philosopher, deeply engaged in his contemporary society, in the academy, and especially in the world of art past and present.I decided to pursue graduate study in philosophy at Columbia in the early 1990s largely because of Arthur Danto. As an undergraduate I read The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), and I recall reading the whole 200-page book in one sitting. In that book, Danto takes the reader on an exhilarating, ridiculously erudite journey through the history of philosophical aesthetics, the history of art, and through contemporary currents in the visual arts especially in the 1950s and 1960s. The meandering but purposive path he takes in the book delivers a compelling case that the essence of a work of art, as opposed to an ordinary object, is that it is an embodiment of meaning, and further, that one needs to understand the historical and institutional background of artistic practice in order to grasp that meaning and to grasp the essential nature of art and why it matters. …

Vladimir Solovyov’s “Sins of Russia,” “Protest,” and “Obituary for Joseph Rabinovich”: Historical (and often neglected) texts in the Catholic intellectual tradition with contemporary comment and reflection

Vladimir Solovyov’s “Sins of Russia,” “Protest,” and “Obituary for Joseph Rabinovich”Historical (and often neglected) texts in the Catholic intellectual tradition with contemporary comment and reflection Gregory Yuri Glazov (bio) Vladimir Solovyov, Russia’s analogue to St. Thomas Aquinas and Bl. John Henry Cardinal Newman, also emerged in the early 1880s as the leading voice in defense of Judaism and Jewish civil rights. The present article serves to introduce some of Solovyov’s lesser-known works on Jewish-Christian relations and to encourage the reader to delve more deeply into this part of his oeuvre.1 Family and friends traced Solovyov’s affection for Jews to his contemplation of Christ as a Jew and to his early disgust for Jew- hatred as un-Christian. His father, one of Russia’s greatest historians, also bequeathed to him a universal worldview that freed him from the judeophobia afflicting many of his contemporary Russian patriots, [End Page 132] influenced as they were by Pan-Slavism, an ideology of action and politics, popularized by Nikolai Danilevsky (1822–85). Danilevsky’s book Russia and Europe proposed that the Slavic peoples were in the process of forging history’s eleventh civilization thanks to their multifaceted, all-assimilating universal humanity. Solovyov satirizes Dostoevsky’s praise for the book as the “future coffee-table book of every Russian,” by calling it “the Koran of all scoundrels and fools.” He further intimates the key difference between his own patriotism and that of the Pan-Slavists in a telling criticism addressed to Strakhov, Danilevsky’s chief exponent in the 1880s: “You regard history as a Chinese Buddhist, and for you there is no sense in my Jewish-Christian question: is the present intellectual climate beneficial or harmful for the divine-human task on earth, in the present historical moment? And by the way, how can Danilevsky’s theory explain that the pure Russian (since it is Orthodox) national culture which we share does not prevent you from being Chinese, and me a Jew?” The italicized words in this excerpt highlight that, for Solovyov, history presents people, individuals, and nations alike, all with divine callings that sanctify not just a life span or an age, but the present moment. In the final question, more difficult to understand, Solovyov emphasizes the failure of Danilevsky’s nationalist determinism to explain how Strakhov and Solovyov can both be Russian Orthodox but subscribe to such different philosophies—Strakhov to what Solovyov deemed a synthesis of Western decadent mechanism and Buddhist passivism, and Solovyov to a biblically rooted belief in the human need to discern a divine calling at every present moment and cooperate with it.2 Solovyov’s conception of the nations and their histories was rooted in the biblical tenet that the peoples of the world are a family of nations for each of whom, he said, adapting Gen 2:18, “it is not good to be alone.” Guided further by his Christian understanding of God as Trinity and Love, Solovyov held that national vocations necessitate fraternal cooperation and love of the other—the other who, being a brother, is necessarily a rival and potentially difficult to live with. [End Page 133] But just as the prophet Isaiah envisioned that the divine task of blessing the earth would be fulfilled through Israel’s cooperation with its traditional enemies Egypt and Assyria (Is 19:24), so Solovyov argued that Russia, as a Gentile Orthodox nation, should develop its messianic vocation by cooperating with Israel, God’s chosen people, and with her Western Catholic brothers, represented by Poland. Only such cooperation, he said, would enable each of these to fulfill their messianic mission to heal the schism between East and West, between spirit and flesh, between the universal and the particular. Consequently, as also explained by Nikolai Bakst, chemist, rabbi, and member of the Pahlen Commission, Solovyov’s wonder about Israel’s perennial cultural receptivity was rooted in his “active and living, rather than abstract and formal, Christian faith which did not permit him to fail to respect other confessions which grew on the same foundations.” Solovyov’s friend Rabbi Faivel Getz also confirmed this evaluation in recalling that Solovyov often characterized Jewish...

Watching Time: Madison Smartt Bell’s All Souls’ Rising, Narrative, Historiography, and the Contemporary Historical Novel

This essay explores a historical fiction that attempts to present a “historically accurate rendition” of the Haitian revolution after postmodernism deconstructed both narrative and history, leaving an intellectual climate skeptical of narrative’s ability to depict the historically real. In Bell’s All Souls’ Rising , characters and plot blend not just with history and not only through historicity, but balance on acceptance or rejection of the narrators’ distinctly diverse historiographic consciousnesses. Bell establishes the contemporary historical novel by productively querying narrative’s production and embracing its myriad possibilities to create a narrative that rejects unity but aspires to comprehensiveness.

The Prehistory of Protolanguage’s Notion. Condillac, Rousseau, De Brosses and the Origins of Language in the Eighteenth Century

The famous prohibition of the Societe de Linguistique de Paris , issued on March 8 th , 1866, which forbade its members to submit research papers about the origin of language, reflected the mood of a precise historical and cultural situation. It was an affirmation of victory achieved by linguistic idealism and German historicis, formalized through an “edict” against the French naturalist-materialist tradition (or a European tradition tradition in general: for instance, in Italy, represented by Giambattista Vico). It was a victory against the philosophy of the Enlightenment, linked to the French Revolution. It was a political and ideological choice and an reflection of the intellectual climate of the Second Restoration, after 1848. In fact, many various and interesting proposals were made in the eighteenth century by the Enlightenment thinkers on the subject of the origin of language. The approaches were empiricist and, at the time, they were meant to counter the theological cliches about the “divine” origins of the primordial language. This theological and metaphysical thesis was opposed by the Enlightenment with a naturalistic explanation. Therefore, those events mark the real prehistory of the protolanguage thesis, concerning human nature, being linked to natural modes of life of the “first men” and primitive humanity. Our paper aims to investigate some of the most original philosophical versions concerning the prehistory of the notion of a protolanguage [1] , echoing the views of our contemporary “gesturalists” (Condillac) and “vocalists” (Rousseau) or “verbalists” (De Brosses). [1] I apologize that I will not adopt the notion of protolanguage in its technical sense, but rather in a historical and descriptive sense.

Defending Political Augustinianism: Brague and Taubes on the “Divine” as a Common Conceptual Space

Augustine holds that each society needs to be oriented to “God and the good.” He invidiously compares the earthly city as receptive to the true God with the earthly city as opposed to the true God, and he resolutely holds that only an earthly city oriented to the true God can be genuinely described as just and legitimate. At first glance this “political Augustinianism” hardly seems very attractive to non-believers or defensible in the eyes of modern secular liberals, and yet in this article I wish to defend it and commend it universally, that is, to promote its benefits and critical insights beyond religious circles. I commend an emphasis on “the divine” (to theion), rather than on God (ho theos), as a bridge to God for believers but also, and more importantly in the West's present liberal pluralist context, as a common halting place where believers and non-believers alike can sense “the beyond” (Augustine's “God and the good”) in their midst. I develop my argument that the “divine,” thus understood, can provide us with a common conceptual space where we can abide, converse, and even agree: (i) by engaging with Jacob Taubes who powerfully criticises such an emphasis on the “divine,” (ii) by considering “divine” natural law as a bridge and halting place between immanence and transcendence, and (iii) by reflecting upon the work of Rémi Brague who has recently given powerful support to the importance and utility in the present intellectual climate of the divine (to theion) as a bridge to God (ho theos).

L’énigme philippine

How come that people, many of whom are applauded for their talents in the seven corners of this world, are deterred from succeeding in their home country? The purpose of this contribution is to explore aspects of the complex problématique of a culture of demotivation in a polity that fails to provide positive prospects. Subsequent despair drives ordinary workers overseas and bleeds the nation dry of talented achievers. In the following, religion, national becoming, way of life and intellectual climate will be spotlighted. These subjects tie in with my observations on the Filipino social imagination (Mulder 2014), and on the haunting question of Philippine national identity (Mulder 2015).

Postcardlogbook

‘Postcardlogbook’ is the “travel diary” of a rereading of Derrida's ‘Envois’ more than thirty years after its publication. It was penned during and after a period of research into the 1974–75 ‘La vie la mort’ seminar, undertaken at the University of California, Irvine, and mimics Derrida's own transatlantic voyages that provided the context for his text. My article borrows a series of formal devices that attempt to maintain it as a peripheral reading of the ‘Envois’. Notably, it refrains from quoting directly from the text or from entering into its substance. It nevertheless addresses, however indirectly, the intellectual climate in Paris at the time the ‘Envois’ were written, and draws comparisons with the current scene, with the current status of Derrida's work, and with problems of a more or less post-literary age.