Supreme Form Research Articles

Homophobic Africa? Toward A More Nuanced View

Abstract:The recent emergence of homosexuality as a central issue in public debate in various parts of Africa has encouraged a stereotypical image of one homophobic Africa, often placed in opposition to a tolerant or depraved West. What is striking is that this image of Africa as homophobic is promoted by both traditionalists who insist that homosexuality is a Western intrusionand bythe Western media that focus on homophobic statements from African political and religious leaders. What both neglect, however, is the existence of internal debate and disagreements among Africans on the subject of homosexuality. In this article we try to counter this image of a homophobic Africa with a more nuanced discussion, including a comparison of different trajectories in the emergence of homosexuality as a public issue in four countries (Senegal, Cameroon, Uganda, and South Africa). The comparison highlights considerable variations in the ways in which the issue became politicized. There is a world of difference, for example, between the image of the homosexual asun Grand(a rich and powerful “Big Man”) who imposes anal penetration as a supreme form of subjection (as in Cameroon or Gabon, where homosexuality is associated with witchcraft and other occult forces; compare Achille Mbembe's visionary evocation of a “phallocracy”) and the often quite marginal persons who become victims of gay persecution in other contexts. More insight into the variations of what is loosely and inaccurately called “homophobia” can help connect international pressures for decriminalization and protection to local circumstances. Working through local activists is crucial for the effort to counter homophobia in Africa.

Orthodox Reactions to "Wissenschaft des Judentums"

��� Wissenschaft des Judentums, 1 the scholarly study of the Jewish religion and people, which originated in the 1820s, challenged many traditional principles and in fact threatened conceptions of the Jewish traditional past. According to some scholars, Wissenschaft des Judentums appears as an irrevocable fissure in Jewish life that wrought havoc on all elements of Jewish culture, due to the assimilatory motives of its founders. One of those scholars, Gershom Scholem, claimed that German Jewish historians had at best an antiquarian interest in Jewish history. 2 Conversely, other scholars believed Wissenschaft des Judentums was the supreme form of German–Jewish self-expression. 3 Either way, everybody agreed that Wissenschaft des Judentums was regarded, by many traditional Jews, as a real threat to Jewish traditional values. At the heart of this threat lay several premises and Weltanschauungen, both methodological and of content. Those concerned: (i) objectivity—a necessary pre-condition for research of the culture or its historical outcome was the recognition of science’s objective truth. Objective research free of dogmas was conditional upon the examination of questions without pre-existing answers, and on obedience to the power of evidence rather than to the authority of tradition with its wealth of historical pretensions. As a corollary to the right of free research, the critical student of the origins of Judaism had to choose a detached observation point. The internal norms of the researched field (the Halacha, for example) no longer obligated the observer and were not to influence his critical

Introduction: Untimely Nostromo

Introduction:Untimely Nostromo Peter Lancelot Mallios (bio) In this foretaste of eternal peace they floated vivid and light, like unearthly clear dreams of earthly things that may haunt the souls freed by death from the misty atmosphere of regrets and hopes [. . . . ] [Martin Decoud] had the strangest sensation of his soul having returned into his body from the circumambient darkness in which land, sea, sky, the mountains, and the rocks were as if they had not been. —Nostromo (1904) We are discussing a problem of abstraction whereby, among many other things, a supreme abstract form slowly appears which is called that of Time itself, and which then holds out the mirage of some pure and immediate experience of itself [. . . . ] [But Nostromo] is rather the situation which suddenly allows the veil to be ripped away from this intolerable ontological bedrock, and it imposes it on consciousness as the ultimate lucidity. —Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (1982) It is a normal if unconscious ambition of the reader to live vicariously through an imagined experience; to live through scenes. But [in Nostromo] every promised scene is here broken off, at most after a few pages. The reader is never allowed to settle down and enjoy. And so too, if only to combat that vertigo, the reader incorrigibly longs to locate himself in time and space, and incorrigibly wants to apprehend experience in its order and degree of importance. But this longing is frustrated from beginning to end [. . . . ] The common reader's notorious general aim—to enter into the book and become one of its characters—is carefully and austerely baffled. The novelist (shifting scene, time, focus, post of observation) maliciously chops at his hands. —Albert Guerard, Conrad the Novelist (1958) [End Page 213] This special issue of essays on Nostromo has its origins in two centennial events of 2004: one, a panel at the Modern Language Association convention in Philadelphia entitled "Nostromo at 100"; the other, the day-long conference "One Hundred Years of Nostromo" hosted by the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York City. "Contemporaneity"—Conrad's timelines—was an important note at both events, as it has been in many recent "twenty-first century" discussions of Conrad's work. But the fact that the essays gathered here appear in the displaced and belated year 2008 , each heavily revised from its original format, each also significantly dislocated from its original scenes of discussion and discussants, all now appearing in a year of no totemic significance or mystic numerical symmetry with respect to either Conrad or Nostromo—all these raise the question of Conrad's untimeliness: i.e., how we might read him, and how we might need to read him, as not a figure of "our man," "our text," "our time," "one of us," but rather as a textual locus irreducibly out of phase with and disruptive of any attempt among its various audiences to construct themselves as "contemporary." Nostromo is the exemplary Conrad text to raise this kind of question because, its ample claims to contemporary "resonance" notwithstanding, there is no other Conrad work, and on so many different levels of composition, construction, and reception, that flaunts problems of temporal displacement and deferral, and challenges assimilation to any specific moment "in" time, the way this one does. "Untimely" from the very beginning, Nostromo was originally inspired by a "story" Conrad heard while in "the Gulf of Mexico" during a shipping run in "1875 or '6"—(Conrad's only visit to Latin America and one in which his "contacts with land were short, few, and fleeting," if any)—which could not be told in that moment (Nosotromo xl-xli). Rather, it had to wait until "twenty-six or seven years afterwards," when Conrad encountered a different (printed) version of the story, in a different location (England), amid a very different spatio-temporal field of available1 European historiography on Latin America and informing political events like the secession of Panama from Columbia in 1903 (Nostromo xl-xli). Actually composed between (roughly) October 1902 and August 1904, Nostromo very nearly was not indigenous to this "moment" either. Though by no means Conrad's most deferred or prolonged text in the making, it may...

My friend Ricardo Ferreira, an impressive natural philosopher

– a title which in my personal conception designates the supreme form of science, the one that was practiced by Aristotle. They are Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel laureate in Physics, and Ricardo Ferreira. These brief lines are dedicated to the celebration of the 80th birthday anniversary of the latter. I first met him, as far as I remember, around 1980, at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fisicas (CBPF). He was joining the Department of Theoretical Physics that I was heading. Immediately after, I resigned as Head: I was less than 40 years old, and I felt very embarrased to have as an administrative subordinate a scientist of the stature of Ricardo. We immediately did new elections, and he became the Head of the department. Sometime after, there was a minor conflict with somebody who (irresponsibly) accused him of having neglected

The string quartets of Peter Klatzow

The string quartet genre has been the vehicle for some of the most sublime and profoundly beautiful chamber music penned by great composers for nearly two hundred and fifty years. This 'burden' of the great tradition of string quartet writing has been intimidating for some composers, many of whom regard it as the supreme form of chamber music. Peter Klatzow's string quartets strike a balance between a sharp intellectual approach on the one hand and an easily accessible one on the other. In his three string quartets Klatzow succeeds in displaying this duality of expression and these works can thus be regarded as milestones in the chamber music repertoire. They also show, over three decades, the composer's coming of age. This article is an attempt to demonstrate this through descriptive analyses of these works.

Civilization: Comparing Concepts and Identities

This article is a transnational comparative study of the history of the concept of civilization. It starts with a brief review of the meaning of concepts that historically preceded it, such as civilitas and civilité. Next, it focuses on the appearance of the concept in eighteenth-century England and France and the ways it was used by different political theorists and polemists, mostly in the sense of politeness. During the nineteenth century in the colonies outside Europe, in Africa, in Asia, and in America, the concept of civilization played a key role in the discourse of colonization. First it was used from above, by the colonists, but later on it was appropriated by the colonized. At the end of the nineteenth century, civilization acquired one more layer of meaning as it was incorporated into nationalistic discourse. Eventually, the concept also became so internalized that the majority of people in a country could identify their own nation as the supreme form of civilization.

Entitlement: Epistemic Rights without Epistemic Duties?

The debate between externalists and internalists in epistemology can be viewed as a disagreement about whether there are epistemic rights (to believe) without corresponding duties or obligations (to justify what is believed). Taking an epistemic right to believe P as an authorization to not only accept P as true but to use P as a positive reason for accepting other propositions, the debate is about whether there are unjustified justifiers. It is about whether there are propositions that provide for others what nothing need provide for them-viz., for thinking them true. I take externalists to be people who believe there are such unjustified justifiers and internalists to be those who deny it. Externalists hold that we are entitled to believe some things for which we have no justification. Some externalists-I happen to be one of them-go farther and say we are not only entitled to believe things we have no to believe, we often, in fact, know things we have no reason to believe. Knowledge, the supreme form of entitlement, requires no justification. This is not to say that it doesn't sometimes have it. Talk of justification and reasons may not be the right way to characterize this disagreement since parties to the dispute tend to use these words in

The Seventh Voyage of Philosophy

Voyages and crises of philosophy refer to philosophical knowledge of truth, in contrast to skepticism and relativism. They encompass the rational foundation of philosophy and the application of a critical method to central contents. Realist phenomenology plays a key role in the seventh voyage by providing an objective foundation to a priori knowledge. It shows also that essential necessity possesses a supreme form of intelligibility. Cognition is reached via insight and deduction. Three kinds of essences explain the difference between empirical and a priori sciences, while the "impoverishment of a priori" is transcended through necessary essences. Rethinking Edmund Husserl's method allows access to real existence, where objective values replace axiological nihilism. Rigorous philosophy is thus compatible with divinely revealed truth about the mysteries of God and man.

Paul Valery et la Grece

The purpose of this work is neither search into possible sources nor confrontation of ideas or forms between valery and greece. It is based on simple original statement - valery's work is pervaded with every form and aspect of hellenism ; valery had, in his own words, a greek hereditary quantum. The point is to estimate the latter with accuracy through the examination of every piece of valery's writing which is obtainable at the moment. What did valery know of greece ? how did he imagine it ? how did he recreate it ? how did he appropriate it to himself, thus making it the fulcrum of his ego ? in order to answer these questions, four different approaches have been selected, a) hellenism and valery's mediterranean sensibility - the beauty of the universe, b) greece and the quest for know ledge - myth and discourse, c) greek tragedy and tragedy according to valery - the distress of being, d) humanist wisdom lying on protagoras's assertion : man is the measure of all things. Hellenism played considerable role in valery's intimate experience : it enabled him first to warily voice then to overwhelm the painful conflicts - sense vs sensibility, reflection vs action, understanding vs being - experienced by his heroes of former ages. Eupalinos the architect is the embodiment of the balance thus reached. By opposing idealists and sceptics, plato and aristotle, augustine and thomas aquinas, valery placed the supreme form of good in action - the harmonious blooming of every human faculty. Moreover, in world intoxicated with the advance of technologies and with every form of excess, greece stands as the preserver of the founding values of western civilisation. Valery's hellenism thus combines humour, charm and elegance with much deeper reflection and quest for wisdom.

Imagen y misterio: sobre el conocimiento metafórico en C. S. Lewis

This article studies the role played by metaphor in the understanding and communication of transcendental truths. The theme was not only touched upon by C. S. Lewis in his apologetical and literary-critical works; it constituted, rather, the heart of his thinking. For if reality is radically a mystery (the mystery of God and the mystery of man), then metaphorical knowledge beco mes the necessary foundation of all human knowledge, and metaphor the supreme form of communication.

Strange Synchronies and Surplus Possibilities: Bakhtin on Time

We live forward, but we understand backward.—KierkegaardBakhtin must surely be regarded as the most remarkable modern thinker to examine time in narrative. For him, the problem was no mere exercise in literary theory. Rather, it was a way to examine ultimate questions—or in the Russian phrase, “accursed” questions—about human existence. In this respect, his work is representative of the Russian tradition, in which literature and criticism served as forms of—a skeptic would say, substitutes for—philosophy. In this Russian view, the task of philosophy is to examine the relation of ideas to the way people live. Novels are a supreme form of philosophy because, unlike the terribly thin accounts of life found in philosophical tracts, they offer a rich and “thick” description of human thinking and action.

Pour une théorie de la description au 18e siècle

Denis Reynaud : For a theory of description in the isth century. Natural history in the 18th Century made description the supreme form of discourse, but it also profoundly rethought its functions and modes. It tried in particular to define what was specific about verbal description as compared to the power of pictural representation. The same preoccupation led to a divorce in the field of description between the 'history' of an object and its true 'description'. In their writings, scientists like Perrault, Réaumur, Buffon, Daubenton, Bonnet or Adanson were perpetually confronted with the problem of the order, limits and objects of description, and their answers to these literary questions concern literature as much as they do science.

Patriotism and War

For centuries-indeed, millennia-there has been special connection between and war. That is, participation in war has been universally considered the primary form and activity in which patriotism manifests itself. To speak of patriotism was to think of war; to hear the words a great patriot was to visualize man with arms in hand risking his life on the field of battle. These mental associations were certainly not without deep empirical roots and strong moral justifications. Many were the occasions when the lives and freedoms of one's people and one's native land had to be defended with physical weapons against aggression and invasion. As to risk one's life is supreme form of courage, so to risk one's life for one's own people and one's own became supreme form of patriotism, and the making of war itself thus became the supremely patriotic profession and institution. Until the time of World Wars I and II, the question of the nature and characteristics of the weapons of war seemed to have only technical relationship to patriotism. That is, the main concern about the weapons was that one's own country should not be at disadvantage in terms of their quantity and effectiveness. It was rightly assumed, without need of any discussion, that if even the most powerful of existing weapons were used, and however numerous the casualties might be, there would still be human beings and habitable earth left when the war was over, with the possibility of better future so long as the country fighting for just cause emerged victorious. But the kind of weaponry that was developed toward the end of World War II created qualitatively new problem. The degree of change that was then brought about can best be expressed by saying we can no longer assume that, if the most powerful existing weapons are used, there will still be human race and habitable earth left when the war is over. And it is self-evident that with no human beings and no habitable earth left, it would be meaningless to talk of victory, of better future, of just cause, or of true patriotism, that is, true love of one's fatherland and one's people. Let us therefore examine carefully the new conditions of our contemporary situation in the effort to understand and deal with it.

In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 525 "an awareness of its perfection in perfect sell-identity" stems from his own theological bias: if God is to be connected with the world, His thinking cannot be merely a thinking about itself; His mind must also contain the Ideas of the sensible world. The inconsistency is quite apparent in the concluding paragraph of the introductory chapter three on "SellKnowledge ": If we study chapters seven and nine of Book Lambda against the background of these texts on the meaning of friendship, it becomes apparent that a fortiori God's thinking must concern his own being and that "the thinking of thinking" is the supreme form of self-knowledge. Far from being an objectless returning to oneself, this knowledge concerns the very being of the First Principle . It would also seem to fot|ow that iust as knowing a friend is a certain degree of self-knowledge because of the ontological kinship between the self and a friend, God, in knowing himself, also knows, to a certain degree, the essential principles of things in so far as he is the first being encompassing within himself the perfections which other beings possess. This would, however, not imply that the first being would know the world as distinct from himself or as dependent on himself (pp. 33-34). How can God (the Unmoved Mover) think only of Himself, and at the same time, to a certain degree (whatever this means) know also the essential principles of things, the perfections which other beings possess? And what textual justification is there for attributing this position to Aristotle? There are a number of errors in the text. Some of them are as follows: (1) On p. 21 Elders quotes from Laws 987b, in spite of the fact that the Laws ends on 969c. The passage referred to would have to be in Epinomis, but at 987b there is nothing of the text he quotes, to wit, vo~g ~v n0ooXQf3o0oa~E~0~tv 6006g 0~tv. (2) On p. 24, note 41, he correctly gives the text at 432a4 as ~ ~oggdSEo~xotg do0n~o~g x6 vo~x6 ~oxt but makes it mean: '~ere are phantasmata in which the intelligible things are contained." Evidently he confuses this with the passage at 431b1--4. (3) On p. 279, p~.~oxr should read p~i~.t~r (4) On p. 5, ~oo~v should read 6.~ao6v. K. W. Hsaa~oroN Emery University In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought. Two Volumes. By Charles Trinkaus. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970. Pp. 985. $22.50) I. Since the appearance of Burckhardt's classic essay more than a century ago, three schools of thought have grown up around the problem of the nature and extent of humanism 's relationship to Christianity. The classic position, represented by Burckhardt, Symends , Dilthey, Gentile, Cassirer, Saitta, and others, has interpreted humanism as an essentiaUy anti-Christian, anti-scholastic, rationatistic, and individualistic phenomenon caught up in an overwhelming concern for attaining to historical greatness in this world. If religion has been considered at all (and it is usually left to take care of itself), it has been so reinterpreted as to become consistent with the interests of emerging secularism, liberalism , and modern science. Opposing the Burckhardtian position, however, is one originally associated with the work of Giuseppe Toffanin and, more recently, Hiram Haydn. Here, Renaissance humanism is seen to be fundamentaUy Catholic, orthodox, and traditional---the two movements joined in perfect harmony by a common concern for antiquity and universaiism, for Latinity, faith, and corporate elitism, and by a common opposition to democratic particularism , heresy, individualism, modernity, and the vernaculars. What makes these two positions extreme, however, is the existence of the largest, most 526 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY moderate, and most diversified camp. Originating with Thode, Pastor, Olgiati, and Joachimsen, among a host of others, it has encompassed the general view that humanism and Christianity are separate yet interrelated. For some, medieval Catholicism is not the antithesis but the fountainhead of Renaissance humanism--the religious cause of a secular effect. For others, humanism is a novel intellectual movement, but one yet operating within a still...

THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH IN POETRY

As the dominatian af science in modern society becomes ever more, overwhelming, sO' our interest in the arts must became more urgent. We must naturally wonder whether they can do anything, however little, to check that 'loss of inwardness',! that spiritual impaverishment, which seems inseparable from an advanced stage of scientific and technological progress and which constitutes such a grave danger to' mankind. Surely it is not without significance, we may reflect, that in Brave New World the only spark af apposition was kindled .by the works of Shakespeare! In this situation, when art appears as almost the anly remaining rival of science, however inferior in power and. prestige to' its triumphant adversary, one would expect that the nature of the arts and their relatian to' science would be the object of the most eager and intensive. study.' Yet how little we still know about them! Even the most elementary questions remain unanswered, or can receive only a doubtful answer. Such is the question with which the present essay is concerned-the questian af truth in poetry. Has poetry got anything to do with truth, ar is truth the prerogative af science? Is poetry concerned with thought or anly with feeling? With fact or only with fictian? With statements or only with pseudo-statements? These questions are evidently very difficult ones or they would have been answered long ago. It would be too optimistic to' expect them to' be answered here and now. What is possible, and perhaps worth while, is tore-examine some of the answers that have already been offered and to consider how much they contribute towards the salution af aur problem. Literary criticism in the mid-twentieth century has generally tended to depreciate the importance af truth. and thought in poetry. 'Ideas in poetry are usually stale or false,' says George Boas, 'and no one older than sixteen would find it worth his while to read poetry merely for what it says.'2 The same view is taken in the very influential writings of I. A. Richards: 'It is never what a poem says which matters, but what it is.'3 'It is not the poet's business to' make true statements.'4 'Poetry ... is the supreme form of emotive language.'5 'We know', says Emil Staiger, 'that the essential thing about a verse-its unique valuedoes not consist in images, thoughts or ideas, but only in the

St. Wanderlust

The season will shortly be coming round when, in sympathy with the resurrection of life around, some ebullience in the blood moves all sorts of people to be on the wander. Some will be lacing on nailed shoes and gripping sticks to get up into the hills; some will be fitting out small boats to be away to sea; some will be throwing handbags into dickys and luggage racks, or climbing, armed with a day’s rations, into charabancs. But one and all are moved by the same pleasantly impatient spirit: Wanderlust.This brings to our mind one of the Church’s ‘Canonizations,’ one of the triumphs of that triumphant humanism by which it admits even the life we share with the animals to partake in acts of worship which it teaches have an eternal significance. It has canonized Wanderlust by the institution of pilgrimages to shrines. He is now ‘Saint Wanderlust.’ He has lesser forms in the everyday desire to be up and moving, if it be only up the hill or about the town, which the Church has canonized by such institutions as processions, or the round of the Stations in Rome, or the Stations of the Cross up the hill at Pantasaph —with the view at the top. He has one supreme form in the Spring Wanderlust, which the poet noted when he said that spring was the time of pilgrimages. So he has been taught the way to shrines.There are, of course, things much more profound that lie behind the institution of shrines than this harnessing of a mere stirring in the blood. Sometimes, as at Lourdes, they are of immediate divine institution. Sometimes even when of human institution they are the occasion of the granting of many favours, even of the working of miracles, as is apparently the case at Carfin; and hence of a great increase of devotion.