Unpublished Treatise Research Articles

The main themes of the «Last God» in Heidegger’s unpublished treatises (1930s and 1940s)

In this study we expose and develop the core and principal themes of the philosophy of the last God in Martin Heidegger’s treatises written between 1930 and 1940. With this historical reconstruction it’s possible to observe and determine how his ontological research involves the subject of Godhood and how they evolve together in the period of time in which being is discovered and interpreted as Ereignis and as Anfang, but most importantly, when this idea becomes the object of an insistent philosophical work that advances towards a more precise formulation and completion of the horizon of its problems, in a group of initially secret writings that aimed to provide an answer to the “question of being”.

Judicial Crisis in Damascus on the Eve of Baybars’s Reform: The Case of the Minor Orphan Girl (651–55/1253–57)

Abstract This essay reconstructs a late-Ayyubid court case in Damascus that was litigated repeatedly between 651/1253 and 655/1257, five years prior to the beginning of Sultan Baybars’s judicial reform in 660/1262. The case involved the marriage of a minor orphan girl. The Shāfiʿī chief justice of Damascus initially permitted the marriage but later instructed his deputy judge to annul it, a move that outraged jurists and elicited a transregional debate. I reconstruct the case proceedings and ensuing controversies primarily from an unpublished treatise by Abū Shāma al-Maqdisī (d. 665/1268), which is partly corroborated by contemporaneous fatwas and historical chronicles. The case illustrates that pre-reform Ayyubid courts lacked the coherent jurisprudence and institutional oversight that might have prevented abuses of power by unscrupulous and inept officials. Although Baybars’s reform has long been recognized as a critical turning point in Islamic legal history, this case exposes the social and institutional dilemmas that the reform sought to address.

Giles of Lessines on Starlight and the Colour of the Sky

Abstract This article provides the first discussion of the unpublished treatise De crepusculis (“On twilight”), written in the second half of the thirteenth century by the Dominican scholar Giles of Lessines. It is shown that De crepusculis was intended as a critical supplement to a treatise on the height of the atmosphere by Ibn Muʿādh (eleventh century). In this supplement, Giles recapitulates Ibn Muʿādh’s geometrical arguments while furnishing proofs and covering relevant questions not included in the earlier work. One area where Giles greatly expands on his predecessor is in addressing relevant physical questions such as the causes of stellar luminosity. Giles here takes a nuanced view, acknowledging that all celestial bodies emit some form of light. He also provides a unique explanation of the blue colour of the sky, which draws on the extramission postulate used by thirteenth-century writers on optics.

Ernst Neufert's ‘Lebensgestaltungslehre’: formatting life beyond the built

AbstractIn 1936, the Bauhaus-trained architect Ernst Neufert published the first edition of his seminal book Bau-Entwurfslehre. One of the most successful architecture books to date, the encyclopedic volume offered dimensioned floor plans for architectural tasks ranging from bunkers to dog kennels to Zeppelins. Two years later, Neufert started working as ‘norm expert’ for Reichsminister Albert Speer, with whom he published another manual in 1943, Bauordnungslehre. Meant to provide a total system of measures for architecture at large, the volume subjected building blocks, bricks and human bodies to Neufert's all-encompassing octametric system. This article contrasts these two books against Neufert's unpublished treatise – ‘Lebensgestaltungslehre’. Never a bound volume, the latter was sketched out in diary entries between 1936 and 1942 on folded DIN A4 sheets (themselves normed) and organized in a card index. Reading them across their medial states, this article investigates the material, methodological and ideological character of Neufert's Lehren. This is not the story of a handbook; rather, this is a story of constructing Lehre one sheet at a time. Neufert's attempt to format German society in the 1930s and 1940s through inherently architectural means such as floor plans, norms and a system of measures ultimately shaped the designing subject – starting with himself.

The Life and Works of Robert Baillie (1602–1662): Politics, Religion and Record-Keeping in the British Civil Wars, by Alexander Campbell

This comprehensive and well researched biography focuses on Robert Baillie’s intellectual world and the times which shaped and influenced his writings. From the outset it makes a concerted effort to grapple with Baillie’s apparently contradictory positions on key religious issues between 1637 and 1662. What emerges from this biography is a man of many faces, a conscientious parish minister, a sharp propagandist, a skilled political negotiator and a defender of deeply held religious and political principles. Alexander Campbell draws upon under-used manuscripts, particularly Baillie’s sermons and unpublished treatises to shed new light on this well-known figure: this material is often quoted by historians but, arguably, tends not to be fully appreciated on its own terms. Baillie’s religious thought is put within its wider European context, highlighting a wider discourse taking place among European Protestant reformers. It questions the clear-cut religious labels that historians use, and impressively shows the vibrancy of...

Imperial Talismanic Love: Ibn Turka’s Debate of Feast and Fight (1426) as Philosophical Romance and Lettrist Mirror for Timurid Princes

Abstract This study presents and intellectual- and literary-historically contextualizes a remarkable but as yet unpublished treatise by Ibn Turka (d. 1432), foremost occult philosopher of Timurid Iran: the Munāẓara-yi bazm u razm. As its title indicates, this ornate Persian work, written in 1426 in Herat for the Timurid prince-calligrapher Bāysunghur (d. 1433), takes the form of a literary debate, a venerable Arabo-Persian genre that exploded in popularity in the post-Mongol period. Yet it triply transgresses the bounds of its genre, and doubly marries Arabic-Mamluk literary and imperial culture to Persian-Timurid. For here Ibn Turka recasts the munāẓara as philosophical romance and the philosophical romance as mirror for princes, imperializing the razm u bazm and sword vs. pen tropes within an expressly lettrist framework, making explicit the logic of the coincidentia oppositorum (majmaʿ al-aḍdād) long implicit in the genre in order to ideologically weaponize it. For the first time in the centuries-old Arabo-Persian munāẓara tradition, that is, wherein such debates were often rhetorically but never theoretically resolved, Ibn Turka marries multiple opposites in a manner clearly meant to be instructive to his Timurid royal patron: he is to perform the role of Emperor Love (sulṭān ʿishq), transcendent of all political-legal dualities, avatar of the divine names the Manifest (al-ẓāhir) and the Occult (al-bāṭin). This lettrist mirror for Timurid princes is thus not simply unprecedented in Persian or indeed Arabic literature, a typical expression of the ornate literary panache and genre-hybridizing proclivities of Mamluk-Timurid-Ottoman scientists of letters, and index of the burgeoning of Ibn ʿArabian-Būnian lettrism in late Mamluk Cairo; it also serves as key to Timurid universalist imperial ideology itself in its formative phase – and consciously epitomizes the principle of contradiction driving Islamicate civilization as a whole. To show the striking extent to which this munāẓara departs from precedent, I provide a brief overview of the sword vs. pen subset of that genre; I then examine our text’s specific political-philosophical and sociocultural contexts, with attention to Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī’s (d. 1274) Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī and Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī’s (d. 1502) Akhlāq-i Jalālī on the one hand – which seminal Persian mirrors for princes assert, crucially, the ontological-political primacy of love over justice – and the Ẓafarnāma of Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī (d. 1454), Ibn Turka’s student and friend, on the other. In the latter, much-imitated history Amir Temür (r. 1370‒1405) was definitively transformed, on the basis of astrological and lettrist proofs, into the supreme Lord of Conjunction (ṣāḥib-qirān); most notably, there Yazdī theorizes the Muslim world conqueror as historical manifestation of the coincidentia oppositorum – precisely the project of Ibn Turka in his Debate of Feast and Fight. But these two ideologues of Timurid universal imperialism and leading members of the New Brethren of Purity network only became such in Mamluk Cairo, where lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf) was first sanctified, de-esotericized and adabized; I accordingly invoke the overtly occultist-neopythagoreanizing ethos specific to the Mamluk capital by the late 14th century, especially that propagated at the court of Barqūq (r. 1382‒1399). For it is this Cairene ethos, I argue, that is epitomized by our persophone lettrist’s munāẓara, which it effectively timuridizes. To demonstrate the robustness of this Mamluk-Timurid ideological-literary continuity, I situate the Munāẓara-yi bazm u razm within Ibn Turka’s own oeuvre and imperial ideological program, successively developed for the Timurid rulers Iskandar Sulṭān (r. 1409‒1414), Shāhrukh (r. 1409‒1447) and Ulugh Beg (r. 1409‒1449); marshal three contemporary instances of the sword vs. pen munāẓara, one Timurid and two Mamluk, by the theologian Sayyid Sharīf Jurjānī (d. 1413), the secretary-encyclopedist Aḥmad al-Qalqashandī (d. 1418) and the historian Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406), respectively; and provide an abridged translation of Ibn Turka’s offering as basis for comparative analysis.

A Contextualist History of Cartesian Philosophy: Roger Ariew’s Descartes and the First Cartesians

A Contextualist History of Cartesian Philosophy: Roger Ariew’s <i>Descartes and the First Cartesians</i>

Syntax in the earliest Latin-Portuguese grammatical treatises

AbstractThis essay analyses the most central concepts of Latin syntactical theory in the earliest pedagogical grammars written in Portugal during the 14th and 15th centuries, namely concord, government, and transitivity. The sources include two unpublished treatises preserved in manuscripts of Portuguese origin, one from the end of the 14th century and the other dated 1427, and the first grammar printed in Portugal (1497). They are representative of the teaching of Latin in Portugal at different levels of learning. All three treatises use the vernacular as a pedagogical aid, and Pastrana’s grammar also employs images to illustrate the main syntactical concepts. All treatises discuss government using the regular medieval terminology ofregere“to govern” andregi“to be governed”. Like in Spanish, Italian and English grammars of Latin, the three concords belong to the basic syntactical doctrine. The major difference between these textbooks lies in their employment of the concept of transitivity. It is little more than mentioned in the two manuscripts, but highly relevant in the printed grammar.

Heidegger’s “Politics” and the Black Notebooks

Under “politics” is included Heidegger’s entanglement with National Socialism in the early 1930’s, an analysis of his rectoral address, and his resignation as rector. An attempt is made to account for this involvement. Also under “politics” there are Heidegger’s own sketchy, and largely unsuccessful, attempts at forging a philosophy of politics, a couple of which are examined, and critiqued, in detail. There is also a section on Heidegger’s “anti-Semitism,” especially as instanced in the Black Notebooks, which have given rise to considerable controversy of late. An attempt is made to set this in its historical and cultural context. Included also are the many remarks, from the curious to the bizarre, that appear in the Black Notebooks concerning the social and political events of the time between 1931 and 1948. The article closes with what the author sees as the more important themes found in these volumes, which echo themes found in Contributions to Philosophy (From the Event) and in the Unpublished Treatises, part III of the Gesamtausgabe.

On what has been called Leibniz's rigorous foundation of infinitesimal geometry by means of Riemannian sums

A number of scholars have recently maintained that a theorem in an unpublished treatise by Leibniz written in 1675 establishes a rigorous foundation for the infinitesimal calculus. I argue that this is a misinterpretation.

Fray Luis de León y su comentario romance al Eclesiastés. Labor humanística, docente y exegética

In the early seventeenth century, José de Valdivieso mentioned an unpublished treatise by fray Luis de León entitled El perfecto predicador. Over time, several researchers identified that work with a Comentario al Eclesiastés preserved in manuscript in the old Convento de los Agustinos in Cadiz, and they edited the Comentario with this assumption in mind. However, the Comentario, an exposition in the vernacular, had nothing to do with the treatise, which in fact was a series of notes fray Luis dictated to his students in 1579, the first year of his tenure of the Chair of Biblical Studies in Salamanca. El perfecto predicador, then, remains undiscovered, but the information gleaned from it about the teaching and exegesis of fray Luis is priceless.

Gavin Alexander (ed.),William Scott: The Model of Poesy.

‘I have led you into all the several rooms of poetry and pointed you to the least twig and scion of this fair plant.’ So wrote William Scott in the summer of 1599 in this previously unpublished treatise, making a virtue of the mixed metaphor to show that poetry is both a built and an organic form. Structural metaphors and terms abound in this newly edited literary treatise, most prominently perhaps that of the title. Model was a fairly new word in English, meaning ‘plan, likeness, and object of imitation’, and in Scott’s usage it also implies Neoplatonic and Aristotelian senses of idea, universal, form, and example. Alexander comments that ‘the relation of model to poesy runs both ways in Scott’s title: we can model poesy and poesy can make models’. Scott believes that poetry might help develop civil society; he develops the common Horatian idea of poetry as educational in appealingly direct terms with ‘poesy as the porter’ standing at the ‘door of delight’ by which ‘knowledge and civility’ enter. Thus he sees some quite literal models to emulate in contemporary literature: ‘The Arcadia hath excellently limbed the dances of all virtues and affections. Bartas his Judith is a worthy pattern of a religiously trained and virtuously living woman’. Inspired by Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy , Scott wrote a manual which is also an apology. Scott makes clear that he assumes a highly literate reader, and one that is already predisposed to learning: ‘we presume that every undertaker in our faculty be a general good scholar. … Then shall we need to prescribe those rules only which are peculiarly by him to be observed inasmuch as he is a poet’.

The Masculine Urge of Jack Kerouac's Haiku

During 1950s, dissatisfied with state of both American culture literature, Beat writers sought cure for Western ills Japanese philosophy (Zen Buddhism particular) poetry (haiku particular). Among prominent Beats to produce haiku are Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Cid Corman. However, perhaps most interesting Beat haikuist is Jack Kerouac, far better known for his sprawling, often manic novels. While 2003 publication of Book of Haikus sparked renewed interest fivehundred-plus haiku Kerouac wrote, critics initially dismissed these three-line poems. Ann Charters Gerald Nicosia, major biographers, generally mention haiku passing, as something Kerouac did between his more important works. James T. Jones observes that, after 1955 publication of Mexico City Blues, Kerouac's verse lost intensity effectiveness, and he concentrated more on haiku his declining years (12). Alison Kirby Record argues that Kerouac occasionally achieved genuine haiku effects his early experiments form, but the majority of these efforts ... are flawed because they rely too heavily on too-thin understanding of Zen Buddhism and, consequently, fail to replicate Japanese models (87). The aesthetic merits of these poems are, of course, debatable. What is more certain is that they function effectively as expressions of Kerouac's dissatisfaction: with consumerism, prevailing literary practices, his own masculinity.Understandably, critics have focused on relationship between Kerouac's much-discussed discovery of Zen early 1954 his haiku, which he probably began writing at about this time continued writing up to his death. Charters, foremost Kerouac scholar, notes that writer composed haiku on typescript of Some of Dharma, an unpublished treatise on Buddhism written between March 1954 late Spring/early Summer 1955 (204; 210-11; 214). In various letters written 1956, Kerouac either mentioned or included haiku. He also wrote number of haiku while serving as fire-lookout on Desolation Peak summer of 1956 (Charters 262), he published three Berkeley Bussei that same year. We know that he retained his interest form 1959, as he wrote some haiku for Frank O'Hara (Charters 306-07) collaborated with Albert Saijo Lew Welch on haiku sequence Trip Trap (Nicosia 606). As late as 1962, Kerouac planned to collaborate with his friend Matsumi Kanemitsu on book about cats; Kerouac was to write haiku Kanemitsu was to illustrate (Nicosia 643).Those critics who examine Zen elements of Kerouac's haiku-specifically Sarah Haynes Yoshinobu Hakutani-tend to draw on poet's familiarity with Reginald H. Blyth's four-volume Haiku. From Blyth, Kerouac would have learned that haiku had evolved over time to its current form as three-line, seventeen-syllable poem arranged five, seven, five ji-on (syllable sounds). Blyth also emphasizes (or overemphasizes, according to some scholars) Zen underpinnings of haiku, including need for haiku poet to attain state of mind in which we are not separated from other things, are indeed identical with them, yet retain our own individuality (I, iii). Other Zen concepts manifested haiku include mu, a state of nothingness that is absolutely free of any human-centered thought or emotion; sahi, quiet beauty or lonely grace; wahi, an aesthetic appreciation of beauty stemming from poverty; yugen, mystery inexplicability, which surround order of universe (Hakutani, Richard Wright 276-77; 280; 290), satori, moment of enlightenment. Yet another important element of haiku is mention of specific season, often implied through employment of kigo, so-called season word.The problem with positing Kerouac's haiku within Zen framework is tendency to read them for what is not there. …

Michael Maestlin and His Unpublished Treatise on the Nova of 1604

Michael Maestlin (1550-1631), professor of mathematics at the University of Tubingen and one of the most significant astronomers between Copernicus and Kepler, published important treatises on the celestial novelties of his period: a short tract on the nova of 1572 in Cassiopeia, which attracted the interest and admiration of Tycho Brahe, who nevertheless criticised Maestlin for his tacit adhesion to Copemicanism;' a larger treatise on the comet of 1577, where Maestiin located the comet in the sphere of Venus according to the Copemican world system;2 and finally a less elaborate tract on the comet of 1580, interpreted as a new creation in the sphere of Saturn.3 But this is not all Maestlin wrote on the subject of novas and comets.Recently, in a collective volume issued with the proceedings of the conference on Michael Maestlin held in Tubingen in 2000, Gerhard Betsch published a survey of Maestlin's printed works, accompanied by a detailed summary of his Nachlass, that is, of his archival papers (manuscripts and letters) preserved in different libraries in Germany and Austria.4 In that publication, Betsch offered, from the two boxes containing Maestlin's papers in the Wurttembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart (WLB), a precise description of the contents of Cod. math, quarto 15 b, among them (as item 8) a treatise in German on the comet of 1618-19.5 Surprisingly, however, Betsch did not mention the presence of another treatise (as item 11), this time in Latin, on the nova of 1604, titled Consideratio Astronomica inusitatae Novae et prodigiosae Stellae, superiori 1604 anno, sub initium Octobris, iuxta Eclipticam in signo Sagittarii vesperi exortae, et adhuc nunc eodem loco lumine corusco lucentis (Astronomical consideration of the extraordinary and prodigious new star that appeared near the ecliptic in the sign of Sagittarius one evening in early October in the preceding year 1604, and continues to shine in the same place with a tremulous light).6 The existence of this tract had already been noted by Richard A. Jarrell in his unpublished doctoral dissertation on Maestlin, which remains the best monograph about the Tubingen astronomer to date.7 Jarrell concluded too hastily that the manuscript is scored and illegible, contributing decisively to the lack of subsequent attention by scholars. However, while the manuscript is badly scored, it is not completely illegible. Although very difficult to read, due to the many cancellations and additions both at the margins and between the lines in the very small handwriting typical of Maestlin (moreover with a constant use of abbreviations), the manuscript treatise can be read to a great extent along the main lines of the argument. Unfortunately, however, the treatise is incomplete, suggesting that either Maestlin finally abandoned it or the concluding pages have disappeared. Our intention in the present paper is to offer a full transcription (together with an English translation by Patrick J. Boner) of the legible parts in the manuscript, along with a presentation and a discussion of Maestlin's theses on the phenomenon in the context of the contemporary debate in Germany and in relation to his previous treatise on the nova of 1572.1. Short Description of the ManuscriptThe autograph manuscript extends over 12 pages. Despite the many cancellations and additions, frequently impossible to read, pages 1-10 offer a readily legible text. Significantly, pages 1-4 and 9-12 present a vertical streak extending diagonally across the entire page. Perhaps this indicates that the content of these pages has been transferred to a fair copy, but this possible copy seems to be irretrievably lost. In addition, from the first lines on page 10 to the abrupt end of the manuscript at the bottom of page 12 (where we find the usual indication of the first word of the following page, which is not preserved), the script changes to a very small and quick writing, with constant cancellations and abbreviations, resembling the first notes of an improvised writing to be polished later. …

La política del acontecimiento. El “nacionalsocialismo privado” de Heidegger como totemismo ontológico

The aim of the present study is to analyze the political implications derived from Heidegger´s concept of Ereignis (“Enowning” or “event of appropriation”). With the concept of “private national socialism” as a guideline, we mean to show the way in which Heidegger deploys a concealed political project derived from his ontological theses (primarily in his courses and unpublished treatises of the thirties). A project that tends to the dissolution of the subject as protagonist of historical becoming and also to its substitution by the primacy of supra-individual powers which are external to subjectivity such as “popular community” or “homeland”.

Book Reviews: Thomas Hobbes, &lt;i&gt;Leviathan&lt;/i&gt;, ed. by Noel Malcolm, Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes, 3 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012, 1832 pp. (Adrian Blau); Rhodri Lewis, &lt;i&gt;William Petty on the Order of Nature: An Unpublished Manuscript Treatise&lt;/i&gt;, Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012, xi + 176 p. (Dana Jalobeanu); Books Received; Guidelines for

Book Reviews: Thomas Hobbes, &lt;i&gt;Leviathan&lt;/i&gt;, ed. by Noel Malcolm, Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes, 3 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012, 1832 pp. (Adrian Blau); Rhodri Lewis, &lt;i&gt;William Petty on the Order of Nature: An Unpublished Manuscript Treatise&lt;/i&gt;, Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012, xi + 176 p. (Dana Jalobeanu); Books Received; Guidelines for

William Petty on the Order of Nature: An Unpublished Manuscript Treatise by Rhodri Lewis

William Petty on the Order of Nature: An Unpublished Manuscript Treatise by Rhodri Lewis

An Anglo-Norman Practica Geometriae: Edition and Commentary

This edition of an unpublished fourteenth-century treatise on geodesy in Anglo-Norman emblematically, as intermediary, fills the gap between Latin scientific treatises of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries and similar treatises in Middle English of two centuries later. The Anglo-Norman evidence demonstrates the increasing demand for vernacular treatment of the sciences which stimulated Middle English production.

Two Antidotes from the 'Empiricals' of Ibn at-Tilmid

This article deals with two antidotes which form part of an hitherto unpublished treatise on 'empirical drugs' (muǧarrabat), composed around the middle of the twelfth century CE by the master physician Ibn at-Tilmid: the so-called faruq theriac and the viper pastilles. These two antidotes, which ultimately depend on Greek prototypes, circulated in different Arabic versions and belonged to the stock of medieval Islamic pharmacy. They are edited and translated here on the basis of Ibn at-Tilmiḏ's 'empirical' recension, which is also distinguished by the fact that the faruq theriac shows traces of an earlier revision made in the ninth century CE by the famous Hunain ibn Ishaq; moreover, the prescription of the viper pastilles is based on early, precanonical antecedents. The article concludes with a glossary of terms and a botanical register.

Cowell's Sliding Tone and the American Ultramodernist Tradition

That Cowell's use of has not received much attention is curious, considering that Banshee (1925), the quintessential example of Cowell's sonic innovation, is best known for its fantastic slides on piano strings. slide has a structural role in others of his works, including A Composition for Piano and Ensemble (1925), the seven-voice counterpoint of vocal wailing and glissando strings in Atlantis (1926-30), the Mosaic Quartet (1935), the colossal design of intricately woven instrumental slides in Symphony No. 11 (1953), and the cells of slides that dominate the sixth movement of Trio in Nine Short Movements (1965). Cowell's theoretical writing also attests to his fascination with tones. In New Musical Resources, a work that was written between 1916 and 1919 and later revised in 1929, he discusses sliding tones in three different dimensions-tone, tempo, and dynamic. In his unpublished treatise, The Nature of Melody, written between 1936 and 1937, he devotes