It is said that all philosophy is nothing other than a commentary on Plato.

Maybe.

But was not Plato himself a commentary on Parmenides, Heraclitus, the Pythagoreans, and the Sophists, not to mention Socrates?

And conversely, too, the Commentary on Aristotle composed by St Thomas was not the personal philosophy of Thomas Aquinas? Or then again, do Proclus’ Commentarii in primum Euclidis Elementorum librum not embody a new and original neoplatonic philosophy of mathematics?

Eric Hobsbawm is a man of the Enlightenment: does he not define socialism as the last and most extreme heir of the eighteenth century's rationalism? So it is not surprising that the distinction between ‘modern’ and ‘primitive’ or ‘archaic’ has an important place in his work. However, examining some of his writings, and in particular the three books from the period 1959-69 devoted to so-called archaic forms of revolt, it is evident that his approach differs markedly from the ‘progressive’ orthodoxy in its interest, sympathy, even fascination - these are his own words - for ‘primitive’ movements of peasant antimodern (anti-capitalist) resistance and protest. I refer to Primitive Rebels (1959), Bandits (1969) and Captain Swing (1969).

So let us leave the Platonists to wander off down a blind alley. Poor simpletons, they think they will find the secret of discourse about time in the link with eternity. Whereas I, who am powerless in the face of eternity, would prefer to ask: what link can be retained, in discourse about time, between past, present, and future? If there is some link, can the three kinds of time break free of their mutual bonds? Can predicting the future, a time that will be but has never existed before, be disconnected from what determines the future as a product of what already exists and what has already existed? Can the past be what it once was or will it always be what each age decides it should have been?

Brazil, land of miscegenation (métisse). An indisputable fact and an unending process. But how should we understand its genesis and how should we, while respecting the requirements of a historiography worth the name, interpret it in terms of our hopes for the future? This is the horizon binding these reflections, which is to be put in perspective in the studies published in this issue of Diogenes.

Foregrounding miscegenation, and understanding its origins, has been one of the constant themes among the most distinguished practitioners of Brazilian thought since the 1930s, and has been accepted, indeed demanded, since the 1920s by the artistic and literary movement known as ‘modernism’, of which one of the major figures was the São Paulo writer, Mário de Andrade. Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987), who would now have been a hundred years old, comes particularly to mind, as does Sergio Buarque de Holanda (1902–1982). Freyre made history with the publication of his two first works, Casa Grande & senzala [Masters and Slaves] of 1933 and Sobrados e mucambos of 1936. The same year Buarque de Holanda published his Raízes de Brasil [Roots of Brasil]. Motivated by the desire to understand their country, its shaping and – with some kind of concern as to identity – their own origins, both had been led to pave the way for what might be called an ‘open’ sociology, which immediately acquired a strongly anthropological character with Freyre and quickly incorporated increasingly historical aspects with Buarque de Holanda.

For a long while the dilemma between ‘not being’ and ‘being other’ has haunted the history of Brazil. The country's mixed-race condition lay at the heart of the dilemma which reached its apogee in the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. At that point in its history, that is, its emergence as a nation-state, the construction of a national identity became an imperative for the political and intellectual elites of Brazil. In this context, a European, the German naturalist, Carl von Martius, made himself particularly notable for having been one of the first, after Independence, to point out the significance of miscegenation in the composition of Brazilian identity.

There is even a paradox in the name of philosophy. Philosophy would rather love wisdom than have it. This is what exasperates those who interrogate it for answers and not questions. But this love must not be unhappy: being satisfied with unsatisfied love means loving love and at bottom feeling contempt for its object. It changes the object, the beloved wisdom is not what one thought one had. Those who say they have wisdom do not doubt, what they have is dogma, but those who doubt whether they have it may gain another wisdom, knowledge. Wisdom seems to change according to its place: it is false wisdom at the beginning of the cognitive process, but may be true in one or other of its relative terms. Knowledge is a wisdom that one works towards and to gain it one must deny having it, know that one does not know. Thus, in order to grasp what philosophy is, we must ask what a knowledge of not-knowing can be - a Socratic question - and what kind of cognitive process it is that can start with what is false to reach what is true; and this is a question to which the answers might be Platonic or Aristotelian. From Plato to Aristotle the ousia, what truly is, which is translated as essence in Plato, and as substance in Aristotle, changes places in this process. And if every philosophy decides to see true being as the thought essence of things or else as their particular substance, it would be a good idea to formalize the difference - gnoseological, ontological, political - between the two philosophers. It is a tricky project because it will have to contravene the rules of interpretation to produce this formal reconstruction.

What relationship is there between violence and language?* What happens when language is the main target of attack? We should perhaps begin by defining the inner logic of violence, and then tackle the question of the monstrous hybrid it has created with language. In one of the texts that make up the collection entitled Difficile Liberte’, Lévinas remarks that violent action is an ‘action where one acts as if one were the only actor: as if the rest of the universe existed only to receive the action; thus every action is violent that we suffer without wholeheartedly collaborating in it’. So violence has two characteristics. On the one hand, it is fed by a fundamental illusion, that is, a fiction of the will that imagines it is so super-powerful and autonomous that it thinks that by itself it can decide the fate of ‘the rest of the universe’. On the other hand, it is never an authentic action, because it prevents others from owning it and becoming co-actors themselves. Thinking perhaps of Spinoza, Lévinas suggests that violence comes into being from the moment when individuals decide to stop being part of the ordinary world of actions and think, ‘like an empire within an empire’, they are the unique cause of their acts and gestures. This subjective decision is clearly a control decision that contradicts the requirement of common sense, which is to be understood here as a sense of the community. It leads inexorably to consigning others to the world of effects in order more easily to turn them into eternal victims. In Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Prince Mishkin perfectly embodies the figure of the other who continually ‘receives’ the action. But when interplay between the will and its own mirrors becomes excessive, individuals always end up confusing the reality of the world with the exaggerated trust they put in their own prejudices. Since the analyses of the psychiatrist Minkowski at least, we know quite well that the more the certainty naturally accompanying the prejudice increases and expands until it borders on madness, the more violence is likely to grow.

The most valuable finding of my first sightseeing trip was that medieval Europe was the seat of Christendom and that Christianity defines the West. I was amazed to see that Europe reveals so much of its past. I had not had such an experience in the United States, where I had lived as a student and then as a professor of economics.

As I glimpsed the West, I found myself rediscovering Confucian civilization and how much I am still Confucian, although I was born into a Presbyterian family in Korea. But then, Korea is the most Confucian country. Curious about the West since my first trip, whenever I can I have toured Europe in search of the meaning of the West.

While travelling in Europe, my mind often jumps back to my early life in Korea and Japan. I am struck by the vivid contrast in appearance between medieval European towns and Asian towns, which were grey and as flat as pancakes. Medieval towns are stony and solid. Nothing is flimsy. Shaped by spires, domes, and towers, a European town's silhouette rises and falls like a stock market graph. Europeans obviously loved the vertical emphasis. A traveller can see either a soaring church tower or a castle keep miles away on the horizon. Churches predominate, as if to emphasize that the main business of the town is the worship and glorification of God.

The European community that is in the process of being created is still searching for its history. For a few years now, the publishing market, which has been attempting - under the heading of ‘European history’ - to construct a shared past for a present that we now have in common, has been mushrooming. This communal experience is indisputably gaining ground (though more slowly and controversially than some well-known optimists hoped): it is promoted by freedom of movement within the European Union, by the effect of tourism, which some time ago ceased being reserved only for the elite, by the availability everywhere of products that, a few years back, typically represented a certain type of national styles of consumption, and finally by the unifying influence of the media. To the extent that closer relations between the inhabitants of the ‘old world’ run in parallel with the attempt to create institutions to regulate these common goods, and to protect against movements of people from other areas with their own sets of values, a combination of powerful ingredients is in place that leads one to anticipate a strengthening of ‘European’ identity. It is well known in research into identity that history plays an important part in its construction. And indeed historians from European countries have set themselves the task of jointly putting together a school textbook in which presentations that might otherwise focus on national character and be likely to offend neighbours will be harmonized. Others are looking at ways of celebrating memory (places of memory) that are intended to stimulate European rather than national memory. In addition, German and French historians met a while ago, in the little place of Genshagen near Berlin, with the intention of identifying events that would be suitable for European celebrations, in that they would not be connected with events that one of the participants might be ashamed of, or refer directly to a victory of one over another. But to anyone who studies the history of the two neighbours separated only by the Rhine, it quickly becomes clear that there is not a lot of space left in the calendar for activities that would found a common tradition.

Superstars are not by accident a conspicuous phenomenon in our culture, but inherently belong to a meritocratic society with mass media, free enterprise, and competition. To make this contention plausible I will use Caillois's book, Man, Play and Games, to compare the mechanisms underlying the superstar phenomenon with a special kind of game, as set out by Caillois. As far as I know, Caillois's book is not quoted in the literature dealing with income distribution theories, although the comparison with play and games is, for limited purposes, interesting. In play and games we find almost all elements which play a role in theories of just income distribution: equality of opportunity, chance, talent, competition and skill, reward, entitlement, winners and losers, etc. These are not chance similarities, for “… games are largely dependent upon the cultures in which they are practised. They affect their preferences, prolong their customs, and reflect their beliefs … One … can … posit a truly reciprocal relationship between a society and the games it likes to play”. Moreover, as we will see, superstars combine the four basic characteristics of play that make their activities a special kind of play.

During an interview on human rights in a TV programme, the interviewer all of a sudden said that, so far as he could understand, I was establishing a connection between philosophy and torture, and asked me what this connection was. I was shocked.

In a couple of seconds I tried to guess how he could have come to such a conclusion. My response was: there is no connection between philosophy and torture, still when you look at the fact of torture with philosophical-ethical knowledge, you can realize that torture does not damage, nor ‘degrade’, the human dignity of the victim of torture, as is usually accepted – e.g. in the formulation of the title of the ‘Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment’. It causes damage to the human dignity of the person who tortures. We protect or damage human dignity, but our own human dignity, by what we do and not by what we suffer, since we are responsible for what we do and not for what others do to us. What we do, or refrain from doing, depends on each of us, i.e. acting in accordance with human dignity in our relations with other human beings is a problem in our ethical relation with ourselves, in spite of the fact that our actions are directed to somebody else.

From the earliest days of its history, Brazil has been a favoured ‘laboratory’ for ethnic, cultural and religious hybridization. The absence or scarcity of white women and the temptations of sexual exoticism drove the Portuguese discoverers, and with them sailors from Normandy, Brittany and Poitou, to have relations with Indian women they chanced to meet, thus creating a race of coloured people, oddly called mamelucos, later cabocles (of mixed white and Indian ethnicity). Afterwards, the very substantial recourse to the Negro slave trade and to manpower of African slave origin because of the requirements of the sugarcane economy (which remained predominant for a long time, especially in the Nordeste region of Bahia and Pernambuco), as well as the numerical imbalance of the sexes, characterized by a great predominance of men, popularized concubinage - all the more so because the Catholic Church was extremely reluctant to sanction interethnic unions with the sacrament of marriage. The Jesuits even recommended the despatch of white prostitutes or women condemned by common law (degredadas), for whom Brazil would furnish the opportunity for redemption, in order to avoid or reduce the number of unions of this kind. Thus, concubinage was the most common vehicle of miscegenation in Brazil.

The genre of the ‘historical film’, or ‘history film’, is protean to such a degree that it is possible to grasp its true nature only by studying the relationships it entertains with history, which is the sole common denominator capable of validating it and of providing an angle of attack for dealing with questions (such as ‘Does this film conform to historical reality?’ and ‘Is it a faithful reconstruction?’) that have more to do with movie-buff criticism or erudition than with a process of reasoning properly seeking to establish a semiotics of the cinematographic representation of history.

In the midst of the ultra modernity of stock exchanges and financial markets, certain practitioners are increasingly using forecasting models of changes in rates whose scientific rationality is particularly contested. We refer to ‘technical analysis’, or, in the jargon of finance, of ‘chartism’. The adherents of this practice affirm that their models offer the possibility of detecting and of reading, by means of stereotyped graphical configurations, rising or falling market trends. Now, for a large number of people who hold scientific economic and financial theories to describe the ‘nature’ of changes in rates as so many random and unpredictable phenomena, these models arise above all from the sphere of ‘superstition’ and ‘beliefs’, in the worst sense of the term. To listen to them, one would think there was hardly any difference between sorcery, prophecy, and chartism, since in short: “it works because people believe in it”. These are remarks that can only arouse the curiosity of the anthropologist, because they actually serve merely to recall epistemologica! controversies that depend on the rationality and the irrationality of observed practices and debates in various cultures. At the heart of these contradictory debates, it is precisely prophecy as a cultural mode of managing unforeseen events that has been the subject of multiple anthropological, historical, and epistemological studies which can, in a comparative perspective, clarify the structure and functioning of forecasting tools employed by the chartists in the context of financial speculation.

Television, newspapers and magazines often discuss the presence in Japan of dekasseguis from Brazil. This migratory movement, which started in 1985, has started to show signs of decline. The recession in Japan has been accompanied by the laying off of around 20,000 Brazilian dekasseguis - employed in businesses in the industrial sector (cars, electronics and food production) - which explains the reduction in the number of candidates for departure.

The emigrants have generally been drawn by attractive salaries, while always aware that they were being offered work refused by the local population, considered kitsui (heavy), kitani (dirty) and kiken (dangerous). The hope of amassing sufficient savings in a few years to enjoy a better standard of living on their return to Brazil weighed significantly on their decision to leave.

One of the most important issues concerning the organization of research and higher education concerns their interaction. The most common form that this relationship of research and education takes in our time and age is to have both functions combined in universities, often referred to more specifically as research universities. This form of organization is more recent than one perhaps might first think, and even at this time there are exceptions to this form of organization. In natural sciences and medicine there are industrial laboratories for research without teaching. In some countries, especially in Russia, there exists an extensive hierarchical institution almost entirely dedicated to research rather than teaching, called an academy of sciences. The members of such academies can devote themselves entirely to research without any teaching duties, except perhaps on the level of dissertation advising. Other exceptions include some rare graduate or research institutions, for instance Rockefeller University, All Souls College, Oxford, and some institutes of advanced study. But such exceptions are few and far between, at least in Western Europe and the Americas. Thus by far the most common relationship, especially in the humanities, of research and teaching is to have them conducted by the same people at the same institution, usually called a university.

From its very beginnings economic anthropology had to tackle a major obstacle: the very nature of its object of study. What in fact is meant by the use of the term ‘economics’ or its corresponding adjective? Does ‘economics’ refer to a specific relationship between ends and means, as some think, or is it defined, more prosaically, as the satisfaction of material needs? Is it a category of specific facts or a praxeology of goal-oriented action? Some interesting debates on the matter, which have brought formalist, substantivist, and Marxist writers into conflict, have revealed marked ideological distortions, some reductionism, and finally epistemological positions that were difficult to reconcile.

The fact that the Earth is no longer seen as at the centre of the Universe is the reason normally put forward to explain the rejection of heliocentrism. However, this version does not hit the mark. We should remember particularly that Man's position at the midpoint of the heavens was not all glorious; in the medieval world's hierarchical vision, only Hell is lower than the Earth, above which rises the celestial sphere, the whole being transcended by divine infinity. Observing that this lowly spiritual position reflects a cosmic reality, Nicolas Oresme (d. 1382) thought it wiser to assign the central place to the Sun. Anticipating Copernicus, he even advanced the hypothesis that it was the Earth that moved rather than Heaven. In any case, the important point was less Man's place in the Universe than in Creation, which might in fact contain another Universe side by side with ours, also with an inhabited Earth at its centre, as certain reputable theologians maintained from the thirteenth century. Thus humanity's loss of the central position in Creation had already been sidelined by the hypothesis of a plurality of worlds. However, Giordano Bruno was condemned in 1600, eleven years before the heliocentrism of Copernicus and Galileo, for having defended the vision of an infinite Universe and the idea of extraterrestrial life. How should we explain the fact that in the thirteenth century the papacy was battling with the universities to persuade them to teach that God could create other worlds, whilst in the seventeenth century philosophers, scientists and freethinkers were risking their lives trying to persuade the Inquisition that solar systems similar to our own exist in the Universe?

We are in 1563, somewhere on a Brazilian beach about 100 kilometres north of what is now São Paulo. A young man in a cowled robe alone on the beach is writing a poem on the sand with the point of his stick. The hostage of a savage tribe for weeks, he struggles daily against manifold carnal temptations, personified in the voluptuous native women who come to visit him every evening in his hammock, and addresses his Latin verses to the Virgin Mary in order to fortify his virtue. The threat of being killed and eaten by cannibals is nothing to him by comparison with the loss of his virginity. Recourse to his own original culture is the ultimate bulwark against contamination, the sign of resistance and strengthening of his identity. The definitive rejection of the Other is, in these circumstances, a survival reflex.