It is the nature of the earth to lie ‘wholly spread out under the sky’: hapasê hê hupo tô kosmô keimenê (Isocrates); and the sky determines the World. Indeed it is the same as the World, as Plato states in the final words of Timaeus: ‘the World was born: it is the Sky, which is one and alone of its race’ (ho kosmos … gegonen heis ouranos hode monogenês ôn). What is thus clearly ‘one and alone of its race’ dominates by its very nature what is subjected to it: the earth. With the coming of the age of modernity, and today more than ever, the West has indeed subjected the Earth and its peoples by imposing its World on them. But it is the nature of worlds, as it is of heavens, to be limited by a horizon; and there is no sky, nor world, that is not supported by an earth. By the Earth, we mean to say nature. This ancient certainty, this primary metaphor, has been inscribed in us since the first creatures to become human, standing with both feet on the ground and head turned towards the sky, first saw the horizon. As paleo-anthropology tells us, it is in effect in the same movement that they began to create technical and symbolic systems from which the ecumene would spring; and this prime metaphor that was the basis for the ecumene and its worlds has continued to work on the generation of secondary metaphors that govern the history of human thought through the unconscious - from Aristotle when, inventing the notion of subject, he called it hupokeimenon, ‘what lies below’ (as the earth lies below the sky), to Heidegger when he imagined The Origin of the Work of Art as a ‘dispute’ (Streit) between a world and the earth. Indeed there is Streit because the earth denies itself and withdraws into its interior, in the very exteriorization that opens it into a world.

To be a teacher of literature at a university today is to occupy a problematic position in the production and codification of knowledge - a fact that has generated a great deal of critical comment in recent years. But it should be noted that this position in its problematic dimensions is not necessarily new. In fact there is reason to believe that the teacher of literature has always been a propagator of an aberrant science - yet a science that in its aberrations has more to do with the methodological problems of the natural sciences than is usually credited.

Knowledge is a social institution, a social activity, as well as the product of that social activity. All known societies incorporate several modes of hierarchical knowledge. Three styles of knowledge co-exist in the transitional societies of the third world in general and of contemporary Africa in particular (even though in each of the latter, only one style tends to predominate). The first are initiation societies - where power is conferred on the initiated; the second are learned societies (or academies) - which handle science and technologies; and the third are industrial societies - whose enterprises apply the technologies in order to improve humankind's material and cultural condition. The initiation, learned and industrial societies were developed in a pre-modern, pre-industrial context which was monarchic, sacred, anti-democratic or endowed with a tribal democracy. A gradual opening can be seen in the passage of initiation societies (where power is the perquisite of the initiated) towards learned societies and then, later, to industrial ones. Here, the problem is knowing whether and how to bring into play a fourth style of society - cognitive society - which requires relatively advanced conditions of democracy.

Clichés about the Orient and Oriental women, which imposed themselves with considerable force on the popular imagination, have been perpetuated in Europe since the Middle Ages. The projection of evil onto marginal or ineffectual groups within a society has always been an easy and useful method for making scapegoats. Jews in Medieval Europe were stereotyped and tried for a number of fictitious crimes such as poisoning wells, killing children for their blood and crucifying and cannibalizing their victims. Along the same lines women were associated with the devil and regarded as enemies of the Church, hence the witch-hunts that tried women for sexual voraciousness, cannibalism and consorting with evil spirits. The projection of evil onto an alien culture was also a distinctive aspect of medieval Europe's intolerance, due to its ignorance of such cultures.

The East has been upsetting and sometimes even revolutionizing Europeans’ modes of thought, feeling and enjoyment since the most ancient times, well before Marco Polo, when it transmitted its techniques and arts (printing, paper money, the compass, porcelain, etc.). From the 18th century Europe has played a similar role in the technological and even the philosophical field, with regard to India, China and Japan. Apart from the infrequent exchanges between West and East, the transmission of knowledge was carried out through ‘buffer civilizations’ - Persians, Sassanids, the Turkic-Iranian Muslim world - whose languages were Indo-European or whose religion was Abrahamic, and so culturally linked to the West. Thus it was to the east of them that the great frontier between civilizations was situated, in a region that, since around the seventh century, has been dedicated to Islam. The huge Euro-Asian bloc was the arena for several encounters, or clashes, between civilizations which considerably enriched the technical skills, culture and taste of Europeans; the transmission of Greco-Arab knowledge in the 12th century, the contribution of Chinese techniques thanks to the great Asian land routes (christened the Silk Road in the 19th century), the importation of Indian techniques over the sea routes. These encounters were also the occasion for two-way trade that gave a new face to countries like India or Japan; the latter, for instance, opened up not only to western technologies in the Meiji period, but also to the philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger in the early 20th century (the case of the Kyôto School of philosophy should be mentioned). The last of the great encounters date from the late 19th and the 20th centuries at the very moment when Europe and the American world were claiming to be the only ‘civilization’ worthy of the name, and considered they had nothing to learn from others, but, on the contrary, could teach them everything. However, this was also the time when a deepening knowledge of India, China, Korea, Japan led to a ‘rediscovery’ of Asia as a continent of great and rich civilizations whose philosophies, arts and many other disciplines were a match for their European counterparts; the French writer Henri Michaux described himself as a ‘barbarian’ when he visited that part of the world at the beginning of the 20th century.

A genealogy of the relationship between Islam and knowledge focusing on the Muslim West and, in particular, Algeria explains the current chaos within Muslim societies. The West, on its side, has difficulties understanding a cultural tradition which differs from its own. Islam did develop an aptitude for knowledge that put into play ‘different intellectual modalities, among which were dialectic argument, intuition and controversy’. However, ‘the accession to knowledge is shown by assent’. A long tradition of debate and controversy drew to a close and was abandoned in favour of the exercise of authoritative and absolute power. Intellectual life in the region suffered notably from the successive departures of the elite, at the end of the Ottoman Empire, at the onset of the colonial period and upon independence. Colonialism founded a new system born of different traditions and entailed the breaking up of traditional scholastic institutions. After Independence, fewer and fewer interlocutors were capable of undertaking a reasoned critique of the West. ‘Mistrust with regard to the West’ translated into a ‘refusal even of controversy’. It is a vicious circle that can be broken only through a minimum of democracy.

The image of the cave described by Plato in Book VII of the Republic is the most frequently quoted emblematic example of the belief in the illusory nature of what sight transmits to the mind. ‘We must compare the world of the senses with the view of those who live in a prison’, says Socrates, referring to the cave in which there are men in chains who can see nothing but a wall onto which are projected shadows of objects lit by a fire behind them, and who, ignorant of the objects themselves, are inclined to give more credit to the shadows than the objects, as long as they are not free and able to rise in their souls from the visible to the intelligible world.

The whole history of human thought could be rewritten in terms of the confrontation between the eye and the mind. The immediate power, poignant charm, evocative force of the messages sent from one to the other have encouraged a bewitching abandon, internal illuminations, but also moments of deliberate blindness and destructive furies. Starting from periods of vague iconophilia, a large number of societies have moved to periods of obsessive iconoclasm in public forms of representation. From sublime experiences of divine mystical visions to the most degenerate forms of violence and pornography, it is the visual image, perceptible or mental, that imposes itself.

People say the same thing is happening everywhere, even though there are local variations; all over the world the study of the ‘humanities’, and even of languages (other than the new lingua franca, American English), is going through an unprecedented crisis that may rightly make us fear for their very survival into the future. In Europe, probably never since the Renaissance has the threat of a return to barbarism or vacuity (the difference is not very great) in education been so clear.

Iconophobia, literally the fear of images, usually occurs in proportion to the powers attributed to images by their believers and attackers. In the worst cases, these fears have led to, or coincide with, a cycle of violence that may involve the actual destruction of images (iconoclasm) and the actual destruction of human life. The distinction between the two activities is often blurred by the language we use: For instance, purging public spaces of the giant statues of Soviet leaders in the early 1990s resonates with the Stalinist purges of living people a generation before (fig. 1). The rhetoric of representation in such photographs of the subjugation and hanging of Lenin('s statue) in Romania in 1990, invokes a retaliation against the real man. The sheer number of such public statues throughout the Soviet Union and its satellites provided many communities with this opportunity for revenge. We also speak of the suppression of imagery, as of popular uprisings; or the eradication of certain beliefs, subjects in art, and even whole tribes of people.

I shall start with a joke and go on with a riddle. The joke first: in Woody Allen's film Take the Money and Run young Virgil, a future criminal, who is clumsy and unlucky, suddenly comes into view, in the middle of the school band, going along the streets of the town playing the cello; in this brief episode the mismatch between the instrument and the situation is complete, absolute, since the cellist could obviously not follow the rhythm of the procession. The riddle next: why do policemen always go around in pairs? Because one can read and the other can write. So the two skills complement each other unreliably, whereas they ought to exist together in the same person.

Gandhara, an area that welcomed Buddhism and where the earliest monasteries are found from the late third century BC, was also a ‘land of immigration’.

With the aim of converting the Greco-Iranian peoples to Buddhism, the dignitaries in charge of these provinces under Asoka had identified in Greek and Aramaic vocabulary equivalents of Hindu or Buddhist themes. But the Gandhara Buddhists seem not to have continued this attempt to translate their sacred texts into Greek, Aramaic and probably Middle Iranian. On the other hand the Buddhists from Bactrian, Sogdian and Xinjiang translated the great texts of Buddhism from Sanskrit into the indigenous languages.

Modern cities have recently evolved as centres for material and intangible exchanges and this obliges us to rethink the urban scene. The passing from the industrial era to the new age of information has rendered obsolete the models envisaged by Max Weber, Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin. Basing her argument on the typology put forward by Saskia Sassen, Barbara Freitag sketches out the different profiles of contemporary cities. Urban centres are now defined by the level, scale and intensity of the exchanges to which they give rise. On the first level is the global city, nerve centre of the globalized economy (Tokyo, New York, London …) and capable of challenging the power of the state. On the second level are the megalopoles (Mexico, São Paulo …), which are only prevented from joining the ranks of the global cities because much of their population is excluded from the global economy. Next come the metropoles, cities like Paris (‘19th-century capital’), which have retained a way of life global centres can no longer provide. However, most of the world's population is concentrated in the peripheral boroughs of the information society's global economy. It is for the sake of this population that attention must be paid to the transformations endured by 21st-century cities.

Among the most recent unforeseen events of this modernity, those of 11 September 2001 exposed the dark side of globalization. If science reduces the whole universe to its one logic, philosophy retains a crucial role as a process of production of meanings for the human being, a being incapable of situating himself or herself in relation to the universe except through dialogue. To the extent that no fragment of truth can be absolutized, only permanent thought can constitute a universal cognition.

Johann Galtung in one of his lectures talks of a painting that hung in the ante-room of the late Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah. It was a giant picture of Nkrumah himself struggling loose from his chains. There is thunder and lightning in the air, and in one corner of the picture are three men, three white men. The first is a capitalist and he carries a briefcase. The second is a missionary and he clutches a Bible. The third, the meekest looking carries a book whose title can be barely read. It is African Political Systems, and the third man is an anthropologist.

Talking about teaching modern literature is also a way of talking about the relationship between literature and society, such an old topic that there is now scarcely any desire to deal with it. But when the teacher in a school or university classroom opens a novel, a poetry collection, or most often an anthology or classic with its attendant notes, and starts reading, trying as hard as possible to grab the attention of twenty or a hundred students, at that moment something crucial happens that has to do with the relationship between literature and society.

Today it seems to be an urgent and necessary task to return to the texts by Michel de Certeau (1925-86). Not because Michel Foucault said of him that he was ‘the best, the brightest of [his] generation’, but for reasons to do with our present thinking.

Indeed, when we consider the social and political disarray of the moment, we are forced to recognize how hard it is, in periods of crisis, to clarify the changes taking place. That implies the emancipation of thought, a process that consists of an inventive interrogation of knowledge and a rigorous elaboration of understanding. This process is one that would not be subject to the dominant ideological models. In addition, thinking of the way clarification and emancipation are intertwined in the most successful intellectual constructions, some of us remember Certeau's work, whose central aim is to clarify the fundamental but stealthy transformations that abruptly emerge into the light of day and undermine the most tenacious assumptions.

Many cultures have had knowledge imposed from outside, whether by force or for reasons of power, to the detriment of their own endogenous knowledge and the wisdom developed throughout their history. Would Japan's acquisition of Western knowledge have led but to the development of a lesser know-how, devoid of meaning or sense, or even of knowledge which it might be better to ignore? Far from benefiting from an endogenous development or a modernization respectful of beings and of their environment, the developing countries that superficially adopt this unilateral knowledge undergo a type of ‘self-colonization’. Although concurring with biologist Keiko Nakamura's theory that scientific attitudes must be studied from within, Masahiro Hamashita considers that knowledge from outside allows for more solid internal reflection. He thus advocates the development of an integrated, hybrid knowledge, where external knowledge is mixed with internal knowledge in a spontaneous, harmonious way, as was the case with the traditional knowledge that Japan acquired from China.

Cultural space knows no official boundary. Civilizational interaction, recorded and unrecorded, is an ongoing process. Diffusionism and parallelism get interfused in civilizational studies. To think of one-sided borrowing or lending in the realm of culture rests on bias or prejudice, perhaps both. To think that originally there was only one culture (Egypt or India or China) and that all other cultures are its diffused or dispersed form is incorrect, both theoretically and evidentially. Comparably incorrect is the anthropological hypothesis that different cultures, in response to diverse social and natural stimuli or conditions, developed quite independently and in parallel manner. Once we believe, as I think we must, that cultural space is a continuum, the parallelistic thesis is bound to collapse. If, on the other hand, we totally reject the possibility of independent, relatively independent, origin and development of different cultures, we are obliged to deny the differentiable identity and personality and distinct cultures. To deny cultural pluralism is psychologically untenable and ideologically pernicious, and I have argued the point at length elsewhere.

This issue of Diogenes includes short papers by prominent officers of 18 of the member-associations of the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures (Fédération Internationale des Langues et Littératures Modernes - FILLM) with a view to introducing and explaining the history, purpose, and function of these international learned societies representing different branches of the modern languages field at a time when the role of such bodies is often questioned even by professional academics working within the discipline, and their very existence largely unknown outside it, even to educated persons. The FILLM is one of the earliest member organizations of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies (CIPSH) which had indeed had a prior existence since its foundation in Oslo in 1928 as the Commission Internationale d'Histoire Littéraire Moderne and was subsequently reorganized in its present structure in 1951 following the formation of UNESCO.

The theme ‘East versus west’ is an old topic for discussion, but one that is constantly being rehashed. Though it has many aspects, a number of elements remain vague. Do East and West each form a monolithic bloc? Where does the East begin in the West's eyes, and vice versa, the West for the East? What, if any, are the basic differences separating the two?

Palaeontologists tell us that a dividing line indicating a divergence of traditions in stone tools can be traced back to the Lower Palaeolithic era, that is, a million years ago, in the western region of India. To the east of that line, in other words in East and South-east Asia, the most common tools are choppers and chopping-tools, while to the west, in western Asia, Europe and Africa, the main tools are hand-axes. The former are suitable for working vegetable materials and making bamboo or wooden, therefore perishable, objects, which for this reason leave no trace in the form of archaeological clues. The hand-axes are capable of being worked into stylized shapes and are appropriate for dismembering large herbivores and cutting up their meat.