Although he was not the first Western philosopher, Plato was the first to define clearly the aim that has characterized Western philosophy since its beginnings. The principal capacities in which the human being acts are scientific, moral, mathematical, artistic, political, and religious, and the aim of philosophical activity was to achieve a standpoint providing complete explanation and justification by finding and eliminating the elements of dogmatism, unrealized ignorance, and mere hypothesis by which, in the capacities mentioned, the human being is influenced. The ideal envisaged was the self-inclusive understanding, achieved by the understanding's successive advancement and containment of all conceivable criticism of itself. The criticisms by Parmenides and Zeno of Ionian and Pythagorean physics and Socrates’ criticism of various aspects of Athenian life were excellent examples.

All the languages of the world, I believe, have words to distinguish, among men, between intellectuals and manual workers: the former use their brains more than their hands; the latter use their hands more than their brains. Since the beginning of time, many men could easily be classified in one or the other of these groups (and certainly many others could fall into the intermediate zones between the two poles). For example, “ intellectuel “ and “manoeuvre“ are very old words in the French language, direct heirs of Latin words designating the brain and the hand.

Reagere, reactio does not belong to classical Latin. Reagere appears, as late as the fourth century A.D., in Avienus, but not reactio. Nonetheless, antiquity was not unaware of the concept of reciprocal action, where the “patient” reacts in return on the agent. The Aristotelian doctrine of antiperistasis occupied physicists up until the time of Galileo: “All movers, as long as they move, are at the same time moved.” The Latin authors dispense with reagere and reactio. It is the verb pati, designating the passive state to which the prefix re is added in the aphorism attributed to the Scholastics in the 18th century dictionaries: omnis agens agendo repatitur.

In the traditional approach, the Bible is treated as revelation, and later as the product of history. But neither the first nor the second can satisfy the modern reader—the first is too naive, the second is too learned. Although the reader no longer believes that the Bible represents the infallible word of God, he nevertheless stands at a loss before an edition which distinguishes its different layers by four different kinds of type. Since he can neither read nor study it, his only alternative is to put it aside.

Does the success of quantum mechanics require that we abandon the notion of complete scientific explanation? Or does it represent a breakthrough in the explanatory scope of physical theories? Ever since Werner Heisenberg formulated the theory of matrix mechanics in 1925, this issue has been the topic of a continuing philosophical debate. In this essay I propose to explain Heisenberg's rejection of the mechanistic philosophy associated with classical physics and the significance of his return to Aristotle's concept of matter as potency.

What strikes me at the outset, and prompts the title, is that nothing exhibits more clearly than mathematics the complicity between man, God and Satan. That man should have knowledge so luminous, so absolute, would seem impossible did he not share, under whatever doubt or qualification, in the divine. On the other hand, the arrogation of that knowledge, its over-reaching distortion and delimitation of mind and world, hints how far it reenacts the revolt of Lucifer.

It was Voltaire, apparently, who coined the term “philosophy of history” in his Essai sur les moeurs (Geneva, 1756). Since then, however, as a field of historical study philosophy of history has been pursued only intermittently and more by philosophers and moralists than by historians—witness the famous names: Herder, Hegel, Marx; Spencer, Spengler, Toynbee. In consequence, philosophy of history has been characterized by philosophical speculation and/or intellectual systematizing which, empirically considered, has not closely reflected reality. Yet some of the most recent writing on the subject together with the advance of archeological knowledge and the development of social science theory, especially anthropological theory, allows at this juncture perhaps at least the beginnings of an empirical understanding of the longer sweep of human history, i.e., of the history of civilizations or of human societies since the inception of civilization. This essay is an attempt at formulating a working hypothesis for just such an understanding.

Science may be designated as the search for the understanding of phenomena apprehended by one or more of the senses in terms of theoretically postulated entities and the interrelationships between them in such a manner that the apprehended phenomena may be deducible from them along with others for which it was not postulated and with respect to which its truth and falsity, or rather fecundity or sterility, could be judged. This continuous interplay between the theoretically postulated and the sensuously apprehended, initially in terms of that which is first sought to be understood but more essentially in terms of that which has not yet been apprehended but which can be apprehended if the theoretical postulation is true, is the heart of the scientific enterprise as we have come to practice it today. The theoretical postulation thus links the past with the future, and thus makes the seeking for knowledge connected in an essential manner with what can only be called its relation to the future.

The question posed in the title of this article requires us to indicate exactly what we mean by medieval India. Does there exist in general an Indian Middle Ages? Or rather are the Middle Ages a purely European category, and the extension of it to include India involve extrapolations that are devoid of sense?

The relationship intelligentsia-morality-politics is characterized by a number of important features. In the first place, it is not a question of an abstract logical structure, but of an objectively existing social phenomenon. In other words, it is a question of the attitude of real, living men, with their intimate personal feelings and experiences, their social and political convictions.

The first term in the title of this study might give some surprise. As I hope to prove, however, hieroglyphic writing happens to be the only key enabling us to gain entry to the Egyptian universe. Not only art and mythology, but also the laws, institutions and even daily life itself were “thought hieroglyphically” on the banks of the Nile.

When, under the tutelage of the “Fathers” Enfantin and Saint-Amand Bazard, the disciples of Saint-Simon were initiated into the exemplary “proletarian” life, they were re-enacting the ways of the first Christians. Styling themselves as “apostles,” by way of justifying their doctrines, they invoked the authority of myth. The “City of God” referred to in their vows was no Utopian invention, but the “New Jerusalem,” the recreation of the original city; the New Book summarizing the ideology of a radical renovatio, was the sacred text of a New Christianity. To the avowed Saint-Simonians, the Golden Age was not the source of some irrepressible nostalgia, but rather the promise of a social perfection that must be realized upon Earth in the more or less immediate future. The pilgrims of Ménilmontant were not unfamiliar with the myth of the Three Ages : did not one of them translate into French Lessing's “incendiary” essay on The Education of the Human Race? (Even while that new interpretation of millennial prophecy by the Calabrian abbot was, through Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte, infiltrating into libertarian socialism and Marxism.)

“What I like in a work of art, is when one finds the very subject of the work transposed, with specific reference to the characters in it. […] Thus, in certain paintings by Memling or by Quentin Metzys a small convex dark mirror reflects on its own the interior of the room where the painted scene occurs. […,] Then, indeed, in literature, in Hamlet, the scene of the play; and in a lot of other theatre plays as well. […] In The Tall of the House of Usher, the story that is read to Roderick, etc. Not one of these examples is totally accurate. What would be far more so, [….] is to compare it to a coat of arms where one image places a second one in a subjugated position (en abyme).”

The theme of Darwin's struggle between reason and imagination is perhaps most clearly shown in his efforts in the Origin to conceive of how the eye of the body might have developed through natural selection. Thus he wrote:

To arrive, however, at a just conclusion regarding the formation of the eye, with all its marvellous yet not absolutely perfect characters, it is indispensable that the reason * should conquer the imagination; but I have felt the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at others hesitating to extend the principle of natural selection to so startling a length.

The sports competitions which have taken on such importance in the life and world of today are connected, over the centuries, with the ideas and customs of the Greek people. The Greek heritage still manifests itself in the collective and individual sports today, and our contemporaries were not mistaken in recognizing this fact. After an interval of 1500 years a new series of Olympic Games began, reviving those pan-Hellenic games which, every four years, gathered athletes and crowds from all over the Greek world at Olympia. It is of utmost interest to study closely the similarities, relationships, and differences which exist between our ways of competing and the ways in which our distant forebears competed. Such a study is enthralling and requires the simultaneous use of all the auxiliary disciplines such as ancient history, the study of literary texts, the study of inscriptions, and archeology.

The status a society assigns to woman largely depends upon the basic structure of that society itself. While considering the emergence of the traditional social structure in India, it is interesting to see how diverse struggling racial groups became parts of an integrated hierarchical society in which the invading immigrants formed the elite stratum. We also see how the values of the elite stratum were forcefully imposed on the integrated culture that emerged as a result of this interaction, how the immigrants suffering from a deep-seated feeling of insecurity performed various rites and rituals to ward off the fear of extermination; how the womenfolk belonging to a stock which was not only racially and culturally different but inimical too, were given a low position; and how due to extraneous origin of womenfolk a feeling of suspicion against them was deeply ingrained in the society.

In European cities there is a clear-cut separation between center and suburbs. During the Middle Ages mainly the dictates of military strategy brought about the crowding of the population inside a belt of ramparts. Periodically this corset of walls proved too narrow, and consequently suburbs grew up along the roads leading from the city. These suburbs were in turn incorporated into the city, to be protected by a new enclosure, causing the (older walls to become circular avenues. Paris is a classic example; with its three successive lines of avenues surrounding concentric areas.

It is now nearly twenty years since Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures appeared, and during these twenty years many things have changed in linguistics—not least, the interest that the rest of the world now takes in what we linguists do. The reason for this is clearly because Chomsky claimed to have discovered a window into the human mind, via the study of the structure of languages. The argument is a simple one: a linguist can write a grammar for a language, with some degree of confidence that his grammar is the “ right “ one for that language, but since the language only exists in the heads of its speakers until linguists or other grammar-writers come along, the grammar that he has written must correspond in some direct sense, and in detail, to the knowledge that exists in the speaker's mind. Therefore, in order to study that particular part of our minds, all we need to do is to write grammars, making sure that they are right, of course, and then study the grammars instead. “We can also compare the grammars for radically different languages and see to what extent they are similar or different, and then draw conclusions about general properties of all human beings’ minds— and we can even speculate as to how our minds have developed that way, whether by genetic programming or by other means. It is no wonder that linguists are not the only people who think linguistics is important.

To the memory of the ephemeral goddess Sedna, whose huge body reached out across the depths of the Arctic seas, whose hair was forever matted, full of ordure, clogged with bear furs and the snouts of narwhales, and could be combed only by a shaman on one of his cosmic journeyes.

The inukshuk are piles of rough stone, shaped like men, and found on the coasts of the Canadian Arctic. I am well aware that they have never found a place in the history of statuary. However, they are unquestionably representations of the human form, and no one would confuse them with the simple cairns raised here and there by so many nomadic tribes in the course of their wanderings. They are disappearing, or have already disappeared with the recent, swift, and far reaching changes in Eskimo life. It is really almost a matter of chance as to whether one recognizes that they represent, or represented, a remarkable image of man. For me, the chance was a two-fold one, so to speak.

Our age is trying in many ways to deal with the problem of the survival of ethnic minorities. Being confronted with a centralized political power which destroys cultural differences, many of these minorities have become conscious of their originality (which is often hidden away in folklore) and are in search of a new balance with the dominant culture. They try to achieve this new balance by bringing their basic characteristics up to date or even deliberately entering a phase of counter acculturation and adopting an attitude of political liberation much like that of the formerly colonized peoples.