Travelogues on expeditions in the 1760s to Tahiti and Yemen among other places are part of the early reshaping of Europe. They display the features of a historical threshold or ‘Sattelzeit’ between the classical and the modern world. But these travelogues also demonstrate another paradigmatic shift with important impact on the conditions for thinking of Europe in present day literary history. Some travelogues inaugurate in their rhetorical practice and anthropological content a problematic cultural relativism and aestheticism in relation to the world outside Europe. Other texts express doubts and contradictions, hesitating without being relativistic, focusing on cultural processes and concrete specifics rather than on essences, and adopting a pluridimensional perspective on the customs the traveller is confronted with. While the former track leads to the dead-end of reductive schematism of 19th century Orientalism, the latter may serve as a relevant model for rethinking Europe as part of a globalised world today. In what follows, the travel writing on Tahiti by James Cook, Bougainville and Diderot, Carsten Niebuhr's travelogue from his expedition to Yemen, Flaubert's Voyage en É:gypte, and Gauguin's NoaNoa, are analysed.

The transmission and acquisition of the wisdom of the ancients throughout the Middle Ages is a fascinating phenomenon in which languages served as the primary vehicles for this journey of classical culture. The main route – but not the only one – was located on the Mediterranean coasts and incorporated Asia, Europe and Africa. It was a multidirectional journey.

Present changes in scientific publishing, especially those summarised by the term ‘Open Access’ (OA), may ultimately lead to the complete replacement of a reader-paid to an author, or funding-paid, publication system. This transformation would shift the financial burden for scientific publishing from the Research Performing Organisations (RPOs), particularly from scientific libraries, universities, etc, to the Research Funding Organisations (RFOs). The transition phase is difficult; it leads to double funding of OA publications (by subscriptions and author-sponsored OA) and may thus increase the overall costs of scientific publishing. This may explain why – with a few exceptions – RFOs have not been at the forefront of the OA paradigm in the past. In 2008, the General Assembly of EUROHORCs, the European organisation of the heads of research councils, agreed to recommend to its member organisations at least a minimal standard of Open Access based on the Berlin Declaration of 2003 (green way of OA). In the long run, the publishing system needs some fundamental changes to reduce the present costs and to keep up its potential. In order to design a new system, all players have to cooperate and be ready to throw overboard some old traditions, lovable as they may be.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a specific type of games took place in the Roman Academy of Arcadia. These games were a major cultural event in the academy and were a type of poetry competition which, in many aspects, was similar to the ancient Olympic Games. Therefore, they are a perfect example of the heritage of the Olympic spirit of the given era.

Applying a comparative and cross-national approach, this article is based on case studies of four representative European Atlantic port cities, namely Nantes, Bordeaux, Lisbon and Cádiz, and their socio-economic relations with Hamburg, one of Central Europe’s most important marketplaces. Based on quantitative data of commodity flows towards and from the Atlantic basin, it also analyses the role of German and German-speaking merchant communities that were established in these metropolitan port cities. The article will show how these foreigners circumvented the respective monopolies that excluded them from direct trade with French, Portuguese and Spanish colonies. These monopolies crumbled only during the era of the Atlantic Revolutions and the disintegration of the respective empires.

The haunting image of Nietzsche as a pre-fascist ideologist does not fit the early impression of him in Japan and Germany. At the beginning of the 20th century, he stimulated young intellectuals to liberate themselves from the culture of the bourgeois. This was replaced by a Heideggerian interpretation of Nietzsche given in the Nazi-period, which influenced conservative circles both in Germany and Japan after World War II. There is now emerging a new interpretation of Nietzsche from the perspective of the cultural left. Considering the impressions of Nietzsche in the two cultures, the author comes to the conclusion that we must forget the old-fashioned dichotomy between East and West and speak instead of the ‘entangled modernity’.

By virtue of its outspoken multidisciplinarity, robotics is an extremely popular research field, but is not always exercised by researchers with the broad scientific view required to make breakthroughs. This leads to a very fragmentary research landscape. Robots have their roots in fiction (the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Frankenstein, Golem, RUR). Their first appearance in the real world came in the early 1960s when Unimation sold their first industrial robots. However, only recently are robots invading people’s daily lives, as service robots, and in health care, as surgery robots, intelligent wheelchairs, and rehabilitation robots, for example. This migration from structured factory environments to cluttered homes is a tremendous step, requiring much more intelligent behaviour. In this paper, the major research questions to be answered will be outlined and illustrated with partial solutions, mainly taken from the author’s own research experience at KU Leuven.

This article supports the belief that transnational and glocal mechanisms have drastically affected identity and memory formation processes; thus, very diverse memories regarding complex episodes of migration or trauma are currently regarded as connected through multidirectional and cross-cultural patterns. Drawing on the fields of Trauma and Memory Studies, which consider the therapeutic role of art to represent and abreact troubled individual and collective experiences, the new hybrid identities born from this exchange and relationality have proved to demand new forms of representation. In particular, numerous groups of transitional women have recently fostered transnational engagements of womanhood through their creative works. Thus, some contemporary examples will be provided to show how art can be an empowering tool for contemporary transitional women to acquire a voice as well as a promoter of empathy for the modern glocal subject.

The importance of Africa for Europe was highlighted in the 1950 Schuman Declaration. Although the overarching framework for relations between the European Union and Africa is embedded in the 2000 Cotonou Agreement, cooperation between the European Union and Africa became increasingly institutionalized through the European Union–Africa Summits of 2000, 2007, 2010 and 2014, during which political leaders from both sides made strong rhetorical commitments to a strategic partnership. Yet, for the wider public, the relationship between the European Union and Africa appears to be both obscure and complex. The fifth European Union–Africa Summit is scheduled to take place in Ivory Coast in November 2017. This article will provide an overview of the development of European Union–Africa relations that coincided with the emergence of the African Union, the successor of the Organisation of African Unity. The so-called ‘strategic partnership’ between the European Union and the African Union represents the most comprehensive partnership the African Union has with any non-African actor. By highlighting current challenges affecting both, such as irregular migration, this article will, however, demonstrate that cooperation between the two is limited and somewhat lacking in strategic direction.

Postmodernism is often virtually equated with French poststructuralism, and seen as anti-rationalist and anti-humanist, even downright nihilist. However, the idea of difference that is central to much poststructuralist thinking can also be used to construct a model of postmodernism/postmodernity that avoids the endless denials of poststructuralism while allowing the establishment of a grip on the distinctions of our own postmodern period from an earlier modernity.

Globalization has accelerated international and intercultural exchange in almost all aspects of life and every discipline of study has to take a global perspective for its development. This paper discusses some current issues in China’s ‘foreign language/literature’ sector, at the tertiary level of human and social sciences, and it does so in terms of localized concepts and diverse fields of study, administrative intervention, institutional organization, professional recognition, academic dilemmas, and problems and prospects of development in view of the international context of sociocultural globalization.

We apply nonlinear Autoregressive-Distributed Lag (ARDL)-based methodologies to examine the nature of the effects of changes in R&D (intensity) on the employment rates of ‘high-skill’, ‘medium-skill’ and ‘low-skill’ labour and also whether or not these effects are symmetric. The empirical results based on the annual data for the period of 1991–2017 have suggested that while increased R&D has favourable effects on the employment rate of ‘high-skill’ labour in France, it has a negative impact on this type of labour in the UK. On the other hand, while the given increase in R&D has been found to be negatively affecting the employment rates of both ‘low-skill’ and ‘medium-skill’ labour in France, it has no impact on the employment rates of these two types of labour in the UK. These results may suggest that the dominant form of technological change in France is possibly a combination of ‘low-skill automation’ and ‘task-based’ whereby new technologies are simultaneously leading to replacement of ‘low-skill’ and ‘medium-skill’ labour by machines and the creation of new tasks (jobs) in which ‘high-skill’ labour has a comparative advantage. In the UK, the dominant form of new technologies resulting from additional R&D efforts seems to be in the form of ‘high-skill automation’ whereby ‘Robotics and Artificial Intelligence’ kind of new technologies might be causing replacement of ‘high-skill’ labour with machines. These results suggest that new technologies might be exerting adverse effects on income distribution in different ways in the UK and France.

The 25 years of the post-Mao era of Chinese fiction is divided into two distinct stages: the pre-1989 period, and the post-1989 period. If this division is true about almost everything else in China, it is especially true with literature. This is because literature had been used as a lethal weapon for political struggle by Mao before and during his regime, and this tradition, though strongly challenged in the post-Mao era, still lingers, though in very different forms now and much watered down. Even the recent trends of art for art's sake, or for the sake of entertainment, or for the sake of religious consciousness, could also be read as political gestures, and are indeed treated as such by Chinese literary officialdom, and also by Western China experts. Despite the fact that Chinese fiction has been highly politicized, this paper will examine, as much as possible, the development of fiction as an art. Only the artistic quality can support my argument that recent novels from China deserve not only more scholarly attention but also more reader appreciation than they have hitherto received around the world.

There was little science policy in the past. Science and technology developed at their own pace. Science policy is now required, not just on grounds of the cost of science, but also because problems of esthetics and of environmental externalities are raised. There are also questions posed by the recruitment of scientists, the structure of research and, above all, priorities in scientific development. There has also to be an analysis of the level—regional, national, plurinational, worldwide—at which decisions on science should be taken. If this is not done through science policy, decisions will be taken entirely haphazardly.

This article studies the different scenarios for the fiscal union in the Eurozone beyond 2019. It explains the different alternatives that the literature has explored to ensure fiscal transfers within Eurozone states as well as for common debt issuance. It also describes the role that monetary policy has played as a backstop for sovereign defaults and highlights the limits that inflation and an anti-euro backlash impose on public debt sustainability.

The aim of this article is to describe the connection of the concepts of nihilism and responsibility in the writings of Karl Jaspers. The article starts with his early writings in the late 1910s and traces his use of nihilism until the late 1950s. Jaspers first defines nihilism in a general, anthropological sense. It is essential to the human condition, which involves questioning everything. However, as his critique of contemporary society evolves, nihilism is treated as the impetus behind concrete threats such as National Socialism and the Second World War, as well as the post-war nuclear arms race.

Mathematics is almost always an insider’s affair. But sometimes things happen within the mathematical community that have a relevance, and perhaps also an interest, beyond the tribe itself. The Grundlagenstreit of the 1920s is such an example. In this review essay we tell this story with a focus on the main actors involved, David Hilbert in Göttingen and L.E.J. Brouwer in Amsterdam. We shall see how fine points concerning the existence of mathematical objects, the question of the editorship of the Mathematische Annalen, and the attempts to resume normal scientific contacts between French and German scientists after the First World War led to an unusually bitter conflict within the tribe and beyond. But even if the effects of the fight were at the time negative, the long range outcome was positive. Hilbert’s work on the foundation of mathematics is still a powerful influence on current research, and Brouwer’s view on the constructive foundation of mathematics, which at the time inspired both Husserl and Wittgenstein, is today of increasing importance in the evolving science of logic and computing.

The cities of Western Europe are profoundly affected by major global forces, which affect both the competitive advantage of different cities and the location of activities between cities and suburbs. These forces will impinge differentially on the main levels of the urban hierarchy; it is useful to distinguish between global cities, regional cities, older industrial cities and county-level cities.

Manipulations with isolated plant cells represent a powerful technology for the genetic engineering of plants.