The concept of tolerance initially advanced by the Arabs in both the East and the Iberian peninsula, an ideal later continued at the time of the Reconquest by Spanish Christians, was the key to the transmission of Greek science to the West. This paper examines the far-reaching and peculiar ways in which both Christians and Muslims fostered on Spanish soil a thriving intellectual life in the low Middle Ages. Particular attention is given to the rich personality and precociously modern achievements of King Alfonso X, with his vast project of cultural empowerment on behalf of his subjects.

A novel written by a Muslim Andalusian of the 12th century brilliantly argues that all knowledge can be obtained by applying reason to experience.

This article critically addresses the varied ways in which political parties can be said to represent. Three important ideal-typical modes of party representation are outlined: the popular, the statal, and the reflexive. Arguments are offered for countering the common view that, for example, popular modes are the most democratic, and statal modes the least democratic. Statal modes in particular are often taken to be an indicator of a decline in parties’ representative functions; however, shifting modes of party representation often have more to do with strategic choices and contextual pressures than democratic ideals. No one ideal-typical mode is intrinsically more democratic than others. Further, there is evidence that a new mode of party representation, the reflexive, may be emerging; parties may be transforming into something they never were in order to continue to do the things they have always sought to do. Whether democracy is unthinkable save for political parties is no longer the question we need to ask. Rather, we need to ask: what kinds of representative democracy are thinkable? And what forms of party claims, if any, are appropriate to them?

Language processing is grounded in brain function. Words of different semantic categories are processed in different cortical areas. Several examples of this distributed processing are given: colour words are processed in visual areas, whereas action words are processed in motor areas. The processing of action words in described in more details. A pathological condition, Parkinson’s disease, is used as an illustration of a motor impairment that selectively affects the comprehension of action words. This comprehension impairment is attributed to a difficulty in accessing the procedural knowledge carried by this specific class of words.

Speech processing in adults relies on precise and specialized networks, located primarily in the left hemisphere. Behavioural studies in infants indicate that a considerable amount of language learning already takes place in the first year of life in the domains of phonology, prosody, and word segmentation. Thanks to the progress of neuro-imaging, we can move beyond behavioural methods and examine how the infant’s brain processes verbal stimuli before learning. These studies reveal a structural and functional organization close to what is described in adults and suggest a strong bias for speech processing in these regions that might guide infants in the discovery of the properties of their native language, although no evidence can be provided as yet for speech specificity of such networks.

The Jews of Spain in the Middle Ages played an important role in the transmission of Graeco-Arabic learning by translating, or participating in translations, of scientific texts. They also composed original works on mathematics, astronomy, astrology and medicine in which they adapted the theories of the ancients for their own time. Science was used by the ruling powers as an element of prestige, and by the Jewish scientists as a way to obtain a high social status. The policy of cultural sponsorship of Muslim caliphs, as well as of Christian kings, was fundamental in the process of transmission of the Greek sciences to the Western world. The School of Translators of Toledo is an example of this process. The astronomical theories developed by Jewish scientists at the end of the 15th century played an important role in the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries of the 16th century. Their knowledge of astronomy, astrology, mathematics, and medicine was also used by the Jewish intellectuals to provide a rational and scientific support for the Jewish religion and tradition, as is reflected in the interpretations of the Bible by medieval Spanish Jewish authors.

In the 2006 Italian election campaign, then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi popularised a widely held view about the negative role of the euro for the Italian economy. This view had initially originated with the secessionist Northern Leagues. More recently, it had come to reflect the view of more moderate political players too. In the campaign Berlusconi ridiculed his contender, and the ultimate victor of the elections, Romano Prodi, for having accepted the ‘unfair Lira pegging’ to the euro in 1998. These claims reflect an ongoing debate about whether the adoption of the euro caused or even significantly contributed to Italy’s loss of economic competitiveness. We will trace the Italian trajectory and its economic preparedness for proposed entry into the EMU. We will weigh whether the terms and conditions of entry predisposed Italy to an inferior economic performance from the outset. We will assess the relative merits of the two interpretations of the role of the euro for Italy since its endorsement of the Maastricht Criteria, agreed to in December 1991. We will also look at the role played by the economic adjustments involved, followed soon after by Italy’s financial crisis in 1992. These latter events ultimately forced Italy to temporarily leave the European Monetary System (EMS). The country re-entered the EMS in 1998. We conclude that Italy’s weaknesses became more obvious with the adherence to conditions required for euro entry, but that its deep-seated political and economic problems were entrenched.

As a result of various political and non-political developments, the socio-culturally anchored and well structured character of European party systems has come under strain. This article assesses the overall social embeddedness of modern party politics and identifies newly emerging conflict-lines. It draws attention to phenomena that do not fit into the trend of dealignment, and discusses the relationship between group-based politics and democratic representation.

The concept of two largely independent systems, with strict left hemisphere lateralization of language and predominantly right lateralization of music is being challenged by the alternative view that language and music are closely related cognitive and neural systems with complex constellations of sub-processes, some of which are shared, and others that are not. Neurophysiologic data demonstrating similar syntax and semantics processing together with similarities in the development of the two domains in the infant brain support that language and music have much in common and complement each other. Close interaction between the two hemispheres is needed for optimal functioning of both language and music. Thus, the right hemisphere has an important role for understanding complex natural language such as stories and metaphors. Learning to read, write and musical training induces functional and anatomical changes in functionally relevant connections, and modifies hemispheric asymmetries for specific functions. Comparative research on music and language provides a way to study basic brain mechanisms and how the brain transfers acoustic stimuli into the unique human abilities for language and music, and may help bridge the divide between the sciences and the humanities.

Sociology is currently undergoing an interesting theoretical and methodological turn. A number of recent and influential works of sociology deal with the seemingly trivial phenomena of everyday life. The standard mass surveys are being replaced by in-depth, interpretative, and qualitative procedures that focus on the visual surface of society. They do so by means of observation and its extension – photography. The author believes that this is not a new fashion but rather signals a true paradigmatic shift. For the author, it heralds the emergence of a ‘third’ sociology, after the ‘first sociology’ of social organisms and systems, and the ‘second sociology’ of behaviour and action. The new focus is on social existence manifested by social events of various scales. This sociology of social existence provides a new angle of vision, which promises to advance considerably our understanding of several perennial riddles of human society.

The ability of political parties in advanced industrial democracies to maintain the traditional linkage between voters and their governments by making and attempting to fulfill policy promises is potentially being challenged by emerging social, political, and economic forces of the 21st century. Parties may become less meaningful to the electorate as they deal with the cross-pressures created by the forces of Europeanization, globalization, localism, and the increasing independence of central banks. These factors have the potential to make parties in government, at the national-level, marginally less able to fulfill the promises they make to voters. The review of literature presented here regarding these challenges indicates that although the risks to parties are very real, the effects of these emerging forces have yet to substantially diminish the primary roles and functioning of national parties in government. Those most at risk of being affected in the future are parties who rely strongly on economic appeals and promises.

This paper deals with the transfer of Arab visual theory in the Middle Ages, as it is believed that the cultural significance of this transfer needs a new emphasis. Mathematical perspective was invented in Florentine Renaissance Art. However, except in the history of science, it is a little known fact that this visual theory was based on the Book of Optics, written by Ibn al Haithan, also known as Alhazen, and was translated, probably in Spain, with the Latin title Perspectiva. We therefore can speak of a double history of perspective, as visual theory and as pictorial theory. The main argument is to identify the importance of images, which separate Arab thought from Western thinking. It was the transformation of mathematics into art, in the Western sense, that allows us to distinguish two different cultures. In this process, the invention of mathematical space by Biagio Pelacani was an important step. Thereafter, the gaze and its looking space became a new concern of the Renaissance.

Sugar has attracted attention from economic historians, particularly because of its significance in the organisation of labour – notably the role of sugar in the development of slavery in the New World. In a Mediterranean setting, the links to slavery are less obvious, but the gradual westward transfer of sugar technology from the Levant to Sicily (under Muslim rule, and later under Aragonese rule) and to Spain reflects seismic changes in the Mediterranean economy. This was a luxury product and, as demand in western Europe grew, European merchants sought sources of supply closer to home than the eastern Mediterranean. Their reluctance to trade in the Levant reflected political uncertainties in the period when Turkish power was rising in the region. In southern Spain, Valencia (under Christian rule) and Granada (under Muslim rule) became major suppliers to northern Europe by the 15th century. Paradoxically, the survival of the last Muslim state in Spain, Granada, was made possible through the injection of capital by Italian and other merchants trading in sugar. However, the discovery of the Atlantic islands, especially Madeira, gave the Portuguese an opportunity to develop sugar production on a massive scale, again targeting Flanders and northern Europe. The article concludes with the arrival of sugar in the Caribbean, in the wake of Columbus.

This article addresses the sudden and somewhat unexpected rise of populist parties in West, Central, and Eastern Europe. The first section highlights the core characteristics of populism through the construction of an ideal type. Subsequently, the focus is on the opportunity structures that give rise to populism, emphasizing the end of the post-war settlement, post-industrialism, the gradual erosion of party politics, and frustrations emanating from the consolidation of liberal democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. The final section examines three distinct forms of populism, focusing on radical-right populism (parties such as the French National Front, the Austrian Freedom Party), center-right populism (Forza Italia), and left populism (the German Party of Democratic Socialism).

The study of language acquisition during the first year of life is reviewed. We identified three areas that have contributed to our understanding of how the infant copes with linguistic signals to attain the most basic properties of its native language. Distributional properties present in the incoming utterances may allow infants to extract word candidates in the speech stream as shown in the impoverished conditions of artificial grammar studies. This procedure is important because it would work well for most natural languages. We also highlight another important mechanism that allows infants to induce structure from very scarce data. In fact, humans tend to project structural conjectures after being presented with only a few utterances. Finally, we illustrate constraints on processing that derive from perceptual and memory functions that arose much earlier during the evolutionary history of the species. We conclude that all of these machanisms are important for the infants to gain access to its native language.

The theme of the 2006 IAP Conference, held at Alexandria, from 1–3 December 2006, was ‘The Unity of Science’. Let me explain how I interpret this interesting motto. For me, this does not mean that there is one regina scientiarum that rules over the other fields of science and learning; a role that was allotted to theology in olden times, and that nowadays – in a more secular vein – is claimed by physics. In my view, the notion ‘unity of science’ rather refers to ‘communality within diversity’. Disciplines vary in content, issues and methods. But there are also quite some common objectives, interests and concerns, the most important of which may be the common goal of searching for testable truth with objective and independent evidence. The communalities render it possible, or even imperative, to communicate and to cooperate. The diversity implies complementariness and calls for interdisciplinarity in the study of today’s numerous and complex phenomena in science and society.