What follows is the Heinz Nixdorf Memorial Lecture that Norman Davies, as the recipient of the Erasmus Medal of the Academia Europaea, gave on the occasion of the 25th anniversary meeting of the Academia Europaea in Wrocław in September 2013.

Our experiences, through day and night, are not as clear-cut as might seem on first thought. Considerable aspects of life comprise illusory phenomena, some of which are realised, while others are not. Moreover, the boundaries between illusion and hallucination can be very blurred. This essay considers specific situations exemplary of these aberrations – the phantom limb phenomenon, the effects of migraine and temporal lobe epilepsy, sleep disturbances, out-of-body and near-death experiences, conjuring, and the technique of pick-pocketing. Life is never as certain or as sure as we think.

Whereas during the first half of the eighteenth century the expression ‘oświecony’ in Polish was nearly always a religious metaphor, between the 1760s and the early nineteenth century the noun ‘oświeconie’ became secularized, broadened and given a quite revolutionary new meaning, denoting an intellectually grounded, rational and true understanding of things in contrast to how traditional religious authority understood things. This is well known to scholars and students alike. But the question now arises, with the rise over the last 20 to 30 years of ‘Radical Enlightenment’ as a fundamental new category in the humanities, how much has this category applicability in the Central European context? Studying book history and print culture, I shall argue, helps us to determine that in fact it does.

Although internationalisation of the scientific world is a key issue in public attention and policy, the actual information base on migration and mobility of ‘teachers in higher education’, ‘scholars’, ‘academics’ or ‘researchers’ has remained weak. Most available statistics focus on ‘foreign’ students or ‘foreign’ scholars rather than persons mobile for purposes of learning and academic/research work, and provide information only on a single moment rather than on the life course of moving between countries. In recent years, some surveys of the ‘academic profession’ and ‘researchers’ have been undertaken primarily in economically advanced countries or especially in European countries that provide an overview on various modes, e.g. migration prior study, short-term student mobility and mobility for the whole degree programme, mobility in the phase of doctoral education and training, professional mobility in various stages of the professional career and finally shorter visits linked to academic and research work. All available information suggests that substantial differences exist by country and that no signs of convergence are visible. Moreover, surveys confirm that international experience is a frequently valuable asset of academic research careers but often is viewed as less beneficial than conventional wisdom suggests.

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.

This paper offers an overview of the Hungarian translations of the Scriptures, printed in the sixteenth century. Both the translation of the Bible and print culture date from the fifteenth century in Hungary, but printing in Hungarian is a phenomenon of the sixteenth century. Before then, Scriptural chapters, translated by Hungarian Hussites and Minorite monks remained in manuscript, and the print of the Renaissance royal court served the needs of the humanist Latin literature. First, this paper will describe the development of the principles of translations from the cautious solutions of the Erasmian contributor of the first book printed in Hungarian, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Kraków, 1535), to the conceptions of the well-organized Calvinist group of scholars that edited the first complete Hungarian Bible (1590). In the analysis of the terminology this paper will focus on the expressions of the divine and earthly power, in the context of the history of political ideas of the same epoch. The history of the early printed Scriptures in Hungarian runs parallel to the gradual enlargement of the earthly power in early modern Hungarian political thought, under the conditions of the Turkish occupation, Hapsburg Catholicism, and the special status of Transylvania. In the history of religion, the dominant strain of the Hungarian Reformation turned from Luther to Calvin, with the most important Hungarian publishing house at the time being that of the Unitarians in Transylvania. This change greatly influenced the development of the Hungarian theoretical culture. For instance, the main destination of peregrinatio academica of Hungarians turned from Wittenberg to the universities of the Netherlands, and the Hungarian printers finally opted for the Humanist Antiqua instead of the German Frakturschrift. The second part of the paper will illustrate this process with examples of the typography of the sixteenth-century Hungarian Scriptures, and of their target audiences.

In recent years, the notion of ‘excellence’ and its interconnectedness with research, development and innovations has become extremely popular across Europe. At regional and national as well as at the EU level, various initiatives have been taken to strengthen the science base, and to establish centres, or clusters of outstanding achievements. Researchers, universities, and funding agencies will have to work their way towards a culture of creativity, which needs a leap of faith based on the high-trust principles of governance and accountability, and which provides more space for risk-taking and thorough rethinking of common wisdom in order to achieve real breakthroughs at the frontiers of knowledge.

The cultural relationship between China and the West, including the hypothesis of a rediscovery, does not fit neatly into the binary pattern implied by the model of Orientalism associated with post-colonial theory. Even in the era of high imperialism, the Sino-Western relationship involved complexities for which the paradigm of colonizer and colonized is too simplistic and therefore requires a theorization of a post-Orientalism. As evidence, the narrative fragment ‘The Boxer Rebellion’, by the Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler, published posthumously in 1957, explores the psychological dynamic between a European soldier and a Chinese prisoner in order to demonstrate the immanent ambivalence of imperialism and its Orientalist categories.

The internationalisation of the academy varies according to individual, institutional and structural characteristics. Among factors influencing it, discipline plays a major role. Relying on data collected by two international comparative studies – the Changing Academic Profession Study and the Academic Profession in Europe Study – this article focuses on two aspects of the internationalisation of the academy – namely, international research collaboration and international mobility – asking whether these two aspects are associated with academic disciplines and how. Results from multivariate data analyses – comparing Europe and the Rest of the World or other meaningful macro-regions – show that in some areas, such as international research collaboration and educational circulation, the international behaviours of academics belonging to different disciplines diverge, while in some others, such as research productivity related to international research collaboration and short-term professional circulation, they converge.

China as a concept had not been put under much scrutiny and challenge until the recent postmodern and postcolonial theoretical discourse on nation and nationhood, and the radical scepticism about tradition and homogeneity. Some scholars have questioned whether China could have been a nation state before there was any nation state in Europe, and others have challenged the very notions of China and Chineseness. How do the Chinese themselves respond to such scepticism and challenge? How does one re-conceptualize China at the present time? By drawing on recent debates on such important issues, this essay tries to find some answers and offers some views from a Chinese perspective, while fully engaging Western theoretical discourses, to attempt an international dialogue and meaningful exchange.

Cosmology is a subject that interacts closely with particle physics. But as well as being a fundamental science, it is also the grandest of the environmental sciences: it is concerned with the complex structures that constitute our present cosmos, and how these gradually emerged during the 13.8 billion years that separates us from the ‘big bang’.

People like to say that energy and water are two problems, two vital commodities in short supply. Here I draw attention to the emerging literature and physics principle (constructal law) that provide the scientific foundation for sustainability. I show that the sustainability need is about flow: the flow of energy and the flow of water through the inhabited space. All the flows needed for human life (transportation, heating, cooling, water) are driven by the purposeful consumption of fuels. This is why the wealth of a country (the GDP) is directly proportional to the annual consumption of fuel in that country. This hierarchical organization happens; it is natural and efficient. Sustainability is the one-word need that covers all the specific needs. Sustainability comes from greater freedom in changing the organization – the flow architecture – that sustains life. Greater freedom to change the design (from water and power to laws and government) leads to greater flow, wealth, life and staying power, i.e. sustainability.

In Leibniz’s view, the presence of the Ottoman Empire revealed that the Turkish influence was the key to the significance of Eastern Europe. So long as Eastern Europe belonged to the Turkish sphere, it was a buffer zone of cultures, civilizations, religions, and political powers. After the departure of the Turks it was treated politically at least patronizingly if not downright conquered by aspiring European and Eurasian powers.

European Union (EU) coexistence policy is based on the principle of subsidiarity, which implies a multilevel governance framework. Different legislative approaches have been developed in EU Member States. These legal rules are oriented to both preventing on-farm adventitious admixture (ex-ante regulations) and reducing potential economic consequences (ex-post liability). So coexistence deals with a subject of negative externalities involving an issue of property-right allocation between farmers. Considering the impacts that coexistence policy has on GM (genetically modified) crop adoption rates and the generation of trade distortions, potential effects of the EU coexistence framework are reviewed from a theoretical property-right allocation view. Derived from the analysis, property-right allocation is focused on non-GM farmers according to EU regulation enforcement, which tends to rigid coexistence measures. Nonetheless, the multilevel EU framework has led Member States to pursue their aims: trade interests and social legitimation.

In this paper we propose a methodological critique of the History of Early Modern Journalism. Our proposal recommends a review of the ‘micro’ concept applied to research in The History of Early Modern Journalism. The current study on the Gazeta de Roma in Valencia (1618–1620) is a sample of this microscopic procedure, and is an important and revealing example that enables us to reinterpret the concept of periodicity. We will discuss the value of periodicity as a demarcation. The contemporaries of the first European newspapers applied characteristics and criteria other than periodicity: a ‘newspaper’ was then a serial document that informed progressively about the news from a certain area at that time, the continuity of which was recognizable thanks to certain typographical resources, in the absence of the header concept.

Two broad frameworks are used to describe and analyse the mobility of academic staff. The first, and dominant, framework focuses on flows from the ‘periphery’ to the ‘core’, although that ‘core’ is also evolving (and is no longer dominated by North America and Western Europe but is increasingly likely to embrace dynamic East Asia systems). This first approach is labelled ‘hegemonic internationalisation’. The second framework focuses instead on issues of development, the emergence of global communities and social movements. This is labelled ‘fluid globalisation’. The article argues that the latter may be more useful for understanding trends in academic mobility.

This essay reviews and assesses recent attempts to revisit and revise the position of China in the configuration of global modernity. Such re-descriptions question the implicit Eurocentric teleology of modern world history. First, the discourse of East Asian modernity or Confucian capitalism draws on late imperial (early modern) East Asia to locate an alternative origin of global modernity. Second, recent scholarship in world-systems analysis repudiates previous Eurocentric narratives of global capitalism and locates China at the center of the world economy in the early modern period up to 1800. Third, China’s revolutionary legacy (what was called ‘Maoism’) and its current ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ in official parlance are considered by New Leftist theorists as a viable alternative to capitalist modernity. Fourth, universal modernity as such is regarded as a social and political imperative by the opposing camp of Neo-Liberalists as modernity is still an ‘incomplete project’ in Chinese history. Overall, such debates are efforts to chart out a cultural and theoretical landscape that does not easily fit in existing models of Western cultural studies that are often based on the colonial and postcolonial experiences of the Anglophone and Francophone world.

Global modernity refers to a moment of the breakdown of the hegemony of a Eurocentric modernity and the fragmentation into many cultural spheres of the very idea of the modern without any promise so far of how modernity might be reconstituted and some coherence restored to its claims.... On the other hand, Global Modernity as a concept is also intended to transcend the situation of which it is the product, as this very situation enables the possibility of re-envisioning modernity, rescuing it from entrapment in a vision of history dominated by Eurocentrism and imagining it differently. (Arif Dirlik, Culture and History in Postrevolutionary China: The Perspective of Global Modernity)1

This is a historical account from my personal perspective of the development over the last few decades of the standard model of particle physics. The model is based on gauge theories, of which the first was quantum electrodynamics, describing the interactions of electrons with light. This was later incorporated into the electroweak theory, describing electromagnetic and weak nuclear interactions. The standard model also includes quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong nuclear interactions. The final capstone of the model was the Higgs particle discovered in 2012 at CERN. But the model is very far from being the last word; there are still many gaps in our understanding.