Author: Roderick Beaton File Type: pdf A wide-ranging study of popular poetry and song in the Greek language from the last years of the Byzantine Empire to the present day. The folk poetry of the title includes the songs, composed and handed down by word of mouth, of unlettered villagers, of wandering minstrels with pretensions to professionalism, and, in more recent times, of the poorer inhabitants of Ottoman and Greek cities. The creative period of this folk poetry covers, at the minimum, 500 years of history and a geographical area stretching from Corsica in the west to Cyprus and Trebizond in the east, as well as northwards into the Balkans. This is not a general or theoretical survey of folk poetry, but an exploration, based on literary, historical and sociological evidence, of a single cultural tradition and the forces which have shaped it.

Author: Caki Wilkinson File Type: pdf Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2010 The poems in Circles Where the Head Should Be are full of objects and oddities, bits of news, epic catalogues, and a cast of characters hoping to make sense of it all. Underneath the often whimsical surface, however, lies a search for those connections we long for but so often miss, and a wish for art to bridge the gaps. Playful and soulful, buoyant and mordant, snazzy and savvy-Caki Wilkinsons poems pull out all the stops, and revel in making the old mother tongue sound like a bright young thing. Lend her your ears and youll hear American lyric moxie in all its abounding gusto and lapidary glory, making itself new all over again.-David Barber, Poetry Editor, The Atlantic Circles Where the Head Should Be has its own distinctive voice, a lively intelligence, insatiable curiosity, and a decided command of form. These qualities play off one another in ways that instruct and delight. An irresistible book.-J. D. McClatchy, author of Mercury Dressing Poems, judge Caki Wilkinsons marvelous and marvelously titled Circles Where the Head Should Be contains poetry as dexterously written as any today. And beneath its intricate surface pleasures lie a fierce intelligence and a relentless imagination constantly discovering connections where none had been seen before. This is a stunning debut.-John Koethe, author of Ninety-fifth Street, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize Like Frost, Wilkinson believes in poem as performance, showing off her verve and virtuosity. She is the Lady on a Unicycle, negotiating her difficult vehicle through the pedestrian crowd with the easy lean achieved by holding on to nothing-a joy to witness. -A. E. Stallings, author of Archaic Smile and Hapax CAKI WILKINSON graduated from Rhodes College and Johns Hopkins University. She received a 2008 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Yale Review, and other journals. She lives in Sewanee, Tennessee.

Author: Kim Plofker File Type: pdf Based on extensive research in Sanskrit sources, Mathematics in India chronicles the development of mathematical techniques and texts in South Asia from antiquity to the early modern period. Kim Plofker reexamines the few facts about Indian mathematics that have become common knowledge--such as the Indian origin of Arabic numerals--and she sets them in a larger textual and cultural framework. The book details aspects of the subject that have been largely passed over in the past, including the relationships between Indian mathematics and astronomy, and their cross-fertilizations with Islamic scientific traditions. Plofker shows that Indian mathematics appears not as a disconnected set of discoveries, but as a lively, diverse, yet strongly unified discipline, intimately linked to other Indian forms of learning. Far more than in other areas of the history of mathematics, the literature on Indian mathematics reveals huge discrepancies between what researchers generally agree on and what general readers pick up from popular ideas. This book explains with candor the chief controversies causing these discrepancies--both the flaws in many popular claims, and the uncertainties underlying many scholarly conclusions. Supplementing the main narrative are biographical resources for dozens of Indian mathematicians a guide to key features of Sanskrit for the non-Indologist and illustrations of manuscripts, inscriptions, and artifacts. Mathematics in India provides a rich and complex understanding of the Indian mathematical tradition. Authors note The concept of computational positivism in Indian mathematical science, mentioned on p. 120, is due to Prof. Roddam Narasimha and is explored in more detail in some of his works, including The Indian half of Needhams question some thoughts on axioms, models, algorithms, and computational positivism (Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 28, 2003, 1-13). **

Author: James P. Sterba File Type: pdf Using yet untapped resources from moral and political philosophy, this book seeks to answer the question of whether an all good God who is presumed to be all powerful is logically compatible with the degree and amount of moral and natural evil that exists in our world. It is widely held by theists and atheists alike that it may be logically impossible for an all good, all powerful God to create a world with moral agents like ourselves that does not also have at least some moral evil in it. James P. Sterba focuses on the further question of whether God is logically compatible with the degree and amount of moral and natural evil that exists in our world. The negative answer he provides marks a new stage in the age-old debate about Gods existence.