Author: George Steiner File Type: epub Steiner escribe para comunicar ideas y sus originales concepciones consiguen el efecto del pensamiento de primer orden. The New Yorker George Steiner nos ofrece en La poesia del pensamiento una esclarecedora vision de la inseparable relacion que existe entre la filosofia occidental y el lenguaje y, con su deslumbrante y convincente criterio a la hora de argumentar, nos presenta su opus magnum un examen de mas de dos milenios de cultura occidental que reivindica la esencial unidad del gran pensamiento y el gran estilo. Panoramico pero preciso, moviendose entre el detalle esencial y el ejemplo decisivo, George Steiner recorre toda la historia de la filosofia occidental, que se entrelaza con la literatura, para llegar a la conclusion de que, como afirmaba Sartre, en toda filosofia hay una prosa literaria oculta. Este genio poetico del pensamiento abstracto, senala Steiner, se ilumina, se hace audible. El argumento, aun analitico, tiene su redoble de tambor. Se hace oda. Hay algo que exprese el movimiento final de la Fenomenologia de Hegel mejor que el non de non de Edith Piaf, una doble negacion que Hegel habria estimado? Este ensayo es un intento de escuchar mas atentamente.
Author: Noel Lenski
File Type: pdf
Over the course of the fourth century, Christianity rose from a religion actively persecuted by the authority of the Roman empire to become the religion of statea feat largely credited to Constantine the Great. Constantine succeeded in propelling this minority religion to imperial status using the traditional tools of governance, yet his proclamation of his new religious orientation was by no means unambiguous. His coins and inscriptions, public monuments, and pronouncements sent unmistakable signals to his non-Christian subjects that he was willing not only to accept their beliefs about the nature of the divine but also to incorporate traditional forms of religious expression into his own self-presentation. In Constantine and the Cities, Noel Lenski attempts to reconcile these apparent contradictions by examining the dialogic nature of Constantines power and how his rule was built in the space between his ambitions for the empire and his subjects efforts to further their own understandings of religious truth. Focusing on cities and the texts and images produced by their citizens for and about the emperor, Constantine and the Cities uncovers the interplay of signals between ruler and subject, mapping out the terrain within which Constantine nudged his subjects in the direction of conversion. Reading inscriptions, coins, legal texts, letters, orations, and histories, Lenski demonstrates how Constantine and his subjects used the instruments of government in a struggle for authority over the religion of the empire. **
Author: Stanley Abercrombie
File Type: pdf
In the words of the author, this book aims to look at the elements of interior design in a way that might aid interior designers in the formulation of individual philosophies for their own work. Here, then, for practicing designers, students and interested laypersons are the fundamentals of design explored, explained and interpreted in a knowledgeable and original way. A Philosophy of Interior Design includes chapters on concepts the duty of the interior designers the role rooms, windows and doors play in determining the character of interior spaces changing levels--cellars, attics, stairs, ramps, balconies and towers the language of furniture color and light sound and smells ornament and details and much more.
Author: Tim Wu
File Type: epub
In this age of an open Internet, it is easy to forget that every American information industry, beginning with the telephone, has eventually been taken captive by some ruthless monopoly or cartel. With all our media now traveling a single network, an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear. Could history repeat itself with the next industrial consolidation? Could the Internetthe entire flow of American informationcome to be ruled by one corporate leviathan in possession of the master switch? That is the big question of Tim Wus pathbreaking book. As Wus sweeping history shows, each of the new media of the twentieth centuryradio, telephone, television, and filmwas born free and open. Each invited unrestricted use and enterprising experiment until some would-be mogul battled his way to total domination. Here are stories of an uncommon will to power, the power over information Adolph Zukor, who took a technology once used as commonly as YouTube is today and made it the exclusive prerogative of a kingdom called Hollywood . . . NBCs founder, David Sarnoff, who, to save his broadcast empire from disruptive visionaries, bullied one inventor (of electronic television) into alcoholic despair and another (this one of FM radio, and his boyhood friend) into suicide . . . And foremost, Theodore Vail, founder of the Bell System, the greatest information empire of all time, and a capitalist whose faith in Soviet-style central planning set the course of every information industry thereafter. Explaining how invention begets industry and industry begets empirea progress often blessed by government, typically with stifling consequences for free expression and technical innovation alikeWu identifies a time-honored pattern in the maneuvers of todays great information powers Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T. A battle royal looms for the Internets future, and with almost every aspect of our lives now dependent on that network, this is one war we dare not tune out. Part industrial expose, part meditation on what freedom requires in the information age, The Master Switch is a stirring illumination of a drama that has played out over decades in the shadows of our national life and now culminates with terrifying implications for our future. From the Hardcover edition. **
Author: Jane Lazarre
File Type: pdf
I am Black, Jane Lazarres son tells her. I have a Jewish mother, but I am not biracial. That term is meaningless to me. She understands, she saysbut he tells her, gently, that he doesnt think so, that she cant understand this completely because she is white. Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness is Jane Lazarres memoir of coming to terms with this painful truth, of learning to look into the nature of whiteness in a way that passionately informs the connections between herself and her family. A moving account of life in a biracial family, this book is a powerful meditation on motherhood and racism in America, the story of an education into the realities of African American culture.Lazarre has spent over twenty-five years living in a Black American family, married to an African American man, birthing and raising two sons. A teacher of African American literature, she has been influenced by an autobiographical tradition that is characterized by a speaking out against racism and a grounding of that expression in ones own experiencean overlapping of the stories of ones own life and the world. Like the stories of that tradition, Lazarres is a recovery of memories that come together in this book with a new sense of meaning. From a crucial moment in which consciousness is transformed, to recalling and accepting the nature and realities of whiteness, each step describes an aspect of her internal and intellectual journey. Recalling events that opened her eyes to her sons and husbands experience as Black Americansan operation, turned into a horrific nightmare by a doctors unconscious racism or the jarring truths brought home by a visit to an exhibit on slavery at the Richmond Museum of the Confederacyor her own revealing missteps, Lazarre describes a movement from silence to voice, to a commitment to action, and to an appreciation of the value of a fluid, even ambiguous, identity. It is a coming of age that permits a final retelling of family history and family reunion.With her skill as a novelist and her experience as a teacher, Jane Lazarre has crafted a narrative as compelling as it is telling. It eloquently describes the authors delight at being accepted into her husbands family and attests to the power of motherhood. And as personal as this story is, it is a remarkably incisive account of how perceptions of racial difference lie at the heart of the history and culture of America.
Author: Charles W. Haxthausen
File Type: pdf
Bloody Serious Two Texts by Carl EinsteinAuthor(s) Charles W. HaxthausenSource October, Vol. 105, Dada (Summer, 2003), pp. 105-118
Author: Brett Edward Whalen
File Type: pdf
Brett Whalen explores the compelling belief that Christendom would spread to every corner of the earth before the end of time. During the High Middle Agesan era of crusade, mission, and European expansionthe Western followers of Rome imagined the future conversion of Jews, Muslims, pagans, and Eastern Christians into one fold of Gods people, assembled under the authority of the Roman Church. Starting with the eleventh-century papal reform, Whalen shows how theological readings of history, prophecies, and apocalyptic scenarios enabled medieval churchmen to project the authority of Rome over the world. Looking to Byzantium, the Islamic world, and beyond, Western Christians claimed their special place in the divine plan for salvation, whether they were battling for Jerusalem or preaching to unbelievers. For those who knew how to read the signs, history pointed toward the triumph and spread of Roman Christianity. Yet this dream of Christendom raised troublesome questions about the problem of sin within the body of the faithful. By the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, radical apocalyptic thinkers numbered among the papacys most outspoken critics, who associated present-day ecclesiastical institutions with the evil of Antichrista subversive reading of the future. For such critics, the conversion of the world would happen only after the purgation of the Roman Church and a time of suffering for the true followers of God. This engaging and beautifully written book offers an important window onto Western religious views in the past that continue to haunt modern times. ReviewWhalen shows how the Papal Revolution of the late eleventh and twelfth century spurred churchmen to imagine a new world of Catholic unity under papal guidance. This new world would aim to unify all Christians, most especially eastern Christians, under the Supreme Pontiff and to bring Jews, Muslims, and pagans under his wing as converts to Christianity. The book takes us through a dazzling array of thinkers, always putting their thoughts in political and military context. Whalens readings of more obscure authors are always enlightening, and his writing is lucid. This book will enjoy a very wide readership. --William Chester Jordan, Princeton UniversityWhalens accomplishment is to take a synoptic view of western Christian apocalyptic thought and propaganda from roughly 1050 until 1350 in terms of one central theme bringing Jews, Greeks, and Saracens into one sheepfold under the ministry of one shepherd, the Roman pope. He offers virtually encyclopedic coverage of the vast number of prophecies from the period. This is a major contribution to the interpretation of medieval and western Christian history, and I enthusiastically recommend it. --Robert E. Lerner, Northwestern UniversityIn this clearly written, forcefully argued volume, Brett Whalen demonstrates that medieval thinkers influenced by the apocalyptic tradition saw the expansion of Christendom as the driving force of history. The end result would be the conversion of all mankind, the defeat of Antichrist, and the restoration of Jerusalem to Christian hands. Dominion of God illuminates this powerful medieval vision. --James Muldoon, author of Popes, Lawyers, and InfidelsAbout the AuthorBrett Edward Whalen is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Author: A. M. Juster
File Type: pdf
Not much can be known about the life of Maximianus, who has been called the last of the Roman poets, beyond what can be inferred from his poetry. He was most likely a native of Tuscany, probably lived until the middle of the sixth century, and, at an advanced age, went as a diplomat to the emperors court at Constantinople. A. M. Juster has translated the complete elegies of Maximianus faithfully but not literally, resulting in texts that work beautifully as poetry in English. Replicating the feel of the original Latin verse, he alternates iambic hexameter and pentameter in couplets and imitates Maximianuss pronounced internal rhyme, alliteration, and assonance. The first elegy is the longest and establishes the voice of the speaker a querulous old man, full of the indignities of aging, which he contrasts with the vigor and prestige he enjoyed in his youth. The second elegy similarly focuses on the contrast between past happiness and present misery but, this time, for the specific experience of a long-term relationship. The third through fifth elegies depict episodes from the poets amatory career at different stages of his life, from inexperienced youth to impotent old man. The last poem concludes with a desire for the release of death and, together with the first, form a coherent frame for the collection. This comprehensive volume includes an introduction by renowned classicist Michael Roberts, a translation of the elegies with the Latin text on facing pages, the first English translation of an additional six poems attributed to Maximianus, an appendix of Latin and Middle English imitative verse that illustrates Maximianuss long reception in the Middle Ages, several related texts, and the first commentary in English on the poems since 1900. The imminence of death and the sadness of growing old that form the principal themes of the elegies signal not only the end of pagan culture and its joy in living but also the turn from a classical to a medieval sensibility in Late Antiquity.
Author: Ruth Iskin
File Type: epub
Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon Perspectives in a Global World seeks to dissect and interrogate the nature of the present-day art field, which has experienced dramatic shifts in the past 50 years. In discussions of the canon of art history, the notion of inclusiveness, both at the level of rhetoric and as a desired practice is on the rise and gradually replacing talk of exclusion, which dominated critiques of the canon up until two decades ago. The art field has dramatically, if insufficiently, changed in the half-century since the first protests and critiques of the exclusion of others from the art canon. With increased globalization and shifting geopolitics, the art field is expanding beyond its Euro-American focus, as is particularly evident in the large-scale international biennales now held all over the globe. Are canons and counter-canons still relevant? Can they be re-envisioned rather than merely revised? Following an introduction that discusses these issues, thirteen newly commissioned essays present case studies of consecration in the contemporary art field, and three commissioned discussions present diverse positions on issues of the canon and consecration processes today. This volume will be of interest to instructors and students of contemporary art, art history, and museum and curatorial studies.