בשנת 1668 נדפס בלונדון ספרו של המלומד האנגלי ג׳ון וילקינס (John Wilkins, 1614–1672) :‘An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language’. וילקינס היה כומר אנגליקני מתון, פילוסוף נטורלי, ...וגם ממיסדי ה‘Royal Society of London’ – החברה המלכותית שהיתה לאבן דרך בהתפתחות המדעית של אירופה. בספרו הציג וילקינס כמה מסרים רדיקליים. אחד מהם היה יצירתה של שפת כתיבה חדשה, אוניברסלית, שתחליף את הלטינית 1672–1614 ,הישנה של הכנסיה הקתולית, ותשמש מצע קשר למלומדים ומבקשי אמת מכל העולם. מגמה דומה התבטאה במשאלה נוספת, דמיונית לא פחות המלומד האנגלי ביקש להחיל על העולם כולו יחידת מדידת אורך אחת ויחידה, שתחושב באופן רציונאלי ובסולם עשרוני. מאז התפרקות האימפריה הרומית, לכל הפחות, היתה אירופה נתונה בתוהו ובוהו של מידות אורך משקל ונפח. בתוך יחידה מדינית אחת כצרפת או אנגליה יכלו לשמש בו זמנית במקביל מאות מידות שונות. יחידות מידה (שפעמים רבות נשאו שמות זהים) נשמרו במקומות שונים בצורות שונות לגמרי. קביעת יחידות המידה היתה לכלי שרת גם בידי שליטים מקומיים – אלה, כמובן, ביקשו לסמן בעזרתן את מרחב סמכותם, וגם אלה, כידוע, רבו מספור.
Für Alltag, Sozialleben und Erfahrungshorizont der Menschen in der Vormoderne waren militärische Aspekte allgegenwärtig. Das gesellschaftsgeschichtlich ausgerichtete Quelleninventar für die ...preußische Zentrallandschaft von der Elbe bis zur Oder führt tief in diese Welt. Es stellt eine Arbeitsgrundlage für ein breites historisches Forschungsspektrum zur Verfügung. Dieser dritte und letzte Teil erschließt über 1.800 Archivalien aus kirchlichen Archiven, aus Kreis- und Stadtarchiven im Land Brandenburg sowie aus den Sammlungen der Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg von 1713 bis 1806. Enthalten sind ferner eine differenziert gegliederte sachsystematische Erschließung aller drei Teile sowie Orts-, Personen- und Sachregister mit rund 10.000 Stich- und Schlagworten.
Für Alltag, Sozialleben und Erfahrungshorizont der Menschen in der Vormoderne waren militärische Aspekte allgegenwärtig. Das gesellschaftsgeschichtlich ausgerichtete Quelleninventar für die ...preußische Zentrallandschaft von der Elbe bis zur Oder führt tief in diese Welt. Es stellt eine Arbeitsgrundlage für ein breites historisches Forschungsspektrum zur Verfügung. Dieser zweite von drei Teilen erschließt über 5.000 Archivalien des Brandenburgischen Landeshauptarchivs aus landesherrlichen Lokalbehörden der Kurmark, aus Ober- und Unterbehörden der Neumark und der Niederlausitz sowie aus (adligen) Herrschafts-, Guts- und Familienarchiven, aus Städten und anderen Körperschaften, ferner Nachlässen und Sammlungen von 1713 bis 1806.
Pierre-Esprit Radisson (1636?–1710) was many men. He was a teenager captured, tortured, and adopted by the Mohawk, and a youth relishing the freedom of the wilderness. He was the French-born servant ...of an ambitious English trading company and a hapless petitioner at the court of Louis XIV. He was a central figure in the tug-of-war between France and England over Hudson Bay and a pretender to aristocratic status who had to defend his actions before James II. Finally, he was a retired "sea captain" trying to provide for his children, and despite the pension he had fought for, the "decay’d Gentleman" described in his burial record. Radisson's writings, characterized by hubris and contradiction, provoke many questions. Was he a semi-literate woodsman? Are his accounts of Native life ethnographically reliable? Can he be trusted to tell the truth about himself? How important were his explorations? In this first volume of Radisson's complete writings, Germaine Warkentin introduces the life, travels, motivations, and work of this compelling and complicated figure while providing a comprehensive and authoritative edition of his masterpiece - The Voyages. In the four accounts of his travels to the far interior of the Great Lakes and James Bay, Radisson vibrantly depicts his life among the Mohawk, his encounters and relationships with Native peoples, Jesuits, English, French, and Dutch colonists and traders, as well as the hazards of the capricious politics of the New World and the thrilling surprise of discoveries. Striking a superb balance between accessible writing and comprehensive scholarship, this new edition of Radisson's Voyages is indispensable, definitive, and reasserts the important roles that Radisson played in seventeenth-century North American rivalries.
Für Alltag, Sozialleben und Erfahrungshorizont der Menschen in der Vormoderne waren militärische Aspekte allgegenwärtig. Das gesellschaftsgeschichtlich ausgerichtete Quelleninventar für die ...preußische Zentrallandschaft von der Elbe bis zur Oder führt tief in diese Welt. Es stellt eine Arbeitsgrundlage für ein breites historisches Forschungsspektrum zur Verfügung. Dieser erste von drei Teilen enthält eine ausführliche Einleitung mit Benutzungshinweisen und erschließt über 6.000 Archivalien des Brandenburgischen Landeshauptarchivs aus Oberbehörden der Kurmark Brandenburg von 1713 bis 1806.
Reading Shaftesbury alongside Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, this essay considers the play of laughter in "Sensus Communis, an Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour." The analysis focuses on a ...paragraph of Shaftesbury's essay in which an Ethiopian supposedly experiences the Venetian or Parisian carnival. As the laughter at the carnival scene becomes more and more intricate, the idea of foreignness begins to insert itself, through a process that Lacan calls the see-saw of desire, into the very substance of European subjectivity. It seems that recognizing oneself as a gentleman depends, in Shaftesbury's essay, upon being misrecognized by someone wholly unfamiliar with European customs. Shaftesbury thus relies upon the idea of foreignness—specifically, an imagined encounter with an imaginary Ethiopian—to produce the laughter upon which sociability depends, and, in turn, the sociability upon which subjectivity depends. These commitments make "Sensus Communis" an important early theorization of intersubjectivity, and establish Shaftesbury within the prehistory of psychology.
The Xiaojiang fault zone constitutes part of the major Xianshuihe-Xiaojiang left lateral structure that bounds the rhombic-shaped block of Yunnan-Sichuan to the east. Long strike slip fault zones ...that have repeatedly accommodated intense seismic activity, constitute a basic feature of southeast China. Known historical earthquakes to have struck the study area are the 1713 Xundian of M6.8, 1725 Wanshou mountain of M6.8, the 1733 Dongchuan of M7.8, and the strongest one, the 1833 Songming of M8.0. Although instrumental record did not report events of this magnitude class, the 18th century clustering as well as the 19th century large event prompted the investigation of stress transfer along this fault zone. Coulomb stress changes were calculated assuming that earthquakes can be modeled as static dislocations in an elastic half-space, and taking into account both the coseismic slip in strong (M ≥ 6.8) earthquakes and the slow tectonic stress buildup along the major fault segments. Geological and geodetic data are used to infer the geometry of these faults and long term slip rates on them, as well as for the fault segments that slipped. Evidence is presented that the strong historical events as well as the ones of smaller magnitude that occurred during the instrumental era, are located in areas where the static stress was enhanced. By extending the calculations up to present, possible sites for future strong events are identified.
In this essay, I attempt to assess Henk de Regt and Dennis Dieks recent pragmatic and contextual account of scientific understanding on the basis of an important historical case-study: understanding ...in Newton's theory of universal gravitation and Huygens' reception of universal gravitation. It will be shown that de Regt and Dieks' Criterion for the Intelligibility of a Theory (CIT), which stipulates that the appropriate combination of scientists' skills and intelligibility-enhancing theoretical virtues is a condition for scientific understanding, is too strong. On the basis of this case-study, it will be shown that scientists can understand each others' positions qualitatively and quantitatively, despite their endorsement of different worldviews and despite their convictions as what counts as a proper explanation.
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