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The period from the late fourth to the late second century B. C. witnessed, in Greek-speaking countries, an explosion of objective knowledge about the external world. WhileGreek culture had reached great heights in art, literature and philosophyalreadyin the earlier classical era, it is in the so-called Hellenistic period that we see for the ?rst time — anywhere in the world — the appearance of science as we understand it now: not an accumulation of facts or philosophically based speculations, but an or- nized effort to model nature and apply such models, or scienti?ctheories in a sense we will make precise, to the solution of practical problems and to a growing understanding of nature. ...
"Ah, I'm Pingree. We meet again. Splendid. Won't you sit down?"I looked around David's room. Short of the library stacks, I had never seen so many books piled into a single room. Where could I sit down? Every square inch of horizontal surface was covered. Books, papers, notes, manuscripts-all congregated in random and chaotic disorder.This small en
Silent Teachers considers for the first time the influence of Ottoman scholarly practices and reference tools on oriental learning in early modern Europe. Telling the story of oriental studies through the annotations, study notes, and correspondence of European scholars, it demonstrates the central but often overlooked role that Turkish-language manuscripts played in the achievements of early orientalists. Dispersing the myths and misunderstandings found in previous scholarship, this book offers a fresh history of Turkish studies in Europe and new insights into how Renaissance intellectuals studied Arabic and Persian through contemporaneous Turkish sources. This story hardly has any dull mom...
The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth is the first major history in English of the origins and early development of trigonometry. Glen Van Brummelen identifies the earliest known trigonometric precursors in ancient Egypt, Babylon, and Greece, and he examines the revolutionary discoveries of Hipparchus, the Greek astronomer believed to have been the first to make systematic use of trigonometry in the second century BC while studying the motions of the stars. The book traces trigonometry's development into a full-fledged mathematical discipline in India and Islam; explores its applications to such areas as geography and seafaring navigation in the European Middle Ages and Renaissance; a...
This volume is distinctive for its extraordinarily interdisciplinary investigations into a little discussed topic, the spatial imagination. It probes the exercise of the spatial imagination in pre-modern China across five general areas: pictorial representation, literary description, cartographic mappings, and the intertwining of heavenly and earthly space. It recommends that the spatial imagination in the pre-modern world cannot adequately be captured using a linear, militarily framed conceptualization. The scope and varying perspectives on the spatial imagination analyzed in the volume’s essays reveal a complex range of aspects that informs how space was designed and utilized. Due to the complexity and advanced scholarly level of the papers, the primary readership will be other scholars and advanced graduate students in history, history of science, geography, art history, religious studies, literature, and, broadly, sinology.
As scepticism has rarely been studied in the context of the Arabic culture and its Judeo-Arabic sub-culture, it is small wonder that sceptical motifs of Judah Halevi’s classic theological The Kuzari (written ca. 1140) received very little scholarly attention so far. Thus, the present study seeks to shed light on Halevi’s wrestling with the dogmatic-rationalistic trends of his period from an angle of this much less studied perspective. As a by-product, this study is a contribution to the mainly uncultivated field of traces of scepticism in the Arabic culture.
This book concerns the ancient rock-cut monuments carved throughout the Near East, paying particular attention to the fate of these monuments in the centuries after their initial production. As parts of the landscapes in which they were carved, they acquired new meanings in the cultural memory of the people living around them. The volume joins numerous recent studies on the reception of historical texts and artefacts, exploring the peculiar affordances of these long-lasting and often salient monuments. The volume gathers articles by archeologists, art historians, and philologists, covering the entire Near East, from Iran to Lebanon and from Turkey to Egypt. It also analyzes long-lasting textual traditions that aim to explain the origins and meaning of rock-cut monuments and other related carvings.
This volume brings together the leading experts in the history of European Oriental Studies. Their essays present a comprehensive history of the teaching and learning of Arabic in early modern Europe, covering a wide geographical area from southern to northern Europe and discussing the many ways and purposes for which the Arabic language was taught and studied by scholars, theologians, merchants, diplomats and prisoners. The contributions shed light on different methods and contents of language teaching in a variety of academic, scholarly and missionary contexts in the Protestant and the Roman Catholic world. But they also look beyond the institutional history of Arabic studies and consider the importance of alternative ways in which the study of Arabic was persued. Contributors are Asaph Ben Tov, Maurits H. van den Boogert, Sonja Brentjes, Mordechai Feingold, Mercedes García-Arenal, John-Paul A. Ghobrial, Aurélien Girard, Alastair Hamilton, Jan Loop, Nuria Martínez de Castilla Muñoz, Simon Mills, Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, Bernd Roling, Arnoud Vrolijk. This title, in its entirety, is available online in Open Access.
The Yearbook of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies mirrors the annual activities of staff and visiting fellows of the Centre as well as scholars of the Institute for Jewish Philosophy and Religion at the University of Hamburg and reports on symposia, workshops, and lectures. Although aimed at a wider audience, the yearbook also contains academic articles and book reviews on scepticism in Judaism and scepticism in general.