The Universal Pattern Within History


Book Description

This book is a work of synthesis, which argues that an all-encompassing blueprint governs the evolution of all parts of our universe. In its first half, it discerns interdisciplinary symmetry in the early development of history and six other disciplines. It then uses this discovery to formulate testable predictions about the form and content of later history. In its second half, the book attempts to verify these intimations of our more recent past and to envision the human future that lies ahead. Contents INTRODUCTION.................................................................. 13 Part I EARLY HISTORY 1. PERIOD 0 THE HOMINOIDS......................................... 19 2. PERIOD 1 THE PALEOLITHIC ECONOMY.................... 43 3. PERIOD 1 THE PALEOLITHIC SUPERSTRUCTURE...... 64 4. A METAPHORICAL SYNOPSIS OF THE PALEOLITHIC PERIOD......................................... 72 5. PERIOD 2 THE NEOLITHIC ECONOMY......................... 84 6. PERIOD 2 THE NEOLITHIC SUPERSTRUCTURE........... 96 7. A METAPHORICAL SYNOPSIS OF THE NEOLITHIC PERIOD............................................ 102 8. PERIOD 3 THE BRONZE AGE SUPERSTRUCTURE...... 110 9. PERIOD 3 THE BRONZE AGE ECONOMY.................... 119 10. A METAPHORICAL SYNOPSIS OF THE BRONZE AGE.. 134 Part II INTERDISCIPLINARY DEVELOPMENT SYMMETRY Early Supernatural Development 11. SUPERNATURAL PERIOD 1 THE TOTEM BASE........ 149 12. SUPERNATURAL PERIOD 1 THE TOTEM SUPERSTRUCTURE................................. 163 13. A METAPHORICAL SYNOPSIS OF THE TOTEM PERIOD.................................................. 168 14. SUPERNATURAL PERIOD 2 THE MOTHER GODDESS BASE................................... 172 15. SUPERNATURAL PERIOD 2 THE MOT




A Universal History of the Destruction of Books


Book Description

Examines the many reasons and motivations for the destruction of books throughout history, citing specific acts from the smashing of ancient Sumerian tablets to the looting of libraries in post-war Iraq.




Time and Transcendence


Book Description

This book investigates one aspect of the story of how our religiously-oriented culture became a secular one. It concentrates on the conflicts enveloping the attitude to the past from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. The background argument is that the way the process of secularization occurred in one particular religious context, the Roman Catholic one, was determinative for the possibility of something such as secular culture, and hence for both the modem secular attitude to the past and the modem religious one. In recent years a spate of scholarship has suggested that the expanded version of Weber's theory, according to which modernity is a consequence of Protestan tism, is not quite accurate. Robert Merton modified this theory to argue that modem natllral science originated in the context of seventeenth-century 1 Protestant England. Against this position, many scholars have investigated 2 origins for the development of science in Catholic countries. The development of natural science, however, is not the whole story of the development of modem secular culture, even if the story of that development is restricted to the development of knowledge. Our modem universities are organized around the division between humanities and natural sciences, and it can be thought that this process of modernization or secularization affected the humanities no less than the sciences.




Comparative History Of Civilizations In Asia


Book Description

This book gives an overview of all of Asian history from the eastern borders of Europe to the Pacific and from the birth of civilization to the present. It provides a broad framework and flexible method for thinking about the history of the people of Asia.




Eric Voegelin on China and Universal Humanity


Book Description

Eric Voegelin on China and Universal Humanity: A Study of Voegelin’s Hermeneutic Empirical Paradigm aims to speak to comparative political theorists, philosophers, historians, sinologists, and anyone interested in understanding our current disorders and exploring a culturally non-specific paradigm for understanding equivalent practices and patterns in the global age, especially China and the West. Specifically, this book looks at Eric Voegelin’s (1901–1985) Theory of Order. It focuses on Voegelin’s interpretation of order/disorder, his penetration of the Tianxia (the Chinese Ecumene), and his comparison of two representative heterogenous Ecumenes in the ancient West and East. In doing so, the book explores the issue of universal humankind and the nature of order-searching.




Between Apocalypse and Eschaton


Book Description

Between Apocalypse and Eschaton argues that eschatology is the key to de Lubacs theological project and critical to understanding the nouvelle thologie, the group of theologians with whom de Lubac was associated. While much recent focuses on the controversies over the supernatural, this work returns to an often neglected aspect of de Lubacs work and examines it in the wider historical, political, and theological context of war-torn twentieth-century Europe, which critically shape the meaning of the end.




An Interpretation of Nietzsche's On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life


Book Description

With his An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s "On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life", Anthony K. Jensen shows how 'timely' Nietzsche’s second "Untimely Meditation" really is. This comprehensive and insightful study contextualizes and analyzes a wide range of Nietzsche’s earlier thoughts about history: teleology, typology, psychology, memory, classical philology, Hegelianism, and the role historiography plays in modern culture. On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life is shown to be a ‘timely’ work, too, insofar as it weaves together a number of Nietzsche's most important influences and thematic directions at that time: ancient culture, science, epistemology, and the thought of Schopenhauer and Burckhardt. Rather than dismiss it as a mere ‘early’ work, Jensen shows how the text resonates in Nietzsche’s later perspectivism, his theory of subjectivity, and Eternal Recurrence. And by using careful philological analysis of the text’s composition history, Jensen is in position to fully elucidate and evaluate Nietzsche’s arguments in their proper contexts. As such Jensen’s Interpretation should restore Nietzsche’s second "Untimely Meditation" to a prominent place among 19th Century philosophies of history.




Historical and Comparative Linguistics


Book Description

In any course of historical and comparative linguistics there will be students of different language backgrounds, different levels of linguistic training, and different theoretical orientation. This textbook attempts to mitigate the problems raised by this heterogeneity in a number of ways. Since it is impossible to treat the language or language family of special interest to every student, the focus of this book is on English in particular and Indo-European languages in general, with Finnish and its closely related languages for contrast. The tenets of different schools of linguistics, and the controversies among them, are treated eclectically and objectively; the examination of language itself plays the leading role in our efforts to ascertain the comparative value of competing theories. This revised edition (1989) of a standard work for comparative linguists offers an added introduction dealing mainly with a semiotic basis of change, a final chapter on aspects of explanation, particularly in historical and human disciplines, and added sections on comparative syntax and on the semiotic status of the comparative method.




Sallust and the Fall of the Republic


Book Description

This book offers a new interpretation of the Roman historian Sallust: it reads his works as complex and engaged contributions to the intellectual life of his period, offering a coherent and contemporary perspective on the end of the Roman Republic.




A New History of the Humanities


Book Description

Offers the first overarching history of the humanities from Antiquity to the present.