Diogenes articles from December 2004

Diogenes archives from December 2004

Fifty is a good age for a journal.(Transcript)
December 22, 2004... This is a transcription of Jean d'Ormesson's speech at UNESCO at the 50th anniversary celebrations of Diogenes in 2003. He describes the journal's origins, inspirations and editors, and the unique place it occupies in the promotion of...

Rediscovering Central Asia.
December 22, 2004... The term 'Central Asia' has been in use for 150 years, yet it is only since the collapse of the Soviet Union and, more recently, growth in awareness and concern about international terrorism, particularly in the USA, that the countries of...

The discipline of culturology: a new 'ready-made thought' for Russia.
December 22, 2004... 'Culturology' is an integral, often compulsory, part of Russian university courses; the discipline has largely replaced chairs in Marxist-Leninism and dialectical materialism, and bookshops are full of texts on the subject. This article is...

On the logics of delusion.
December 22, 2004... Delusion is an exceptional test case for the principal categories of common sense and philosophical thought such as 'reason', 'truth' and 'reality'. Via an engagement with the legacy of Freud and the most remarkable results of 20th-century...

Paper chains: bureaucratic despotism and voluntary servitude in Franz Kafka's The Castle.
December 22, 2004... This article is an attempt at a 'political' reading of Kafka's The Castle, as an ironical, radical critique--from a libertarian perspective--of the despotism of the modern bureaucratic apparatus. (1) This reading is not self-evident. Like all...

Giorgio Levi Della Vida: Remembered Ghosts (extracts).
December 22, 2004... Giorgio Levi Della Vida (1886-1967) was not only an eminent Islamologist, belonging to that tradition of Italian Oriental studies that stretches from Ignazio Guidi to Leone Caetani, Carlo Alfonso Nallino and Francesco Gabrieli--he was also a...

Do intellectuals still exist? The case of Italy.
December 22, 2004... It has never been easy to understand what intellectuals are, whether they still exist, or whether they are vanishing into a huge 'cultural middle class' where high culture and mass culture meld into one another. With particular reference to...

The Mediterranean revisited.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... Sergio Frau, Le Colonne d'Ercole, un'inchiesta, Rome, Nur Neon, 2002, 672 pp., illustrated This is a multi-authored review of a book that is extremely rich and lengthy (43 chapters, among whose titles are: Chapter III, In the name of the...