Diogenes articles from June 2000

Diogenes archives from June 2000

Time, Understanding, and Will.
June 22, 2000... In the passage from the Enneads devoted to discussing and defining the nature of time, it is written that first one must experience eternity, which, as everyone knows, is the model and archetype of time. This initial warning, which is...

Looking With Fresh Eyes Across Time and Space: Europe from a Confucian Perspective.
June 22, 2000... The most valuable finding of my first sightseeing trip was that medieval Europe was the seat of Christendom and that Christianity defines the West. I was amazed to see that Europe reveals so much of its past. I had not had such an experience in...

Roger Caillois, Games of Chance and the Superstar.
June 22, 2000... Superstars are not by accident a conspicuous phenomenon in our culture, but inherently belong to a meritocratic society with mass media, free enterprise, and competition. To make this contention plausible I will use Caillois's book, Man, Play...

Stock-market Forecasting as Cosmography.
June 22, 2000... In the midst of the ultra modernity of stock exchanges and financial markets,(1) certain practitioners are increasingly using forecasting models of changes in rates whose scientific rationality is particularly contested. We refer to `technical...

Economic Habitus and Management of Needs: The Example of the Gypsies.
June 22, 2000... From its very beginnings economic anthropology had to tackle a major obstacle: the very nature of its object of study. What in fact is meant by the use of the term `economics' or its corresponding adjective? Does `economics' refer to a specific...

Old Age.
June 22, 2000... I am still here(1) I was a delicate child, and to my great embarrassment I was excused from gymnastics as a teenager owing to an illness whose identity is still mystery, at least to me. That is when I acquired my world-weariness, a...

A Subject in Search of Meaning: Frailty and Dignity in Very Old Age.
June 22, 2000... An ageing population and increased life expectancy are a characteristic of the Western world. Nevertheless, as Roger Fontaine writes, "although we should be glad about this fact, it should also be stressed that old age reveals profound...

Animal Magnetism and Psychic Sciences, 1784-1935: The Rediscovery of a Lost Continent.
June 22, 2000... In the spring of 1784 the Marquis of Puysegur, a great landowner and colonel in an artillery regiment, was called to the bedside of Victor, the son of his steward, who was suffering from pneumonia. Puysegur was a follower of the new holistic...

The Modern Intellectual and His Heretical Ancestor: Gershom Scholem and Nathan of Gaza.
June 22, 2000... Gershom Scholem was without question a brilliant example of the modern Jewish intellectual: neither Talmudic, rabbinical, nor kabbalistic and still less a prophet.(1) More modestly -- but with remarkable spiritual energy -- he was a historian,...