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This book explores the dynamic relationship between myth and philosophy in the Presocratics, the Sophists, and in Plato - a relationship which is found to be more extensive and programmatic than has previously been recognised. The story of philosophy's relationship with myth is that of its relationship with literary and social convention.

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Interest in the science, technology and medicine of India under British rule has grown in recent years and has played an ever-increasing part in the reinterpretation of modern South Asian history. Spanning the period from the establishment of East India Company rule through to Independence, David Arnold's wide-ranging and analytical survey demonstrates the importance of examining the role of science, technology and medicine in conjunction with the development of the British engagement in India and in the formation of Indian responses to western intervention.

The Ramayana is one of India's foundational epics, and it demonstrates a continuing power to influence social, religious, cultural, and political life.This book presents the latest in Ramayana scholarship. Fourteen leading scholars examine the epic in its myriad contexts throughout South and Southeast Asia.

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Ce livre doit son origine à un épisode qui marquait profondément la science encore nouvelle de la mécanique céleste au milieu du XVIIIe siècle. Ce fut la mise en doute quasi simultanée de la loi de la gravitation newtonienne par trois des plus célèbres mathématiciens de cette époque : Clairaut, d’Alembert et Euler.

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What does the future hold for European Christianity? Is the Christian church doomed to collapse under the weight of globalization, Western secularism, and a flood of Muslim immigrants? Is Europe, in short, on the brink of becoming "Eurabia"? Though many pundits are loudly predicting just such a scenario, Philip Jenkins reveals the flaws in these arguments in God's Continent and offers a much more measured assessment of Europe's religious future.

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My object in proposing topics was to avoid settled areas of discussion and ‘bounded’ subjects. Hence, this collection contains no ‘major author’ essays—even though citations and analyses of writings by Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and Lydgate constantly recur. It contains some ‘genre’ chapters, but wilfully new ones that violate customary categorizations: ‘Vision, Image, Text’ (embracing both secular visions and religious revelations) and ‘Speculative Genealogies’ (embracing romances, chronicles, and other narrative forms). Although its central subject is Middle English literary texts, it frequently sallies into Old and Early Modern English for its illustrative instances, and extra- or apparently ‘non-literary’ writings (‘Learning to Live’, ‘The Poetics of Practicality’) receive generous—even repeated—attention.

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This book introduces readers to the remarkable linguistic diversity of East and Southeast Asia. It contains wide-ranging and accessible discussions of every important aspect of the languages of the region, including word origins, cultural key words, tones and sounds, language families and typology, key syntactic structures, writing systems, and communicative styles.

Blackburn takes a wide ranging, historical approach, discussing lust as viewed by Aristophanes and Plato, lust in the light of the Stoic mistrust of emotion, and the Christian fear of the flesh that catapulted lust to the level of deadly sin. He describes how philosophical pessimists like Schopenhauer and Sartre contributed to our thinking about lust and explores the false starts in understanding lust represented by Freud, Kinsey, and modern "evolutionary psychology".

David Nash's new study focuses on the development of blasphemy in the Christian world. Tracing the subject from the Middle Ages to the present, he outlines the history of blasphemy as a concept, from a species of heresy to modern understandings of it as a crime against the sacred and individual religious identity.

From Zeus and Europa, to Diana, Pan, and Prometheus, the myths of ancient Greece and Rome seem to exert a timeless power over us. But what do those myths represent, and why are they so enduringly fascinating? Why do they seem to be such a potent way of talking about our selves, our origins, and our desires?

Relativistic cosmology has in recent years become one of the most active and exciting branches of research, often considered to be today where particle physics was forty years ago, with major discoveries just waiting to happen. Consequently the part most affected by this second edition is the last part on cosmology.

This book contains the complete games of both Kasparov-Deep Blue matches in a compact volume.Pandolfini gives explanation to nearly every move, even the first few moves of openings, which may be too elementary for advanced players, but could be appreciated by the novice for the detail.

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The Armenians traces the evolution of Armenia and Armenian collective identity from its beginnings to the Armenian nationalist movement over Gharabagh in 1988. Applying theories of national-identity formation and nationalism, Razmik Panossian analyzes different elements of Armenian identity construction and argues that national identity is modern, predominantly subjective, and based on a political sense of belonging. Yet he also acknowledges the crucial role of history, art, literature, religious practice, and commerce in preserving the national memory and shaping the cultural identity of the Armenian people.

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From antiquity until the nineteenth century, there have been two types of state: macro-states, each dotted with a number of cities, and regions broken up into city-states, each consisting of an urban centre and its hinterland. A region settled with interacting city-states constituted a city-state culture and Polis opens with a description of the concepts of city, state, city-state, and city-state culture, and a survey of the 37 city-state cultures so far identified. Mogens Herman Hansen provides a thoroughly accessible introduction to the polis (plural: poleis), or ancient Greek city-state, which represents by far the largest of all city-state cultures. He addresses such topics as the emergence of the polis, its size and population, and its political organization, ranging from famous poleis such as Athens and Sparta through more than 1,000 known examples.

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With more than 1.2 billion people divided into hundreds of ethnic groups, all dominated by the Han people, China's politics and its foreign policy are bound to be affected by ethnicity and ethnic rivalry. This book is designed to give librarians, students, scholars, and educated readers a ready reference for background information of interpreting ethnic events in China. Generally defining ethnicity in terms of language, this book provides individual essays on hundreds of Chinese ethnic groups, including ethnic groups living in the Republic of China on Taiwan. The book also includes a chronology, bibliography, and a breakdown of the People's Republic of China's ethnic political subdivisions.