8.3 Worship in temples and street shrines Apart from being intensely visible, participation in devotional practice at temples and festivals is extremely widespread within popular Hinduism. If we make allowance for regional and sectarian variations, we can gain some truly representative insights into a central preoccupation of living Hinduism. As in Section 6, I would like you to look
4.3 The changing face of belief The religious life of post-war Britain has become more varied, although Christianity in different forms remains the most influential religion. Yet, the influence of Christianity over British institutions has declined greatly over the last century and a half, although both England and Scotland still retain Established Author(s):
4.2 Reasons for studying religion Identify and jot down reasons that you think might prompt someone to make a study of religion. Here are some reasons in no special or 2.2 Activities 3 to 5 Watch the next segment of video. Once you’ve watched the video, make a few notes on what you’ve learnt about how the present buildings of the Louvre came about. Click to view video Introduction This unit explores the Holocaust, as the destruction of European Jewry is commonly known. The mass killing represented by the Holocaust raises many questions concerning the development of European civilisation during the twentieth century. This unit, therefore, covers essential ground if you wish to understand this development. This unit is an adapted extract from the Open University course 7 Poems that don't rhyme Are poems that don't rhyme prose? Not necessarily. Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), a novelist rather than a poet, and T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), known particularly for his poetry, both wrote descriptive pieces best described as ‘prose poems’. These look like short prose passages since there is no attention to line lengths or layout on the page, as there was, for example, in ‘Mariana’. When you study Shakespeare you will come across blank verse. ‘Blank’ here means ‘not rhymin Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able to: know something about how hieroglyphs were used to represent numbers and the nature of the problems that have survived; understand that Egyptian calculation was fundamentally additive. Operations such as doubling and halving being used for multiplication and division; appreciate the advanced understanding of mathematics in Ancient Egypt in relation to the manipulation of fractions; consid 1.5.1 Uncertain origins The tablet is called Plimpton 322, and is described by Neugebauer (The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (Dover, 1969) p. 40) as ‘one of the most remarkable documents of Old-Babylonian mathematics’. The name arises simply from the fact that the tablet has catalogue number 322 in the George A. Plimpton collection at Columbia University, New York. Plimpton bought it in about 1923 from a Mr Banks who lived in Florida; it is not certain where he obtained it, but it may have been dug u 5.2 Wilberforce’s anti-slavery campaign in context Certainly the outcome was a positive one from Wilberforce’s point of view in that abolition of the slave trade in British ships and colonial possessions passed rapidly through both Houses of Parliament, and became law in March 1807. This result in part implied an increased receptivity to Wilberforce’s religious arguments against slavery, but there were also other factors at work. These included the advance of liberal ideas of justice and toleration, themselves reflecting the influence of 1.1 Early influences In the early summer of 1771, the clergyman and writer John Newton (1725–1807) was visited at Olney by two of his admirers, William and Hannah Wilberforce, a wealthy childless couple, and their 11-year-old nephew and heir, also named William. Newton made a profound impression on the boy. In 1785 it was to Newton that the younger William Wilberforce (1759–1833), now Member of Parliament for Yorkshire and a close friend of Prime Minister William Pitt (the Younger), turned for counsel in the Learning outcomes When you have completed your work on this unit you should have developed: a knowledge of key aspects of William Wilberforce’s political career and writings, and an appreciation of their historical and religious significance; an awareness of the relationship of Evangelicalism to cultural transitions between the Enlightenment and Romanticism; an understanding of the contribution of religion to cultural, social and political change in Britain in the 4.3 Physical grounds for thinking we are immortal In section III Hume discusses what he calls physical reasons for thinking there is an afterlife. A sensible guess as to what he means by a physical reason is that it is one based on observation and experience of the physical world. He begins by asserting that physical reasons are the ones he has most respect for. (This assertion is unsurprising: his objections to moral reasons, and the metaphysical reasons we skipped, turn on the allegation that they depend on claims that go beyond wha 6 The Thermidorian Settlement and the end of the Revolution In Thermidor (July) 1794 there was a further political coup, this time engineered by deputies in the Convention who felt that Jacobin fanaticism, mob violence and bloodshed had got wildly out of hand and feared for their own lives. They succeeded in outmanoeuvring Robespierre, who was arrested and (after a botched suicide attempt) guillotined together with over 100 other Jacobins. The Thermidorians then put a stop to show trials and bloodletting. They also called in the army to put dow 1.1 Biography and art history The biographical monograph, that is, a book about a single artist and his or her works, is one of the most common forms of art history writing. Biography, as a literary form, applied to art history, is underpinned by the assumption that knowing about an artist's life can help to establish both the significance and the meaning of that artist's work. This is a very common, and it seems a reasonable, assumption to make in the interpretation of pictures. It is therefore a central theme in this un 2.5 The problematic status of the imagination Let us review the position we have reached. Stevenson's twelve conceptions of imagination suggest that ‘imagining’ might be defined as ‘thinking of something that is not present to the senses’. This definition succeeds in distinguishing imagining from perceiving, but is too general in including such things as remembering. Gaut defines ‘imagining’, in its core sense, as ‘thinking of something without commitment to its truth or falsity, existence or non-existence’. This succeeds 2.3 A first attempt at defining ‘imagining’ So far I have made some preliminary remarks on the meanings of ‘imagination’ and related terms, and considered one attempt at distinguishing different conceptions of imagination. In a broad sense, ‘imagining’ means thinking in some way of what is not present to the senses. Imagining may involve, but is not the same as, imaging. In a derogatory sense, ‘imagining’ may mean ‘fantasising’, as suggested by their etymological roots in Latin and Greek, and our use of the term ‘imag Introduction This unit investigates certain philosophical issues concerning imagination, creativity and the relationships between them, and considers the conceptions and varieties of imaginative experience. This unit is an adapted extract from the Open University course Thought and experience: themes in the philosophy of mind (AA308). Introduction This unit looks at a selection of short poems in German that were set to music by Franz Schubert (1797–1828) for a single voice with piano, a genre known as ‘Lieder’ (the German for ‘songs’). Once they became widely known, Schubert's Lieder influenced generations of songwriters up to the present day. This unit discusses a choice of Schubert's settings of Goethe's poems, and using recordings, the poems (in German with parallel translations into English) and the some music scores. You 3.2 Strawson: Sections III and IV Click on 'View document' to open Peter Strawson's article 'Freedom and Resentment'. Acknowledgements This unit was written by Dr Inga Mantle
Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce
Exercise 7
Discussion
Activity 3
Activity
