6.2 Days and time The separating out of a special day or time in the week runs in parallel with the marking out of a space that is set aside for worship, ritual and communal activity (material dimension). The place where a religious community gathers speaks powerfully about the convictions shared by its members.
5.1 Relativising the Holocaust? In the wake of the Soviet armies during 1944–45 came police units. In Poland the communist Office of State Security (Urzad Bezpieczerstwa Publicznego, UB) refilled former Nazi camps and prisons with civilians, many of whom were Germans innocent of any offence other than that of being German. Somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 died as a result of UB behaviour in the camps and prisons; victims were beaten, tortured, starved, killed. One of the only researched UB units is that which op
Acknowledgements This unit was written by Dr Alex Barber
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References 1 Prelude: Hume's death In mid-August 1776 crowds formed outside the family home of David Hume. Hume was a pivotal figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, and his imminent death was widely anticipated. The crowds were anxious to know how he was facing up to his coming demise. Hume is best known today as a historian (through his History of England of 1754–62) and a philosopher. His Treatise of Human Nature is regarded by many as one of the most significant philosophical works to have been written 5.1 Revolutionary calendar and metric system We considered earlier the universalist principles of 1789 deriving from the Enlightenment that inspired the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the redivision of France into departments. As the dominant group in the Convention by 1793, the Jacobins regarded themselves as mandated to enact the ‘general will’ of the people in a sense inspired by Rousseau: not as the aggregate weight of the individual aspirations of 28 million Frenchmen, but as the expression of that which, as virtuous men 4.1 Intellectual, governmental and monarchical responses There was much sympathy among intellectuals abroad for the Revolution, which seemed to be putting so many Enlightenment ideals into practice. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant was among the first to hail the Revolution as a unique historical phenomenon, and these early reactions were shared by Fichte, Herder, Schiller and Goethe. Enthusiasts in Britain included the radical Thomas Paine, author of The Rights of Man (1791), Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights 4.5.2 ‘Ganymed’ (‘Ganymede’) ‘Ganymed’ is another through-composed setting of a poem inspired by ancient Greek mythology. Ganymede was a boy of exceptional beauty, and Goethe's poem describes the feelings of the young lad as he is transported up to heaven by Zeus to become cup-bearer to the gods. Like ‘Prometheus’, this is a freely written poem, with no consistency in the length of lines nor any formal metrical scheme. There is only one rhyme (‘Nachtigall’ and ‘Nebeltal’ in lines 18–19), and there Introduction This unit asks what it is to be a person. You will see that there are several philosophical questions around the nature of personhood. Here we explore what it is that defines the concept. As you work through the unit, you will notice that this area of enquiry has developed its own semi-technical vocabulary. The plural of ‘person’ is, in this area of enquiry, ‘persons’ rather than ‘people’. It is easy to see the reason for this. The question ‘What are people?’ is potentially c 4.2 Parts of speech In describing the grammar of written Latin, the best method is to use the traditional classical grammar, as worked out by the Greeks and Romans themselves. As a preliminary, it may be useful to learn the ‘parts of speech’ in English. A very brief explanation follows, and then a much fuller discussion. 2.3.1 Politics MacLean was a socialist from the age of twelve, and a Marxist by the late 1930s, when he believed that the Soviet Union and the Red Army were the only agents that could defeat Fascism. However, he never joined the Communist Party, and by 1944 events in Poland had thoroughly disillusioned him about Stalin and the Soviet Union. One reason why he could never commit himself fully to Communism seems quite clear: he retained from his Calvinist heritage a deep pessimism about human nature and human Introduction Sorley Maclean (1911–1998) is now regarded as one of the greatest Scottish poets of the twentieth century. However, until the 1970s, his verse was known by very few people. In that decade, publication of English translations of his work and the impact of his public readings established him in the eyes of poetry lovers in Scotland, Ireland and England, as well as further afield, as a major poet. This material is from our archive and is an adapted extract from Literature in the moder 7 The Enlightenment and nature The sublime was potentially subversive of the Enlightenment mindset, which focused mainly on the power of human intelligence to grasp and explain the natural world, and indeed to discover natural causes of phenomena previously considered supernatural. There were, for example, frequent attempts to demystify the ‘miracles’ narrated in the Bible, since the violation of the laws of nature which a miracle implied was a physical impossibility and a contradiction in terms. The Marquis de Sade wa 4.1 Constant human nature Just as with other natural phenomena, Enlightenment thinkers came to the conclusion as a result of observation that human nature itself was a basic constant. In other words, it possessed common characteristics and was subject to universal, verifiable laws of cause and effect. As Hume put it: Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. 1 'The Enlightenment' What a change there was between 1785 and 1824! There has probably never been such an abrupt revolution in habits, ideas and beliefs in the two thousand years since we have known the history of the world. (Stendhal, Racine and Shakespeare, 1825; 1962 edn, p. 144) This unit looks at a period of 50 years or so during which European culture underwent one of the most profound and far-reaching ch 5.6 Other stanza lengths Other stanza lengths include the sestet, and the octave. We've looked at how poems utilise line-breaks and stanzas to evoke a landscape, develop ideas and to present different elements, the juxtaposition of which suggests an argument. We've looked at poems which are about themselves – about line-breaks or poetry itself – and found that they are also about something else. Poetry doesn't always move in a linear fashion, following a single idea or event. It can jum 1.3 The Royal Artillery Memorial Now I want to take another text. It is similar to the paintings in the Sandham Memorial Chapel in that it asks for a visual response first and foremost. We can, therefore, ask the same kinds of question – how the text came into being, the context in which it was produced, what form it takes, and how it communicates meaning. The text is the Royal Artillery Memorial. The architect was Lionel Pearson, the architect responsible for Sandham Memorial Chapel; the sculptor was Charles Sargean 3 The elusiveness of consciousness Consciousness is, in a sense, the most familiar thing in the world: our lives consist of a succession of conscious experiences. Yet consciousness can also seem elusive and mysterious, and this section contains some activities designed to highlight this. Here is a simple exercise to start us off. 1.6 Further reading For an advanced general introduction to the philosophy of language, see Blackburn 1984. Lycan 1996 is pitched at a more accessible level. Pinker 1994 is an informal but informative discussion of the hypothesis that much of our linguistic ability is innate, an important topic that has had to be left out of this unit. 4.6 New Lanark and the Falls of Clyde Let us take a moment to consider another aspect of New Lanark that was potentially of great importance to any propaganda campaign built around it. Big factories employing large numbers of youngsters were still unusual and so objects of curiosity. But New Lanark was unique given its proximity to the Falls of Clyde, the most spectacular waterfalls in Britain. By our period, the falls (see Author(s):
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