Humanities & Social Sciences

Wie arbeiteten Botaniker abseits höfischer, universitärer und kolonialer Zentren? Am Beispiel Zürichs beleuchtet die Studie die Bedingungen für das Aufblühen der vormodernen Pflanzenkunde. Wie entwickelte sich Zürich zu einem Knotenpunkt in den transnationalen botanischen Netzwerken des 18. Jahrhunderts? Dieser Frage nachgehend leistet Meike Knittel einen Beitrag zur Erforschung der vormodernen Botanik abseits von Hafen-, Residenz- und Universitätsstädten. Johannes Gessner, der 1746 zusammen mit anderen naturkundlich Interessierten die Naturforschende Gesellschaft in Zürich gründete, deren Herbarium pflegte und sich um die Einrichtung eines botanischen Gartens in der Limmatstadt bemühte, dient dabei als zentrale Bezugsfigur für eine Untersuchung der Aktivitäten der Zürcher Pflanzenliebhaber, des Aufbaus und der Pflege ihrer translokalen Beziehungen sowie des hier koordinierten materiellen Transfers von Wissen in Form von Büchern, Herbarpflanzen und Samen. Deutlich werden dabei die ökonomischen und sozialen Verflechtungen erkennbar, die die Zürcher Botanik »aufblühen« ließen und in die Netzwerke einbanden, die sich auf dem europäischen Kontinent von Uppsala bis Pisa und von London bis Wien erstreckten und darüber hinaus bis nach Sibirien, Südafrika und Ostindien sowie in die beiden Amerikas reichten.

With renowned female rappers such as Ana Tijoux, Rebeca Lane or Gata Cattana, a new way of understanding rap as an anti-patriarchal, political and literary discourse has emerged in the Spanish-speaking world. Drawing on various disciplines, this study seeks to contextualize feminist rap as a theoretical and aesthetic discourse by women and analyze its potential and challenges in today's globalized society.

Destins de femmes is the first comprehensive overview of French women writers during the turbulent period of 1750-1850. John Isbell provides an essential collection that illuminates the impact women writers had on French literature and politics during a time marked by three revolutions, the influx of Romantic art, and rapid technological change. Each of the book’s thirty chapters introduces a prominent work by a different female author writing in French during the period, from Germaine de Staël to George Sand, from the admired salon libertine Marie du Deffand to Flora Tristan, tireless campaigner for socialism and women’s rights. Isbell draws from multi-genre writers working in prose, poetry and correspondence and addresses the breadth of women’s contribution to the literature of the age. Isbell also details the important events which shaped the writers’ lives and contextualises their work amidst the liberties both given and taken away from women during the period. This anthology fills a significant gap in the secondary literature on this transformative century, which often overlooks women who were working and active. It invites a further gendered investigation of the impact of revolution and Romanticism on the content and nature of French women’s writing, and will therefore be appropriate for both general readers, students, and academics analysing history and literature through a feminist lens.

The restless Riccardo Del Punta was culturally and scientifically resistant to ideological simplifications. This was due to his refined culture, not only in legal matters, which made him a scholar of labor law capable of engaging with the complexity of postmodern social transformations. A jurist of 360 degrees, he questioned law as a legal dimension, a product not only of legislative provisions but of overall cultural and social processes. His scholarly and teaching commitment represents a testamentary legacy in the tradition of titans such as Gino Giugni, Otto Kahn-Freund, Marco Biagi, and Massimo D’Antona.

Concepts of the Body - Transformations in Slavic Literatures and Cultures refers to the corporeal turn and examines the representation of bodies and related cultural discourses from an interdisciplinary perspective. The volume focusses on transformations, i.e. conceptual changes in the artistic view of the body that were effected by historical events such as wars and migrations movements, scientific discoveries or social changes. The contributions highlight the interplay between artistic innovation and the political positioning of writers, artists and activists on relevant contemporary issues.

The here collected contributions relating to the 46th International Conference of the Representation Disciplines Teachers, organized jointly by Sapienza University of Rome, Roma Tre University, and San Raffaele Roma University, aim to offer the scientific community a reflection on the theoretical and methodological aspects related to the concept of èkphrasis, a term that, in the field of representation, concerns descriptive, analogical, and digital activities that generate new knowledge in several areas of application. The Conference aims to place at the center of the discussion an interpretation of the concept of research that, without neglecting an idea of study, protection, and enhancement of environmental and cultural heritage, focuses on the needs of contemporary society and its possible developments, making use of innovative theoretical, methodological, and operational activities, including those characterized by an interdisciplinary approach. According to this interpretation, research can also be seen as a foreshadowing of the definition and testing of experimental proposals aimed at exploring new areas of investigation: this opens up imaginative and utopian perspectives in the relationship between the sciences, the arts, and the disciplines that contribute to common goals, through the experimentation of methods, techniques, and languages for conceiving, prefiguring, designing, and representing.

Materials / States of matter

While medieval guilds failed to absorb and encapsulate the entire world of labour into their fold, the moral, civic and political impact in medieval societies and the role in articulating rank in an increasingly hierarchical society is unquestionable. Guildsmen believed that their associations promoted 'justice' and that decisions within the guild should express the will of the majority of peers. However, this moral ethic, this concept of brotherhood, led to the exclusion from the world of production and, by extension, civil society, of all those who were outside the guild system. This system limited the resourcefulness of some and entailed the survival of the mediocre, but it was an acceptable compromise to ensure the security, order and reliability of the economic and social system for the majority.

The human mind is capable of entertaining an astounding range of thoughts. These thoughts are composed of concepts or ideas, which are the building blocks of thoughts. This book is about where all of these concepts come from and the psychological structures that ultimately account for their acquisition. We argue that the debate over the origins of concepts, known as the rationalism-empiricism debate, has been widely misunderstood—not just by its critics but also by researchers who have been active participants in the debate. Part I fundamentally rethinks the foundations of the debate. Part II defends a rationalist view of the origins of concepts according to which many concepts across many conceptual domains are either innate or acquired via rationalist learning mechanisms. Our case is built around seven distinct arguments, which together form a large-scale inference to the best explanation argument for our account. Part III then defends this account against the most important empiricist objections and alternatives. Finally, Part IV argues against an extreme but highly influential rationalist view—Jerry Fodor’s infamous view that it is impossible to learn new concepts and his related radical concept nativism, which holds that essentially all lexical concepts are innate. Throughout the book, our discussion blends philosophical and theoretical reflection with consideration of a broad range of empirical work drawn from many different disciplines studying the mind, providing a thorough update to the rationalism-empiricism debate in philosophy and cognitive science and a major new rationalist account of the origins of concepts.

Josef Wünsch (1842 - 1907) undertook a three-year research activity in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In this volume his estate (cartographic and ethnographic works and collections) is brought together and evaluated from today's scientific point of view

Decolonization; Politics and government; Papua new guinea

Abstract englisch (Max. 3 Sätze) The book analyzes the importance of Italian art and artists in Vienna from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Drawing from archival sources and unpublished materials, all the contributions of the book delve into several case studies that, in their complexity and diversity, clearly show the fundamental role of Italian art in Vienna and in the territories of the Habsburg domains. However, it was not only works of art that arrived from Italy, which were collected and esteemed by the aristocracy, clergy, and the court, but also artists who arrived in Vienna for periods of time, sometimes remaining there for their entire lives, and imprinting an epochal turning point in the local artistic production. Thus, it is not only a matter of material transfer but also of knowledge, know-how, and techniques spreading north of the Alps.

This book presents a rigorous philological examination of every instance where Hektor enters the Iliad, analysing each entrance's narrative context and style. In so doing, the author challenges and destabilises previous popular and scholarly assumptions about Hektor, and about the Iliad as a whole.