Rammohun Roy and the new language of monotheism

Rammohun Roy, the great 19th‐century intellectual, was the first Indian to respond to western ideas. His approach was selective, rejecting what he felt to be incompatible with the needs of Hindu society. This paper deals with his response to Western religious ideas. Roy sought to reform Hindu religion by claiming to restore the original monotheism of the ancient vedic‐Upanisadic period by cleansing Hinduism of its later corruption, as represented by 19th‐century Hindu Idolatry. This paper argues that firstly, Roy's claim rested on the appropriation of the Enlightenment discourse contra orthodox Christianity, for he too, like deists and freethinkers, sought to undermine institutional priesthood. However, the fundamental issue here is Roy's claim that Vedic‐Upanisadic religion was monotheistic. Monotheism is a doctine entirely rooted in the traditions of the Religions of the Book, which believe in the total “otherness”; of God, thus setting up a binary opposition between monotheism and polytheism. Hinduism, on the other hand, is more relativistic in its conception of divinity, and monotheistic tendencies in Hinduism, if it is possible to speak of Hindu “monotheism”;, are looser and more flexible. In fact, Roy's “monotheism”; is a modern reinterpretation in the light of the monotheism of the people of the Book. But while Roy was expounding his “monotheism”;. Western conceptions of monotheism were undergoing profound transformations, under the impact of the newly‐discovered Eastern religions. In other words, modern conceptions of monotheism are informed with the cross fertilisations of Eastern and Western religions.     

The impossible interview with the man of the hidden biological structures. Interview by Paolo Mazzarello

This paper presents an "impossible interview" to Professor Camillo Golgi, placed in time in December 1906. The Italian Professor Golgi from Pavia has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine ex aequo with the Spanish anatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Both scientists have obtained the award for their work on the anatomy of the nervous system. However, they have opposite views on the mechanisms underlying nervous functions. Golgi believes that the axons stained by his "black reaction" form a continuous anatomical or functional network along which nervous impulses propagate. Ramón y Cajal is the paladin of the neuron theory, a hypothesis questioned by Golgi in his Nobel lecture of Tuesday, December 11. After the ceremony, an independent journalist has interviewed Professor Golgi in the Grand Hotel in Stockholm. Excerpts about his education, his main scientific discoveries, and his personal life are here given (reconstructing the "impossible interview" on the basis of Golgi's original writings).     

The impossible interview with the man of the neuron doctrine. Interview by Edward G Jones

This paper follows the form of that by Mazzarello that precedes it (Mazzarello, 2006) and presents an imaginary interview with Santiago Ramón y Cajal in December 1906. A few days earlier Cajal had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, an award that he shared equally with Professor Camillo Golgi. Golgi had been recognized for his work as a pioneer into investigations of the nervous system, primarily on account of his discovery of the "black reaction" of silver chromate impregnation of whole nerve cells and their processes. Cajal had been recognized for his implementation of that method and for laying with it the foundations of what was to become modern neuroanatomical science. Paradoxically, the two awardees had been led by their researches to diametrically opposed views of the organization of the nervous system. Golgi believed in a continuous network of axons that formed the basis of all the integrative properties of the nervous system, while Cajal had provided the information that led to the formulation of the neuron doctrine that saw the nervous system as being made up of chains of discontinuous cells joined by polarized functional contacts that we now call synapses. The paper takes the form of an interview with Professor Cajal in the Grand Hotel Stockholm. His responses to questions posed by the imaginary interviewer are all taken from Cajal's own writings.     

The impossible capital: Monumental Rome under liberal and fascist regimes, 1870-1943

Every nation-state has a capital city from where the central government's institutions operate and where the past of the nation is remembered monumentally. Following unification in 1870 Rome became the capital of the new Italy. Turning it into a singular site to represent the aspirations of the regimes that came to power, however, proved an impossible task. Not only did the Liberal and Fascist regimes of the period 1870-1943 have contradictory intentions and goals, they also ran up against the complexities of Rome's own history in trying to establish their own. This paper contends that there are important similarities between the two regimes in their approaches to making Rome a capital for the new state and that contemporary cultural analysis of the Fascist regime misses this continuity when it takes the regime's claims to aesthetic novelty and architectural innovation at face value. In the end, Rome resisted attempts at using its monumental space to symbolically unify a country that remained materially and culturally divided.     

铜川耀州窑博物馆

从西安沿西铜高速公路北行,经三原,过耀县,在古镇黄堡南侧的漆水河畔,有一座雄伟的现代建筑,簇拥在一片碧树绿草之中,这就是我国目前规模最大的陶瓷博物馆——耀州窑博物馆。     

Polytheism impossible; or,the empty gods: Reasons behind a void in the history of roman religion

From the first decades of the nineteenth century, the gods of Rome have suffered discredit with respect to both the influence of Greek polytheism and the fervor of pre‐Christian and Christian monotheism. This attitude, not yet espoused by Gibbon and Herder, goes back to Hegel, whose system proclaimed the distressing emptiness of the mechanical gods of a religion already dead at the end of the third century B.C. This way of looking at Roman polytheism, propounded by a series of specialized studies published throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, gained even more ground with the appearance, in 1854, of Theodore Mommsen's History of Rome. The influence of the book as well as the personality of this unchallenged master of the German Universities were such that the theory of the death and the incoherence of the Roman gods spread throughout the universities of Europe, and continues even today to be determining in an important number of studies.     

洛阳孟津天皇岭西汉墓(M26、M27)发掘简报

2011年10~12月,洛阳市文物考古研究院在河南省洛阳市孟津区平乐镇天皇岭村南进行了考古勘探和发掘。共清理西汉墓24座、东汉墓7座、唐墓2座,其中两座西汉墓(编号M26、M27)保存较好。两墓均为单室土洞墓,置双棺,出土陶器、陶模型明器、釉陶器、铜器等。M26出土的陶井,井栏四壁模印图案,较为精美;两墓出土的清白镜和昭明镜具有西汉晚期的典型风格。洛阳地区的西汉墓葬多位于今洛阳市区周边,其他区域所见西汉墓葬材料较少,本次发掘有助于全面了解洛阳地区西汉墓的分布情况。