Henry Head in Ewald Hering’s Laboratory in Prague 1884–1886: An Early Study on the Nervous Control of Breathing

Henry Head, the English neurologist, received the main parts of his academic education in Cambridge and in London. In addition, he spent two years in Prague where he worked in the physiology department of the German university under the guidance of Ewald Hering. He was interested in the nervous control of breathing and worked out a new method of recording the tension and the contractions of the diaphragm in anaesthetised animals. His results substantiated the experimental basis of the Hering-Breuer reflexes and included the discovery of a new reflex now named Head’s paradoxical reflex. Head not only wrote an extensive paper about his scientific work, the recollections of his time in Prague also formed a considerable part of his autobiographical notes. These were written some forty years later and still expressed a deep affection for his teacher and mentor.     

The world of medieval learning

Karl Kautsky's writings on the French Revolution were crucial to the construction not only of the Marxist interpretation of the Revolution, which was perhaps the most important reference point for the historiography of that event during the 20th century, but even of Marxism itself as a comprehensive, systematic theory partly based on historical studies. However, these writings have been neglected and practically forgotten for decades, mainly because of the general rejection of Kautsky's theories after the October Revolution of 1917, in Marxist as well as non-Marxist circles.

Studying these writings, spanning roughly four decades from 1889 till 1930, we may see dynamic interrelations between historical study, theory construction and contemporary political intervention. Kautsky's approach to such key Marxist concepts as class and state prove to be much more subtle and nuanced than what has commonly been assumed, incorporating the results of historical study rather than pure social theory. Yet, his account does contain important internal tensions and contradictions between agency and objective conditions and between the historical material and the normative and political perspective of the historiographer. Several of these internal tensions were carried on into mainstream Marxist accounts of the Revolution, with important historiographical as well as political consequences.     

Scienze credenze occulte livelli di cultura

The essay intends to find out why although many studies have focused on the three-year revolutionary period in Italy from 1796–1799, the Cisalpine Republic has never been studied in the same detail as the Neapolitan Republic. In reconstructing these events, the two republics are regularly presented in opposing terms. The Cisalpine Republic is portrayed as exemplifying subordination to the military protectorate and politics of France, while the Neapolitan Republic is put forward as the shining example of revolutionary resistance within Italy at the time. The essay intends to underline why the nineteenth and the twentieth century historiography has negatively and prejudicially judged the political experience of the Cisalpine Republic.     

Henry VIII et le schisme anglais

For the philosopher of Rotterdam, religious coercion has two essential sources of illegitimacy: the linking of religious and ecclesiastical belief and the use of politics for religious purposes. Bayle responds to it, with his doctrine of freedom of conscience, on one hand and by means of the essential distinction between voluntary religious affiliation and political obligation, on the other hand. From my perspective, his doctrine of tolerance does not involve an atheist state, nor does it mean the rejection of the presence of religion in the public space or its displacement to the intimate sphere of the conscience. This paper proposes a reading of Baylean tolerance as a political doctrine that allows the articulation between freedom of conscience (individual), minority confessions (private associations), and official religion (established church). Thus, the Baylean theoretical model could be considered a proposal to provide a normative form to the practice of toleration present in the seventeenth -century Netherlands.     

The work of Norbert Elias

This paper argues that the moral legitimating reasoning of terra nullius assumed an under-recognised, different guise in the later years of colonial justification in the form of trusteeship. The idea of terra nullius has a central place in the political thought of thinkers such as Grotius and Locke. Although terra nullius, consolidated in European colonial thought in the early modern period, differed conceptually from the doctrine of trusteeship as the colonial legitimation for Africa, both instituted a moral justification for the appropriation of native land, and of empire itself.

The contention is that the trajectory from the one doctrine to the other was aligned with the change in the underlying moral framework of the rights and duties of Europeans and non-Europeans. In the early days of colonisation, there was a certain permissiveness on the part of the colonisers to appropriate the land of American Indians. By the late nineteenth century this seemed to change into a moral requirement for civilising the native Africans. Edmund Burke's conceptualisation of trusteeship illustrates the way in which traditionally conceived natural rights were transformed into fundamental social rights, and central to this idea was the expansion of European ‘civilised’ moral communities on which rights now depended.     

Precarious Democratization and Local Dynamics in Niger: Micro–Politics in Zinder

Literature on the African state often finds it hard to specify what is state and what is not. The closer one gets to a particular political landscape, the more apparent it becomes that many institutions have something of a twilight character. This article argues that studies of local politics in Africa should focus on how the public authority of institutions waxes and wanes and how political competition among individuals and organizations expresses the notion of state and public authority. This is explored in the context of contemporary political struggles in Niger, played out in three different arenas in the region of Zinder around 1999, as home–town associations, chieftaincies and vigilante groups all take on the mantle of public authority in their dealings with what they consider to be their antithesis, the ‘State’.     

Klaus G. Witz,The Supreme Wisdom of the Upanisads: An Introduction

Indo-Iranian Journal -