Author Archives: stephenkmacksd

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About stephenkmacksd

Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer. 'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.' https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary

Human Rights Organizations Condemn the Trial of Civilians before Military Courts | Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights

via eipr.org

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Books of Interest:Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson – Jonathan Kramnick

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Books of Interest: Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution – Academic and Professional Books – Cambridge University Press

Seventeenth-century Europe witnessed an extraordinary flowering of discoveries and innovations. This study, beginning with the Dutch-invented telescope of 1608, casts Galileo’s discoveries into a global framework. Although the telescope was soon transmitted to China, Mughal India, and the Ottoman Empire, … Continue reading

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Books of Interest:Isaac Israeli: A Neoplatonic Philosopher of the Early Tenth Century, Israeli, Altmann, Stern

  Recognized as one of the earliest Jewish neo-Platonist writers, Isaac ben Solomon Israeli (ca. 855–955) influenced Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars through the Middle Ages. A native of Egypt who wrote in Arabic, Israeli explored definitions of such terms … Continue reading

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Books of Interest:Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale, Tufayl, Goodman

  The Arabic philosophical fable Hayy Ibn Yaqzan is a classic of medieval Islamic philosophy. Ibn Tufayl (d. 1185), the Andalusian philosopher, tells of a child raised by a doe on an equatorial island who grows up to discover the … Continue reading

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Books of Interest:This Is Enlightenment, Siskin, Warner

  Edited by Clifford Siskin and William Warner 568 pages | 24 halftones, 2 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 2010 Debates about the nature of the Enlightenment date to the eighteenth century, when Imanual Kant himself addressed … Continue reading

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Books of Interest:The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, Wortman

  Richard S. Wortman 360 pages | 6 x 9 | © 1976 Until the nineteenth century, the Russian legal system was subject to an administrative hierarchy headed by the tsar, and the courts were expected to enforce, not interpret … Continue reading

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Living in Arcadia: Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from the Liberation to AIDS, Jackson

  In Paris in 1954, a young man named André Baudry founded Arcadie, an organization for “homophiles” that would become the largest of its kind that has ever existed in France, lasting nearly thirty years. In addition to acting as … Continue reading

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Books of Interest:The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors, Sullivan

  There have been numerous studies in recent decades of the medieval inquisitions, most emphasizing larger social and political circumstances and neglecting the role of the inquisitors themselves. In this volume, Karen Sullivan sheds much-needed light on these individuals and … Continue reading

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Books of Interest:Giordano Bruno: Philosopher / Heretic, Rowland

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) is one of the great figures of early modern Europe, and one of the least understood. Ingrid D. Rowland’s biography establishes him once and for all as a peer of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Galileo—a thinker whose vision … Continue reading

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