Guttman scale analysis is a very useful tool to understand the evolution of societies. It shows the accumulation of cultural traits throughout history in various societies and that those cultural traits were usually accumulated in the same order. The results of studies, by Robert Carneiro and others, shows the accumulation of cultural traits is…[Read more]

This paper was written to question the widespread belief among anthropologists that prehistoric hunter gatherers knew about agriculture long before agriculture began to be practised. The paper suggests gradually accumulating human knowledge led to the development of agriculture rather than population pressure, favourable mutations or convenient…[Read more]

Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Leslie White, Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle, and Stephen Sanderson, all produced some of the more interesting theories of history, social change and cultural evolution but their theories have a common deficiency. None of them provide an ultimate explanation for social, cultural and historical change. This failure was…[Read more]

There is a traditional narrative within information studies regarding precision and recall measures. Precision and recall have been the most commonly used retrieval metrics and are the basis for more complicated and accurate information retrieval evaluations. Relevance, which is the criterion by which both recall and precision are judged, is…[Read more]

Completed in early 1944, Robert Desnos’s militant series of 25 poems in Contrée evokes memories of a lost peace and calls for the defeat of the German occupiers. Suggesting the desecration of the human body by the occupiers, Picasso cut his cubist–surrealist frontispiece etching of Dora Marr to produce severed heads and dismembered body part…[Read more]

Library and information center services are at risk during times of extensive budget reductions. Publicly funded institutions labeled as inessential or as auxiliary departments may lose the revenue necessary to maintain full staffing. Financial circumstances of recent years highlight the importance of strategic planning in library and information…[Read more]

A traditional expectation for publicly funded libraries is that they should be institutions where patron records are kept confidential and a standard of privacy is maintained. After the events of 911, methods increasing search and surveillance powers and reducing legal protections were drafted into law as the “Patriot Act”. Searching patron rec…[Read more]

In response to a lack of funding during the 2007–2009 recession, many library systems reduced or eliminated professional and library support positions. Traditional outcome measurements were not sufficient to convince tax-depleted legislatures to allocate more funds to libraries. In response to the crisis authors recommended cost-saving measures a…[Read more]

The functioning of truth in a history text does not depend only on its episte-mological conditions, but also on an ethical relation between the historian and the reader. Paul Ricoeur proposed that such ethical relation is based upon a tacit reading pact, a contract in which the author ensures his reader that his narra-tive is…[Read more]

In Historians of Brazil, Francisco Iglésias reviews some of the great names in Brazilian historiography as divided by him into three distinct moments: up to 1838, from 1838 to 1931, and from 1931 onwards. This article shall focus on the third of these moments, which has traditionally been considered the moment of the “modern Brazilian hi…[Read more]

In Historians of Brazil, Francisco Iglésias reviews some of the great names in Brazilian historiography as divided by him into three distinct moments: up to 1838, from 1838 to 1931, and from 1931 onwards. This article shall focus on the third of these moments, which has traditionally been considered the moment of the “modern Brazilian hi…[Read more]

Enrique Dussel is considered one of the founding philosophers of liberation in the Latin American tradition, an influential arm of what is now called decoloniality. While he is astoundingly prolific, relatively few of his works can be found in English translation — and none of these focus specifically on education. Founding members of the Latin A…[Read more]

In “Real Patterns” Daniel Dennett developed an argument about the reality of beliefs on the basis of an analogy with patterns and noise. Here I develop Dennett’s analogy into an argument for descriptivism, the view that belief reports do no specify belief contents but merely describe what someone believes, and show that this view is also supported…[Read more]

India has been the seat of deep philosophical engagements since the Vedic period. However, Indian philosophical wisdom, albeit different from Western philosophical in many respects, was not widely known to the rest of the world before colonial thinkers started their dialogue with Indian philosophy through their translations and academic exegeses.…[Read more]

This is a recording of a reading of Aristotle’s De Anima by Richard Lee and Christopher P. Long that was originally presented at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Citta di Castello, Umbria, Italy, on July 10, 2018. The theme of the 2018 Collegium was Aristotle: Physis, Psyche, Anthropos, and Kristi Sweet read Chris Long’s part at the conference…[Read more]

“Where do we find ourselves?” are Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Experience” first words. The query is the author’s starting point for a number of philosophical considerations; it’s also the point of departure for our making sense of pain, through the reading of both Emerson’s essay and James Joyce’s Ulysses.
The essay hipothesises that Joyce’s “We walk…[Read more]

In addition to the enigmatic The Codomas, Henri Matisse distinguished three other images with a name, Icarus, Monsieur Loyal and Pierrot’s Funeral for his landmark livre d’artiste Jazz. While the characters Loyal, Pierrot and Icarus were readily identifiable and the images could be interpreted within the context of the difficulties of the Ger…[Read more]

Henri Matisse’s images in Jazz, created during the disruption of the German Occupation of France, were embedded with symbols of cultural resistance, while his text, which he composed after the defeat of the Germans, reflected the transition to a post-Liberation France. The wartime symbols and allusions camouflaged within these images are readily r…[Read more]

Borges made a habit of differing from himself. “El otro” and “Borges y yo” are only the most overt examples from a corpus that constantly played with his biography, his beliefs, and his proper name. In his “non-fiction,” this Auseinselbstsetzung takes the form of self-contradiction, asserting opposed theses in his own name, celebrating…[Read more]

This paper suggests ever increasing human knowledge of the world around us is the driving force for much social and cultural evolution. It examines the order of discovery of our knowledge of the world around us and notes this knowledge comes to us in a particular and necessary order from the easiest to discover to the more difficult to discover.…[Read more]