Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960), prominent astronomer and world-renowned socialist theorist, stood at the nexus of the revolutions in politics, science and the arts of the early twentieth century. His astronomy was uniquely visual and highly innovative, while his politics were radical. Anton Pannekoek: Ways of Viewing Science and Society collects…[Read more]

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]

Catalogue of the Exhibition held in Pisa in October 2015.

This study of Leibniz’s philosophical views on mathematics starts from the rank he assigned to them in the encyclopedia of knowledge. Mathematics, in many Leibnitian writings, is proposed to other disciplines as an example to follow: they are an essential component of the new, at the same time encyclopaedic and demonstrative knowledge he is…[Read more]

Leibniz was undoubtedly a many-sided man, and a polymathic mind, if ever there was one. The concept of analysis is notoriously, for its part, a polycephalous monster, and nearly all its meanings are spread through Leibniz’s works, in juridical, scientific, mathematical, or philosophical contexts, under different conditions and with different p…[Read more]

Universo Cantigas is a critical digital edition of the surviving corpus of secular troubadour poetry in Galician-Portuguese. This online edition is the latest instalment of the Glosario da poesía medieval profana galego-portuguesa project (available on this site and at http://glossa.gal) and is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and…[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]

The article processing charge (APC) is the specter haunting the open access movement. Advocates for open access (OA) face plenty of other obstacles, including tolled journal prestige, researcher inertia, and the life-draining embrace of the publishing oligopolists. But the APC—the fee many publishers charge authors to publish—is a homegrown pro…[Read more]

Alberto Pérez-Gómez’s 1983 Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science is used here as a vehicle for exploring the behavior of disciplinary boundaries in the context of crisis both historically and theoretically. Responding to his contemporaneous architectural crisis of the 1970s instigated by the rise of positivism, Pérez-Gómez uses Ale…[Read more]

Las fortalezas son uno de los más prominentes hitos del paisaje bajomedieval gallego. Pambre (Palas de Rei) es una de ellas, envuelta en la fama de ser una de las pocas capaz de resistir el ataque irmandiño. Sus constructores son los Ulloa, uno de los linajes nobles gallegos más distinguidos de los últimos siglos del medievo. La fortaleza de Pam…[Read more]

Este artículo tiene como objetivo realizar el análisis de la secuencia constructiva de la torre-puerta de la alcazaba medieval de Guadix (Granada). Para ello, se efectuó un levantamiento tridimensional de la estructura mediante fotogrametría, una lectura estratigráfica de paramentos en profundidad y una caracterización de técnicas constr…[Read more]

This review explores usage of the term public in debates about science and society. Since the 1980s, there has been a broad shift from public understanding and science communication towards engagement, dialogue and participation. I explore the multiple meanings of public in these debates, including the transition from singular the public to plural…[Read more]

Un estudio del impacto de la obra de Alonso de Espina en la acusación de crimen ritual presuntamente ocurrida en La Guardia tal y como se refleja en los documentos del proceso inquisitorial contra Yucé Franco. Este estudio intenta dilucidar cómo los procesos de comunicación escritos, en este caso las acusaciones de asesinato ritual, fomentan la…[Read more]

Germany today is experiencing the strongest upsurge of right-wing populism since the second world war, most notably with the rise of Pegida and Alternative für Deutschland. Yet wealthy global cities like Hamburg continue to present themselves as the gatekeepers of liberal progress and cosmopolitan openness. This article argues that Hamburg’s ur…[Read more]

This study argues for the importance of competitive discourse in placing the study of the ars dictaminis within the cosmopolitan tradition of humanistic Latin literature in the Middle Ages, particularly as it is expressed in the writing of Boncompagno da Signa and Guido Faba at Bologna in the first decades of the thirteenth century. Examining…[Read more]

The tale of Óðinn and Rindr is a complex one, but in its version found in the early thirteenth-century Gesta Danorum, we can see how Óðinn’s gender fluidity has become simplified into transvestism. From a being capable of changing gender, Óðinn now simply adopts the disguise of a woman. With this disguise, Óðinn rapes the woman Rindr in order ful…[Read more]

This is an outline of how the Leys d’amors, a fourteenth-century troubadour treatise of huge influence on post-troubadour poetry, catalogued rhymes according to merit. It is used in my classes of 35399 Medieval Catalan Literature II, degree in Catalan Philology, at the Universitat de València (http://go.uv.es/ozQkp3H).