I was a delicate child, and to my great embarrassment I was excused from gymnastics as a teenager owing to an illness whose identity is still mystery, at least to me. That is when I acquired my world-weariness, a permanent and invincible lethargy that was to get worse with the passing years. Tiredness as a natural state has for many years been a recurring theme, when I'm complaining about life in letters and conversation. My friends consider it a bad habit of mine, almost an attempt to attract attention, and they don't take me seriously. “I'm increasingly falling apart”, I recently told an old friend. He replied with a slightly mocking air: “You've been telling me that for twenty years”. But the truth is - and it is difficult to explain this to anyone younger - that the descent into the void is long, much longer than I would have ever imagined, and slow, so slow as to appear almost imperceptible (although not to me). The descent is continuous and, what is worse, irreversible: you descend one step at a time, but having put your foot on the lower step, you know that you will never return to the higher one. I have no idea how many more downward steps are to follow. I can only be sure that their number is steadily decreasing.

The historical formation of Brazil is distinguished from the majority of ex-colonial nations by one factor that is especially characteristic: an intense process of ethnic and cultural mixing. The Portuguese colonisers, who, unlike the English Puritans in North America, left their families and arrived in Brazil in small groups mainly composed of men, naturally tended to pair off with the women they found available - first of all indigenous women and later African women. There was nothing in Brazil to prevent this spontaneous behaviour similar to the role played in the English colonies of North America by the strength of the family group or the strict religious observance of the community. Thus from the outset Brazil tended to accept racial mixing as a de facto reality. As Gilberto Freyre correctly noted in his book Casa Grande e Senzala:

The East has seen totality in a far more consistent and systematic way than the West; and India more so than any other civilisation in the East. When the Swami Siddheswarananda came to France to lecture on Vedic philosophy, he entitled his address, Outline of a Philosophy of Totality’. The expression could have been applied to the philosophies of India as a whole. But the world of thought, coextensive with culture, is far broader than philosophy. It is no exaggeration to assert that India is the land of totality par excellence. Is it not even, according to one dictum, bigger than the world … ? The notion of totality, implicit or conscious, poetic or theoretical, original or final, is present throughout Indian culture, both in its religion and in its arts, both in its customs as in its language. The Mahabharata, the largest epic poem ever conceived, proclaims: everything in the Mahabharata can be found elsewhere, but what is not in the Mahabharata cannot be found anywhere. Whilst the absolute beginning of a piece of Western music is in keeping with a dramatic time analogous to that of the Creation, Indian music seems to come from the eternity of a universe without transcendence. The body takes on a cosmic meaning through dance. By performing the tandava, the cosmic dance, Shiva Nataraja (‘Lord of the dance’) endlessly creates and destroys worlds. Indian art is an art of proliferation: both the reiteration of motifs sculpted in architecture and the litanies and metaphors spun out in epic poetry are symbolic attempts to capture the totality of the world. Every single element, being, movement or thing within this continuous space and time points towards all the others. The texts describe the sky of Indra with its web of pearls arranged in such a way that when one looks into one, one sees all the others reflecting in it; in the same way, each object of this world is not merely itself but comprises every one of the others and actually is all the others. The culture of India is one of plenitude, presence and continuity. At the opposite extreme, Japan developed a culture based upon the values of emptiness, absence and the interval. When a guru speaks, Valmiki and Vyasa know that it will take them many scores of verses. A Zen master's reply to his disciple takes up a single-line anecdote, or a word, or even a silence. At the other extreme, hundreds of statues line the gopuram of the temple at Madurai: not all of the thirty-three million gods ‘recognized’ in the writings are there, of course, but at least their unbelievable abundance gives us a plausible image of them.

Antônio de Castro Alves was born on 1 March 1847 on the Fazenda das Cabaceiras (Cabaceiras Farm) in the state of Bahia, and died in July 1871 in Salvador, the state capital. For this short twenty-four year span of his life he represented, as no one else in Brazil did, the myth of the Romantic poet and hero.

His literary vocation became clear very early on. Coming from a well-to-do family, he studied law in Recife (the capital of Pernambuco), Salvador and São Paulo. He fell in love with a Portuguese actress, Eugênia Câmara, ten years older than himself, and had the deep experience of a love affair with her that shocked the moral provincialism of contemporary Catholic monarchist Brazil. Like many writers of the period he wrote plays, and had great success with the drama Gonzaga, or the Minas Revolution, about the (abortive) attempt to free Brazil from the Portuguese yoke, which had been made in Minas Gerais in the eighteenth century. But it was in poetry – Espumas flutuantes (‘Floating Foam’, 1870) as well as the posthumous A cachoeira de Paulo Alfonso (‘Paulo Alfonso's Waterfall’, 1876) and Os escravos (‘The Slaves’, 1883) – that Castro Alves stood out on the country's literary scene.

Reading the vast panorama of the history of Western medicine in general and psychiatry in particular sheds an interesting light not only on social constructions and representations but also on the perception of the Other by the medical institution. Colonial medicine in its struggle - praiseworthy, moreover - against epidemics, presents an interesting case here. We read in the Colonial Medical Archives at Berlin, that a certain Dr Roesener was sent to Kamerun (Cameroon), a German protectorate, to take charge of the eradication of malaria, hookworm (anchylostoma), filariosa and sleeping sickness. But he also found himself faced with mental illnesses and, in his report of October 1909, reported the case of a sick man of the Dwala tribe claiming to be a friend of the Kaiser and presenting all the symptoms of mental illness. A problem of nosography arose - stemming from the cultural perception of an illness and above all of the Other: did this Dwala merit being mad? To understand the meaning of this question, we must return to the German anthropology of the last century, which made a clear distinction between ‘natural people’ (Naturmenschen) and those that were civilized, who were part of Kultur. Moreover, in this report Roesener used the word Naturmenschen to signify the Dwala. In this perspective, as the doctor notes, mental illness was, in the medical teaching of that time, a disturbance of the mind, a malaise of civilization. The prerequisite for being mentally ill was being implicitly part of a civilization. Mental illness was, moreover, translated in German by Geisteskrankheit, in other words, literally, illness of the mind. Now, the ‘natural person’ (the Dwala) has no civilization and in consequence cannot be sick in his mind. And yet he presented all the symptoms which made him a classic mental patient. Could one apply the nosography proper to illnesses stemming from civilization to ‘natural peoples’? Without resolving the problem which his terminological usage posed, Roesener insistently demanded that Berlin send the logistical means to Cameroon to build a lunatic asylum (Irrenhaus). To the problem of mental fragility that was posed came the answer of incarceration in a society that knew nothing of confinement of its ‘mental patients’, the latter often not being considered as inferior.

An ageing population and increased life expectancy are a characteristic of the Western world. Nevertheless, as Roger Fontaine writes, “although we should be glad about this fact, it should also be stressed that old age reveals profound discrepancies between individuals. In fact, we should not speak of ‘old age’ but ‘old ages’. Specialists make a distinction between normal old age, successful old age, and pathological old age.”

Catherine Guchet points out that, at the end of the twentieth century, two images of old age coexist, utilitarian in conception: that of ‘flamboyant’ old age and that of ‘dependent’ old age. The latter is associated with a loss of autonomy and dignity, especially for subjects affected by senile dementia, described as ‘unconscious’. We shall focus on these more problematic forms of old age.

I propose to examine here, at the outset, what I call the asymmetry in Thomas Hobbes's thought between his treatment of civil war and war between states, that is to say, between the departure from the state of nature - when that is a condition prevailing between individuals - and the permanency in the state of nature when it forms a condition existing between states. Secondly, I will address the Kantian progression beyond this asymmetry through the dual introduction of the idea of progress and of ‘cosmo-political’ peace. The attention given in recent years by Habermas to the Kantian idea of perpetual peace [Habermas, 1996], the recent events in Kosovo and Chechnya, and their implications for the shape of an international penal tribunal to judge crimes against humanity, invigorate the questions of civil peace and of rights which transcend state frontiers.

In the spring of 1784 the Marquis of Puységur, a great landowner and colonel in an artillery regiment, was called to the bedside of Victor, the son of his steward, who was suffering from pneumonia. Puységur was a follower of the new holistic medicine taught in an atmosphere of intense enthusiasm and scandal by Franz-Anton Mesmer, an Austrian doctor who had been living in Paris for several years. As a disciple of Mesmer, he intended to direct his ‘vital fluid’ onto the young patient, by means of ‘magnetic passes’, to provoke ‘spasms’ which would lead to a calm state and an improvement in health. But things did not go as anticipated. Instead of displaying the anticipated spasms, the young Victor sank into a strange state of unconsciousness which, at first sight, resembled a deep sleep. Then he revived once more and came to life with a new personality. Freed from his inhibitions, he no longer spoke his habitual dialect, but the French of aristocrats, and he had no hesitation in berating his school teacher, whose secret thoughts he appeared to be able to read. Finally, he forecast the stages by which he would be cured and the remedies which would be suitable for him. Puységur wrote down all these strange facts and the following year he published a report which caused a sensation. Soon, throughout France, somnambulists appeared and observations about their subjects gathered. From that time onwards, the incomprehensible facts apparently evident in ‘provoked’ or ‘artificial somnambulism’ and also in ‘magnetic sleep’ - such expressions were used by Puységur and his followers for the state that he had just discovered - were to give rise to huge controversy. The Marquis of Puységur triggered the development nineteenth century of a movement of reflections and practices which have generally been referred to by the expression ‘animal magnetism’, invented by Mesmer. On the eve of the Revolution and throughout the nineteenth century this movement held a real fascination for philosophers, writers, and scholars. But there has been a tendency to overlook this episode in European culture, which has ultimately become a “lost continent” in our own period.

We have never come face to face with ‘Philosophy’, that goddess who was courted, scorned, hated, and betrayed throughout history by those who claimed to represent her - we only come into contact with her officers: philosophers, that is, human beings who exist in an economic context, have religious ideas, support political opinions, find a way through their emotional history, are paid by institutions, fanstasize about a vision of hope, have appetites, can fight, are mad keen to be noticed and recognized and above all frequently make certain types of statements that have claims to validity. So philosophers are not only creatures in history but also historical creatures who interrogate the meaning of the world and particularly their own work. However, one of the tricks of instrumental rationality - if we follow Marx's analysis - is to focus first on the product rather than the producer. This is the basic reason for the fact that a passion for the exegesis of philosophical texts often conceals philosophers’ practices. And this is why - where African philosophers are concerned, and they are not the only ones - people focus first, with benign curiosity, on their books, the theories that they expound and that may provide matter for heated discussion, but questions are hardly ever asked about the stance of African philosophers, in other words, the actual conditions in which their position is created, the particular abilities of African philosophers to achieve their emergence as ‘philosophers’, and their recognition in the international arena. The rhetoric about the acceptance of multi-culturalism argued on the basis of the complexity of present-day societies often hides practices and processes of legitimation that are revealed by their relationship to those two phenomena, economics and the state. The love of little abstractions that philosophy resists in the name of its historical position, the haste with which African philosophers, among others, clamour for recognition from their peers in other cultures are partly intended secretly to conceal their true relationship to money. Not that ‘disinterested’ philosophers ‘in love’ with knowledge do not exist, but we need to recognize that they often fail to say, as Adorno does in Dialectique négative, that ‘philosophy's freedom is simply the ability to allow its non-freedom to be expressed’. The purpose of this article is less to question philosophers’ capacity for knowledge than to urge them to have the courage to proclaim and challenge their non-freedom.

‘My name is Ephraïm Naana, I have already told you on one of these many occasions when you have come here before closing time to speak about my school. In my village, since you ask me, there are not all the things which are to be found on the market here, there are only those which grow there: mangoes, potatoes, maize, bananas, papayas. And my primary school teacher told me that in other places there might be even fewer things; he said that in the market in Khartoum, in Sudan, the nation is vast but on the stalls there are only onions and white and red beans; and even though they were nicely arranged in piles, they were still only white beans, red beans and onions; and then he said that the world was big and that the hunger we experienced was not the worst of famines.

Pedro Alvares Cabral's ships left Portugal on 9 March 1500 en route for the territory that he first named Terra de Vera Cruz and that later came to be known as Brazil. On the 22 March they called at the island of São Nicolau [Caminha, 1500], one of the northernmost islands of the Cape Verde group; this was about forty years after the discovery of the archipelago in 1460-62 [Albuquerque, 1991]. It is known that Vasco da Gama had stopped at the island of Santiago in 1498 on his voyage to India, and also in 1499 on the return journey. Straight after the discovery of Brazil Cabral sailed for India and on the way back also dropped anchor at Santiago. Indeed, our archipelago, which is situated off Cape Verde in Senegal (the place from which it appears to take its name), was to become an important stopover point for maritime traffic between Europe, Asia and the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, both to allow crews to rest and to take on water, wood and some food supplies. It also became important as a holding point for slaves (a large number of whom came from around thirty Guinean ethnic groups and subgroups). They were dispatched from Santiago, known then as Cape Verde island, to territories such as Brazil from the early sixteenth century onwards, since these territories, which had only recently been discovered and were little known, needed people to work and populate them.

Gershom Scholem was without question a brilliant example of the modern Jewish intellectual: neither Talmudic, rabbinical, nor kabbalistic and still less a prophet. More modestly - but with remarkable spiritual energy - he was a historian, a man of learning, a university graduate, a (critical) son of the Haskalah or Hebrew Enlightenment, and a thinker who - without ever ceasing to believe after his own fashion - abandoned the traditional orthodox faith, with its rituals and prohibitions. He was also a modern Jewish intellectual because he was assimilated, shaped by German culture - despite his revolt against assimilation, his fight on behalf of ‘dissimilation’ (to use the term invented by Franz Rosenzweig), and his adherence to Sionism, which caused him to leave for Jerusalem in 1923. In reality he belonged to the first generation of Jewish university intellectuals in Central Europe who burst massively into the institutions of higher education at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries - in contrast to the isolated individuals, generally cut off from the Jewish community, who had had access to academic study in the earlier period.

The liberal-communitarian debates, which became prominent in social and political philosophy during the 1980s, continue to be waged in those disciplines and in politics today with even more fervor, and this time, both the ‘80s and the ‘90s are called forth as bleak and sorry evidence for one side or the other. The current scene is reminiscent of some of the ‘60s ideological disputes, especially the reformist critique of conservatism within liberalism. And that dispute itself is reminiscent of yet another, the one from whence it derived, John Dewey's well-known opposition of new and old individualism.

I find it hard to understand what can be meant by ‘mestiço (mixed-race) art’.

No one disputes that the Brazilian people are of mixed race, but even if this is the case, the idea that their artistic creations should also be ‘mestiço’ seems to be an argument that may be logical but is unverifiable in practice.

The first difficulty is that I can see no causal relationship between an individual's racial make-up and the character of the object he or she produces or creates. In my view human individuals are essentially cultural. So it is on the cultural level that they are defined and their creations described. From this it can be concluded that if a mulatto transmits something of his mulatice (‘mulatto-ness’) to his art, this has nothing to do with the type of blood flowing in his veins, but is related to the influence that his position as a mulatto has on his world view, if indeed he has one. Personally I can see no sign of it in the work of Machado de Assis, for example. Should writers' social and racial position influence their work? Of course. But not to the extent that it becomes visible and less still so that it determines the quality or meaning of the work.

We are at the moment experiencing renewed interest in the life and work of Aldo Capitini, the Italian philosopher of nonviolence, who was born in Perugia in 1899 and died there in 1968. Conferences, publications, and meetings are drawing the Italian public's attention to his pure lifestyle, deeply marked first by the courageous choice to oppose fascism, then by the long period during which he was marginalized by the university world and official culture; but attention has also been drawn to his numerous writings (from his Elementi di una esperienza religiosa, published in 1937 at the height of the fascist regime, with the help of Benedetto Croce, to Religione aperta, one of the last books to be placed on the Index by the Catholic Church, and finally the essay Attraverso due terzi del secolo, which appeared posthumously in Guido Calogero's journal La Cultura), and to his tireless activity as the driving force behind movements and initiatives (it was Capitini, amongst others, who organised the first peace march from Perugia to Assisi in 1961).

This paper sets out to discuss the use and power of music in representing social identities, concentrating on the more specific case of the Brazilian nation, which has made itself a complex and all-embracing socio-political unit in spite of the great diversity and the great inequalities to be found within its borders. It is well known that what appears to be its most uniform feature, the use of a dominant language, is actually quite fragmented, due to the influence of various co-existing systems of production, cultural models and social hierarchies, which change on a daily basis. Although this diversity seems to be underwritten by daily practice and independent of debate and official encouragement, the same cannot be said of the search for national unity. It is obvious in the case of most of the action undertaken with this end in mind, that questions such as exclusion and the imbalance and arbitrariness of power have been eliminated. Besides, certain alert individuals are wary of this insistence on the construction of a nation, since the role of the old national states throughout the world seems to be disintegrating in the face of the proliferation and growing importance of social, economic and cultural relations at a supranational level. It is therefore hardly surprising that the twentieth century is considered to be a milestone in both the rise and fall of efforts to achieve Brazilian national unity. Amongst these efforts, music has played a prominent role, as I shall endeavour to show.

Like many sociocultural phenomena in Brazil, popular music, as everyone knows, is the result of a meeting of influences. It could almost be said that it is born a cross-breed, given the half-European, half-African origins of its best-known first genres, lundu, choro and maxixe. As a result of its history it comes under the sign of the Cannibalism, the metaphor invented by modernist writers in the 1920s to refer to the ‘ritual devouring’ by which Brazil assimilated foreign values and made them its own.

Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil readily used the concept of Cannibalism at the end of the 1960s, when they founded Tropicalismo, which claimed a mixture of genres, styles and arts as its basis, and married international pop music and Brazilian traditions, electric guitars and berimbau. Tropicalismo as such only lasted for a few months, but the ideas which it promoted profoundly marked contemporary Brazilian culture. Caetano Veloso returned to the history of this movement in Verdade Tropical, an autobiographical work in which he reveals his thoughts on a number of subjects close to his heart: music, the cinema, masters/teachers, friends, family, love, sexuality freedom, prison, exile, books, language, etc. For this author, composer, performer, actor, director, poet and prose writer, inveterate and voracious reader and incorrigible chatterbox, anything to do with human beings is fair game. For Caetano loves words, and loves to talk about words. As early as the acknowledgements page he praises Unamuno, the author, according to him, of comments which are “the most moving that a foreigner has ever written about the Portuguese language”. And in a chapter entitled ‘Língua’ he mentions not only the songs he has written in English and his interest in the Anglo-Saxon language, but also his attachment to Romance languages in general and Portuguese in particular.

Nowadays, that part of Amazonia which is situated on Brazilian territory is more and more the focus of attention for communication methods and the international agenda. This enormous expanse of land covered by tropical forest of unequalled beauty, extending over several Brazilian states, possesses an extremely rich biodiversity, with a vast potential reserve of natural resources of all sorts, and inspires admiration as well as inevitable greed. The intensification of human activity in the region has given rise to problems such as deforestation and a resulting loss of organic matter whose importance has yet to be properly evaluated; it has also led to conflict between the different local groups, such as the indigenous population, gold prospectors and the big landowners, and to the degradation of quite extensive areas, thus provoking questions on how best to promote sustained development in the region.