Did the first men dream their voyages before making them? Or did they have to first take to the sea so as to be able to later embark on the ship of their imagination and thus embroider on accounts of their journeys? Is it the prestige of the dream that spurred them on to run the risk of translating it into a real experience? Or is it the account of authentic voyages that supported that of imaginary voyages? These are questions that make one dream and that we continue to ask ourselves, even though we suspect that they are idle, since it is impossible to answer them with certitude. All that we know, or think we know, is that among the first written testimonies that have come down to us, real and imaginary voyages are mixed and confused in an alloy of a homogeneity that resists analysis and is perhaps an image of the reception they had from their original public. Who knows if the Greeks who listened in the middle of the first millennium B.C. to the poets singing the return of Ulysses to Ithaca, could, or wanted to, untangle the part of truth from that of poetry? Who knows if the Arabs who, at the end of the following millennium heard the enchanting tale of the voyages of Sinbad, distinguished, as the Western orientalists of the 19th century must have done, the real ports of call and the shipwrecks experienced in the dreamed places and fantastic adventures?

In a recent essay it was emphasized that brain and mind appear to the mind as complementary and reciprocally recursive domains of a hermeneutic circle (Fischer, 1987). An outstanding and not yet recognized feature of this hermeneutic circle is that interpretation within this circle is not rule-governed and hence appears self-organized: individual features of the world (or the brain) become intelligible in terms of the whole context (of the mind)… while the entire context becomes intelligible through individual features (or brain functions). How, or from where then is significance arising?

These observations are an extension of those of a friend, the late Mircea Eliade, who more than once dealt with the problem of time. Philosophers have long been interested in this problem, which obviously concerns all of us. The nature of Eliade's preoccupations obliged him, but aside from that, we sense that the subject was close to his heart and that what he called “the terror of history” was a fundamental problem for him. He spoke of it at length in Le Sacré et le profane, in Le Mythe de l’éternel retour, in Images et symboles. His approach was that of a moralist and philosopher, but we know that this distinguished scholar was in reality an encyclopedist.

If you were trained as a philosopher and were suddenly bereft of speech, writing and reading, how would you feel? Would you feel a sensation of death, or Nirvana, or unconscious or conscious loss of control? Would you feel scientifically objective, or full of Aristotelian wonder? Would you think you were having a supernatural experience?

The nature of the relationship between surrealism and anthropology has been a focus of recent anthropological debate. This relation has not been considered at the level of methodology and the aim of this article is to consider surrealism in specific methodological relation with anthropology, particularly about how the idea of travel has been conceptualized.

One of the more recalcitrant issues in the philosophy of time concerns the question of temporal asymmetry. Some theorists, many of them, like Einstein, physicists, believe that time is fundamentally reversible. According to this view, the physical universe is indifferent to the direction of time; consequently, something like an arrow of time is held to be a human subjective imposition on an otherwise temporally isotropic world. Another position, held by Alfred North Whitehead and contemporary process philosophers, maintains that temporal asymmetry is a primitive condition of the universe, and that therefore even the most basic physical processes, such as those occurring at the subatomic level, display a distinct temporal direction. Finally, the philosopher of time J.T. Fraser (1978) claims that temporal asymmetry is an emergent feature of the universe, appearing for the first time with biogenesis. According to Fraser, with the emergence of life comes a present, or “now”, a temporal dimension whose absence in more primitive levels of cosmic evolution prohibits the attribution of an arrow of time to any pre-biotic entity.

To be able to read a precise and elaborate self-observation by someone who suffered for an extended period of time from that language affliction that has been called aphasia for more than one hundred years is such an extremely unusual occurrence that one would think such a work would attract the attention of all those persons, whether specialists or enlightened amateurs, interested in questions of language and in its eventual pathological aspects.

In his philosophy of life, Bergson's aim is very clear: to determine, beyond mechanism and finalism, the essence of change and of evolution according to the order of duration in opposition to the order of space or juxtaposition. His intention is to penetrate the specificity of the order of duration. Regarding time, the analyses of the previous philosophers are proved to be deceiving, since all of them, according to him, ended up in reducing time to a succession of simultaneities. Founded on the order of magnitude, mechanism lines up succession as a series of numbers, finalism adds to succession the law of the better: in both cases all is already given and time is reduced to a mere appearance. Nowhere do we find a process in depth; as time is conceived as the realization of a programme previously arranged, everything is simply spread out in space.

The history of historiography, in other words the history of history, is in vogue. In the realm of Classical Antiquity (whence speaks the author of this essay), but elsewhere as well, increasing numbers of pioneers set out each day to explore this new path of history.

To take a structural approach to genealogy means dealing with it as a story written in a language that is unknown and yet to be deciphered. It is the very language of time—individual and familial—in which a human being situates, often in a striking manner, the principal life and death events of his own destiny. Or better perhaps, it means discovering this in genealogies, which must first be exhumed from the dusty cabinets where a solid and excessively documentary tradition has too long confined them, in order to consider them now, in a sense, as venerable “black boxes”, potentially containing secrets of the intimate functioning of families, capable of providing unknown information on this subject, with meaning and logic winning out over the apparent fantasy with which they have been coated.

A discipline with mythical origins, an almost legendary genesis, with indefinite and unde finable boundaries, with uncertain and controversial results, sociology has always claimed for itself the right to be the science of society, the only scientific discipline entrusted with the study of the entire set of intersubjective relationships and the magnetic field they constitute.

A comparison of African grammars written in French, and bilingual Franco-African or Franco-Caribbean dictionaries, allows us to discern a common myth concerning “family” ties between French and African Languages.

Missionaries consider two means of conversion: by the introduction of the God-Word to his children, which predetermines the foreign society to be encountered; the other demands an ethno- graphic study (to discover the meaning of language) in oral societies (African, Caribbean) to whom an alphabetical language is superimposed (with Latin characters). This effort of transcription presupposes the harmonious compatibility of all oral languages with French. Thus the missionaries breathe the Word and transcendence into the colonies in order to recover in “Word incarnate”, instrument and symbol for the conversion process. (The theologian would speak here of the “verticality of transcendence”.) But the missionary enterprise meets with the resistances of written language and of foreign societies endowed with complex structures and syntaxes. Thus, the so-called “verticality” crumbles along with missionary hopes, resulting in a trite approximate translation which could be characterized as “horizontal”.

The dialogue that we contemporary historians try to have with past cultures is at the same time imperceptibly the beginning of a dialogue with coming generations. The historian of culture in fact has a double and heavy responsibility. On the one hand, his mission is to “resuscitate” the past. His period requires him to do justice to the culture of vanished peoples, to bring life to their thoughts and feelings, even though he knows that a complete and adequate reconstruction of their spiritual universe is only an ideal, a utopia of the scholar. It is in this sense that each scientific reconstruction can only be a modern reconstruction.

Long considered to be institutions outside of time, the temples of India are today the subject of ethno-historical studies that attempt to establish their continuous and recent transformations. Recent monographs, based especially on relationships between the central government and local authorities, reconstruct by periods their medieval, modern and present history, that is the long destiny of constant restructuring over time (Appadurai 1981; Fuller 1984; Reiniche 1989), showing that temples, whether large or small, never ceased being the center of important conflicts between social groups seeking dominance.

A part of European cultural patrimony rests on the relationships our ancestors had with time. A few examples chosen at random will suffice to show how their attitude toward this point evolved over the ages. The famous Carpe Diem by Horace was an invitation to take advantage of the present moment. In Jewish tradition man‘s obligation to work was considered a curse. Similarly a saying attributed by Pliny to the painter Appelles emphasized the necessity of daily labor. In still other ages time appeared as the great destroyer of all things, and Christianity promised its enemies tortures that were no less eternal than the joys it reserved for its disciples.

It seems that whenever there is a struggle between cultures, the culture of the victorious people becomes the culture of the people as a whole in the beginning, but later on the culture of the subjugated people asserts itself and many of its essential elements have to be integrated in the elite culture. We can see this process at work in the making of the Indian civilization. In the beginning the culture of the newly triumphant Aryan hordes naturally became the dominant culture of the Indian sub-continent. But later on the culture of the subjugated non-Aryans asserted itself, and during the second Brahmanical revival it found full-blooded expression in the Mahabharata, the Rāmāyana and the Puranas. As we shall see in this paper, even though the Aryans were conscious of the non-Aryan influence and resisted it, their attempts could not prevent copious inflow of non-Aryan culture.

As with any historical study, including that of knowledge and ideas, the progress of the semiology of the theater is subject to periodicity. The aim of any division into periods is to obtain a global view, even at the price of simplifications, but it can also bring out the hidden aspects of the phenomena under study.

The semiology or semiotics of the theater, that is, the application of the idea of sign to the art of the spectacle, has a long past, in which several stages may be distinguished, and first of all those that I would call the presemiology and the protosemiology of the theater.

In order to explain ancient myths rationally, Vico claims that one must affect to have no erudition whatever (in his words, “ridursi in uno stato di somma ignoranza di tutta l'umana e divina erudizione”), for myths are not fables but accounts of the beginnings of civil history as primitive minds, comparable to the minds of children, might have been expected to relate them. Later thinkers who dwelled on these “narrations” with their own civilized minds, failed to seek in them the very framework of the primitive and poetic world they described.

Applying the concept of social agent in the field of criminology and of penal law is aimed at advancing criminological research and analyzing the operations of penal justice from a perspective other than those generally in use. This, summarized in a very few words, is our principal objective.

In recent years, the relationships between systems of symbolic representations and cities have given rise to an often rich and stimulating consideration among various specialists in human sciences, namely, historians, anthropologists, semiologists and sociologists, among others. Urban conglomerates can no longer be conceived as simple assemblages of more or less functional constructions. The city is as much a mental concept as it is a physical reality. It is made up of images that give it a meaning. It does not exist independently of the sum of subjective interpretations that are continually made by its inhabitants. Our Western perception of the city may be influenced by romanesque literature or the memory of a painting, in other words, by imaginary worlds. It varies according to individual memory: each of us is attached to the different urban spaces of his souvenirs, emotions arising from family history or the duration of a lifetime. These personal projections are all the more important because they command a certain number of daily actions and furnish a framework of orientation to every citizen. They contribute to giving a moral quality to urban space and transform physical objects into concepts, into more or less determined signs.