‘Philosophical anthropology’ was initiated in the late 1920s as an alternative to abstract philosophical definitions of human nature (‘animal rationale’) and to the exclusively empirical, physical study of anthropology. Philosophical anthropology focused upon what it meant to be a human being. Its founders concentrated upon the situated existence of human beings and their ability to think beyond and to deny even what was actually vitally important to them. For Cassirer, these efforts remained too abstract because they failed to take the breadth of human cultural activity into account. The decisive feature of human life is neither reason nor language. These are derivative from symbolism, not the other way around. Human beings are best described as ‘animal symbolicum’. The error of earlier anthropological conceptions was not that they venerated reason, but that they ignored the body and so separated reason from emotion. The concept of symbolism, as Cassirer conceived it, overcame this dualism. His philosophical anthropology has been vindicated today in many areas of empirical research, but replacing the concept of ‘reason’ with that of ‘symbolism’ was no minor revision to the Western philosophical tradition, and the amplification and application of this new outlook has barely begun.

The theme of the 2006 IAP Conference, held at Alexandria, from 1–3 December 2006, was ‘The Unity of Science’. Let me explain how I interpret this interesting motto. For me, this does not mean that there is one regina scientiarum that rules over the other fields of science and learning; a role that was allotted to theology in olden times, and that nowadays – in a more secular vein – is claimed by physics. In my view, the notion ‘unity of science’ rather refers to ‘communality within diversity’. Disciplines vary in content, issues and methods. But there are also quite some common objectives, interests and concerns, the most important of which may be the common goal of searching for testable truth with objective and independent evidence. The communalities render it possible, or even imperative, to communicate and to cooperate. The diversity implies complementariness and calls for interdisciplinarity in the study of today’s numerous and complex phenomena in science and society.

(Translation: Stefan Menhofer, 2004, revised by Peter Burke, 2005)

The question: ‘How to write the history of Europe?’ can only be answered in context. The reply depends on what sort of readership one wants to write for, what ideas one entertains about tasks of exploring and conveying historical studies, how one views the relation of European history to other forms of historiography. The following reflections seek to take up and connect with one another two strands of historiographical discussion which are surprisingly disconnected, namely the discussions about concepts of European history and of global history. Suggestions for a European history in a global context, such as are presented here under the heading ‘exceptionalism’, are based not only on theoretical reflections but also on several attempts to put them into practice over the past few years.

Along with those case studies he did on the Middle East, the Cyprus case study that is presented here was meant to have been part of István Bibó's Paralysis of International Institutions and the Remedies. A Study of Self-Determination, Concord among the Major Powers, and Political Arbitration (Hassock, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1976), written between 1965 and 1974, but it was finally left out of the volume. István Bibó (1911–1979) was a seminal Hungarian democratic political thinker, international lawyer, and the last legitimate minister of the 1956 revolution, and, in this case study, he pointed out that there is no such entity as a Cypriot nation. Cyprus is the clashing and splitting area of the Greek and the Turkish nation-making processes. His detailed analysis is based upon this assumption. It has been translated by Péter Pásztor (Szentendre, Hungary).

People need socially accredited but disinterested experts to give them reliable advice about risks. Traditionally, this role has been performed by academics, but academia is coming increasingly under the influence of commercial and political interests. How can ‘post-academic’ science be shaped to sustain its vital role as an independent organ of civil society?

The human species is beset by ‘risks’; one of which is related to its exposed position on the Earth as it travels through cosmic space. An examination is made of the major risks – those associated with cometary impact, with solar emissions and with the explosions of nearby stars. Estimates are given of the risks associated with trying to avoid the effect of these phenomena. Not surprisingly it is concluded that more work is necessary.

The essay deals with the criterion and the distortion of making democratic political culture the basis of the democratic political community in the context of the traumatic historical experiences. The historical traumas of the communities may lead to a fluid or vacuum situation, a non-democratic consolidation, a fall back to personal power, even political hysteria if the assessment of the situation is wrong and bad aims are chosen; to a situation that could bring almost all the countries of Europe to the brink of disaster, and only those countries that could recall democratic political culture and education will be able to keep up with the rise of democratic crowd emotion. A comparative European research into the ways and means of processing collective traumas is not only an area that might shed new light on political phenomena, but a requirement of democratic functioning.

This article argues that the digital ‘revolution’ may turn out to be a true revolution for humanities and social sciences scholars, but not for the reasons usually brought forth in academic debates. Digital humanities is a way of returning to the intellectual fundamentals of the scholarly profession and of deeply changing the notion of academic community as well as that of reward and even authorship. This means not focusing on the new technical possibilities offered by the electronic format, which do not necessarily produce better science, but actually inventing a (new) political economy of social and human sciences. Scholars and academics should reinvent their daily practice in order to make true again the ideal of their profession: understanding societies in order to help them become more human.

Journalists are often blamed for producing scare stories. It seems to have been forgotten that many, perhaps most, modern scare stories are based on scientific risk calculations, and that journalists are not trained in scaring the wits out of people in that particular way. A more precise accusation might be that journalists are eager, unthinking and unquestioning conveyors of results from scientific risk calculations. Calculation of risk has become an important research product; a product fitting nicely into conventional journalistic storytelling, but the concept of risk tends to dilute value disagreement and conflict of interests into seemingly purely factual issues, leaving little room for political debate. Moreover, the cargo attitude of journalism is in conflict with the journalistic ideal of critical investigation and analysis on behalf of the public to stimulate common deliberation in the public sphere. Apparently, the production of scientific knowledge is excluded from the public sphere. Regarding discussions on science and technology, journalists will have to enquire into aspects of facts, values and social interests to live up to the ideal of investigation on behalf of the public. Several obstacles along this path can be identified, one of them being the commercialization of journalism in the media-industry and of scientific research in the knowledge-industry. Universities, in the search for a meaning of life, might consider providing a home for independent, reflexive journalism on science in a social context.

Our modern representation of elementary processes considers that all physical phenomena result from the interplay of four fundamental interactions: the gravitational attraction, the electromagnetic force, the strong interaction and the weak interaction. Formally, the quantum mechanical description of elementary processes introduces the concept of discrete symmetry, illustrated for instance by space and time inversions. Discrete symmetries play a central role in the elaboration of theories and models, and have profound consequences in the predictions of these theories. For nearly 50 years, it has been observed that, of the four fundamental interactions, only the weak interaction violates mirror symmetry, and all observations so far indicate that it does so in a so-called maximal way. Despite overwhelming evidence of mirror-symmetry breaking, the search for a possibly underlying left–right symmetry has been pursued for many years by dedicated experiments. In this paper we review the context of mirror symmetry breaking in the weak interaction, we describe its interpretation in the framework of the standard model of particle physics and describe current efforts to identify the restoration of the left–right symmetry.

This article presents a brief analysis of the ways in which women’s healthcare was understood by medieval Jews, as well as how this sphere of medical activity was learned, practised and disseminated among western Jewish communities during the Middle Ages. It examines the paths of transmission and reception of theories and notions of female physiology, health and disease within the Hebrew medical corpus, and it analyses the influence of the Arabic and Latin traditions in this process. In connection with the understanding of women’s healthcare, it pays some attention to adornment and decoration of the body, as part of the technology that focused on intervening in the functioning of the body. It also discusses succinctly the process through which medical ideas and concepts, as well as healing practices, were received, and integrated or refused, by Jews.

Words can be confusing and titles can be misleading, particularly if titles consist of one simple word. Two titles suffice to illustrate this phenomenon. In 2000, a book appeared with the title Empire and in 2002 another book appeared with exactly the same title. In the first Empire, Michael Hardt, an American literary theorist, and Antonio Negri, an Italian political philosopher, argued that although classical imperialism is over, Empire is alive and well, albeit in a new form. For them ‘Empire’ means the following: ‘Our basic hypothesis is that sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire.’ This is a rather special definition of Empire because what one usually has in mind when using that word is something very different. It is the Empire that the other book, written by the British historian Niall Ferguson, is about. This book describes, as the subtitle indicates, The Rise and Demise of the British World Order. But it is also about something more, as is apparent from the rest of the subtitle: and the Lessons for Global Power. These lessons are intended for the rulers of the Empire of today, the Americans. While the first Empire is the Bible for anti-globalists, Ferguson's book can be considered as the New Testament of the advocates of America's imperial ambitions.

The Mediterranean Strategy on Education for Sustainable Development (MSESD) Report reveals that the Mediterranean is an exceptional eco-region not only due to its geographical characteristics, but also its heterogeneous economic structure, in which education is regarded as a key driver of sustainable development. Given this importance, this study attempts to investigate the impact of education as a channel for human capital accumulation on two different growth concepts in a panel group of eight Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EUROMED) countries. We utilize an endogenous growth model using annual observations spanning from 2000 to 2017 by employing the Augmented Mean Group (AMG) estimator. Empirical results obtained from the Augmented Mean Group estimator indicate a positive impact of education, regardless of the growth proxy. In addition, empirical findings reveal that the impact of education on inclusive growth is five times higher than that on output growth. We also find that capital is the main driver of growth while inclusive growth is primarily triggered by education. One of the main policy implications raised in this study is that education reforms that attempt to improve educational quality will assist policymakers to achieve sustainable development goals. Extensive policy discussions related to the experiential findings are also provided.

In this article, I examine how defeat in war has shaped intellectual discourse in postwar Japan, particularly intellectual debates on war guilt. Known as ‘war responsibility debates’ in Japanese, the disconnection that is imposed on national identity by defeat has led to a number of different responses from Japanese opinion leaders and scholars. Implicit in these responses is a desire to restore fundamental continuity, either by revising the appraisal of war, or by making guilt the unifying element in a transwar national identity. Defeat is the crux of the issue around which intellectuals have had to navigate in their quest for a continuous history for postwar Japan. This article considers the contributions made to this debate by Maruyama Masao, a pioneering thinker on political thought in postwar Japan; by the scholars in the Science of Thought Research Group in their study of political apostasy (tenkō) and the more recent advent of revisionist historians in the ‘Liberal School of History’ group. I conclude that this ongoing debate should itself be regarded as a positive phenomenon, as it continues to presume a basic link between the war and accountability that is fundamental to the integrity of Japan's postwar democracy.