In the traditional approach, the Bible is treated as revelation, and later as the product of history. But neither the first nor the second can satisfy the modern reader—the first is too naive, the second is too learned. Although the reader no longer believes that the Bible represents the infallible word of God, he nevertheless stands at a loss before an edition which distinguishes its different layers by four different kinds of type. Since he can neither read nor study it, his only alternative is to put it aside.

Does the success of quantum mechanics require that we abandon the notion of complete scientific explanation? Or does it represent a breakthrough in the explanatory scope of physical theories? Ever since Werner Heisenberg formulated the theory of matrix mechanics in 1925, this issue has been the topic of a continuing philosophical debate. In this essay I propose to explain Heisenberg's rejection of the mechanistic philosophy associated with classical physics and the significance of his return to Aristotle's concept of matter as potency.

The question posed in the title of this article requires us to indicate exactly what we mean by medieval India. Does there exist in general an Indian Middle Ages? Or rather are the Middle Ages a purely European category, and the extension of it to include India involve extrapolations that are devoid of sense?

“What I like in a work of art, is when one finds the very subject of the work transposed, with specific reference to the characters in it. […] Thus, in certain paintings by Memling or by Quentin Metzys a small convex dark mirror reflects on its own the interior of the room where the painted scene occurs. […,] Then, indeed, in literature, in Hamlet, the scene of the play; and in a lot of other theatre plays as well. […] In The Tall of the House of Usher, the story that is read to Roderick, etc. Not one of these examples is totally accurate. What would be far more so, [….] is to compare it to a coat of arms where one image places a second one in a subjugated position (en abyme).”

It is now nearly twenty years since Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures appeared, and during these twenty years many things have changed in linguistics—not least, the interest that the rest of the world now takes in what we linguists do. The reason for this is clearly because Chomsky claimed to have discovered a window into the human mind, via the study of the structure of languages. The argument is a simple one: a linguist can write a grammar for a language, with some degree of confidence that his grammar is the “ right “ one for that language, but since the language only exists in the heads of its speakers until linguists or other grammar-writers come along, the grammar that he has written must correspond in some direct sense, and in detail, to the knowledge that exists in the speaker's mind. Therefore, in order to study that particular part of our minds, all we need to do is to write grammars, making sure that they are right, of course, and then study the grammars instead. “We can also compare the grammars for radically different languages and see to what extent they are similar or different, and then draw conclusions about general properties of all human beings’ minds— and we can even speculate as to how our minds have developed that way, whether by genetic programming or by other means. It is no wonder that linguists are not the only people who think linguistics is important.

No serious argument proves that mythology is only a by-product or a residue of history. On the contrary, a certain number of analyses and theoretical reflections on the myth suggest that different levels of meaning, covering the whole body of mythology, demonstrate a great autonomy and that if the hunt, for example, introduces a series of myths, in a society as fundamentally agricultural as Greece in the first millenium, it is not a distant echo but rather is faithful to the social means of production of a horde of hunters who had crossed the clearings of History some millenia before, but in a less diffuse manner because the cynegetic activity constitutes an excellent operative in the scheme of the myth. For a series of reasons: the hunt, a fundamentally masculine activity where the confrontation with wild animals results in bloodshed in order to procure a meat complement, contrasts with the cultivation of the land but is closely linked with warfare. If this is completely the privilege of the male, because it is a work of death, the production of cultivated foods, on the contrary, takes place on the level of gestation and reproduction, even if working the land in Greece is assumed by men.