Search

B NEIL DALAL b is Associate Professor of South Asian Philosophy and Religious Thought, and the Director of Religious Studies at the University of Alberta, where he teaches in both the Philosophy Department and Religious Studies Program. B ARUN VINAYAK JATEGAONKAR b has a doctorate degree in Mathematics from University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA. B VASANTI ARUN JATEGAONKAR b has a doctorate degree in Mathematics from Cornell University. [Extracted from the article]

Considered precursors of ḥadīth criticism, the opinions of ʿAlī b. ʿAbdallāh b. Jaʿfar al-Madīnī (161–234/778–849), extensively cited by later ḥadīth scholars, have given considerable weight to the credibility of a ḥadīth and its transmitters. Despite his centrality to the science of ḥadīth, there is not a single monograph dedicated to him and his intellectual output in the scholarly literature in English. This article presents a critical reconstruction of his life. Although the biographical sources on ʿAlī b. al-Madīnī are copious, the earliest details, especially on evaluation of his scholarly accomplishment, are often tendentious and contradictory. There is also a controversy related to his submission to the miḥna. Analysis of these biographical reports intimates that the questioning voices mainly came from the early Ḥanbalī circle, while other scholars, comprising Yaḥyā b. Maʿīn's disciples and non-Baghdadis, especially of Basran and Khurasani origins, tended to defend ʿAlī b. al-Madīnī. This paper argues that ʿAlī b. al-Madīnī's unfaltering status as a leading ḥadīth critic can be attributed to the geographical outreach of his supporters, whose overall attitude towards the createdness of the Qurʾān is more tolerant compared with that of the Ḥanbalīs. More importantly, ʿAlī b. al-Madīnī's contribution to the formation of ḥadīth criticism as a discipline was realized from early on, which is manifest in his knowledge of ʿilm al-rijāl and mastery of ʿilal al-ḥadīth. His theorization of ḥadīth transmission through the framework of the madār al-isnād also laid the epistemological foundation for the following ḥadīth critics in their formulation of the disciplinary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After her depiction in Catullus 64, Ariadne became a model for the relicta , the abandoned woman. The tapestry that ornamented the wedding of Peleus and Thetis told exactly of her dismay and anger upon learning that Theseus left her. As far as the myth goes, following her abandonment, Dionysus took her as a wife. Modernist Brazilian author Hilda Hilst (1930–2004) revisits this portion of the tale in her cycle of ten poems Discontinuous and Remote Ode for Flute and Oboe. From Ariadne to Dionysus (1969). This introduces the poems as works of reception vis-à-vis the ancient figurations of Ariadne, as well as the context of Hilst's biography, it analyses them as reimaginations of the Roman elegy, and presents their first complete English translation, all original endeavours. On the surface, Hilst's Ariadne fashions herself as a learned poet who reads Catullus and rejoices in her abandonment. I argue that upon a closer look, however, this endlessly unrequited woman desires instead union and permanence. Hilst, herself an underappreciated and disreputable figure, unveils Ariadne's labyrinthic mind as she negotiates her devotion to poetry and her desire for the man she loves, revealing the afterlife of the myth of a heroine who found her own voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to record the various writings of A. J. A. Symons (1900–1941). While best known for his biography, The Quest for Corvo (1934) Symons wrote widely on biography and on bibliographical and bibliophilic matters. He also made many contributions to the various publications of the First Edition Club, of which he was Director. In addition, in his later years he wrote extensively on food and wine. The range of his publications indicates the steadily widening extent of his interests in his brief life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When we consider classical receptions in terms of presences, we often think of how antiquity materializes visibly and/or substantially in the fabric of our histories, whether as physical remains or concrete traditions. Yet the search for the classical as a solid, conspicuous phenomenon reveals only one side of the fascinating story of how we can conceive its status and circulation across space and time. This article investigates some key examples across the period 1896–2017, from Argentine author J. L. Borges to British poet-translator Josephine Balmer, which disclose the flip side of this story—that of antiquity's existence on various levels of dispersal, silence, and occlusion at the intersections of poetry, mythopoeic biography, legend-making, and creative translation. It argues that, in their engagement with the Greco-Roman past, these examples both advance our understanding of absence as a critical idiom and question our sense of how antiquity makes its impact on our world as a 'classical presence'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, there has been a growing interest in the interaction between the urban milieu and the development of psychosis. While growing up in an urban environment constitutes a risk factor for developing psychosis, patients who develop a first episode of psychosis tend to avoid city centers and suffer from isolation. These observations have fostered emerging interest in ways of developing contexts in cities that are favorable to mental health and that may help service users in their paths to recovery. Building on work on place attachment as well as systemic therapy, we present a new approach to map the urban spaces experienced by service users. We propose two tools, the "place attachment diagram" and "life space network," to situate emotional bond and spatial dimension respectively at their center and help service users to map meaningful places in the city. We also suggest that different facets of the illness such as epidemiological risk factors (residential mobility, migration, urban living, trauma), early place attachment and abnormal space experience, may shape individual space and place experience in psychosis. Psychotherapeutic process with patients should aim at turning urban "spaces" into "places" characterized by a sense of familiarity, security and opportunity. Finally, we argue that the "spatial" is a forgotten dimension in psychotherapy and should be taken into account when treating individuals with psychosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a new knowledge-based approach for finding interesting semantic relations between resources in a knowledge graph (KG). The idea is to characterize the notion of 'interesting connection' in terms of generic ontological explanation patterns that are applied to an underlying linked data repository to instantiate connections. In this way, (1) semantically uninteresting connections can be ruled out effectively and (2) natural language explanations about the connections can be created for the end-user. The idea has been implemented and tested based on a KG of biographical data extracted from the life stories of 13,144 prominent historical persons in Finland, enriched by data linking to collection databases of museums, libraries, and archives. The demonstrator is in use as part of the BiographySampo portal of interlinked biographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the last few years, Mitra has studied Bengali-speaking Buddhists in Bangladesh, India, and Myanmar funded by the Ho Family Foundation's Research Fellowship in Buddhist Studies administered by the American Council of Learned Societies. With a PhD in religious studies, Mitra received trainings in both textual and social scientific study of religion. D. MITRA BARUA currently teaches Buddhism and Asian Wisdom Traditions at Martin Luther University College affiliated with Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada. [Extracted from the article]