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Real, Miguel (2021). Pessoa e Saramago. Alfragide: Publicações Dom Quixote. 268 pp. [ISBN: 9789722073653].

This paper considers Daljit Nagra's engagement with concepts of canon and tradition in British Museum (2017). Throughout the collection, Nagra provides readers with a multifaceted insight into the ways in which a plurality of 'cultures' and 'traditions' — literary, historical, political, religious — inform contemporary notions of Britishness and shape his work as a writer living with the legacies of literary heritage. British Museum, this paper argues, explores how Nagra's work relates to canons of English Literature, and how he makes sense of his own position. The discussion is framed by a consideration of what happens when we review canons of culture and their place within an increasingly diverse society. Underlying the inevitable conflicts and dislocation involved in (re-)defining traditions and cultural canons, this paper considers the ways in which Nagra identifies, through plurality, a fundamental desire for the meaningful connection of canonical culture with the diverse 21st century world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the emergence in official Russian political discourse of a conceptual framework centered on the notion of a plurality of coexisting civilizations, each distinguished by certain inherent cultural values. The article champions the view that the rise of this framework to the status of official foreign policy in 2008 can be seen as a crucial step in an increasing 'symbolic sovereignization' of Russia driven forward by the Russian government. While Russia's own civilizational identity during the period in question was initially defined as European, the Russian government eventually offered a contending model based on the notion of a self-contained and unique Russian civilization. In the concluding remarks, it is suggested that this development represents a major conceptual turn, the wider political implications of which have become apparent during the still ongoing Ukrainian crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, Aphra Behn's Emperor of the Moon (1687) has begun to attract considerable critical attention. Behn's play has been explored in the context of contemporary concerns about farce and spectacle, as a satire on the Royal Society or pedantic male scholarship, as a critique on identity issues, and even as an example of class mobility. This essay argues that Behn's play is largely a response to her reading of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralite' des mondes (1686) and that through commedia dell'arte, she ridicules that still contentious 'scientific' notion - the plurality of worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culture designates "the tools through which the human polishes himself and develops his multiple spiritual and physical gifts."2 The humans interact and change opinions and become conscious that they belong to a global cultural space and are also "authors of the culture of their own community."3 Through these tools human "exerts to disobey the world, humanizes social, family and physical life, through progress of mores and institutions, in the end human, expresses, communicates and keeps in its operas, during the times, its great major experiences, because them to serve the progress...of whole human people."4 The human valorizes itself but also contributes to the progress of society. Today we talk about the plurality of culture through which is opened the path to the cultural dissemination and perfection. In this way, the humans get a responsibility towards the cultural progress of their community which is anchored in global community, and then appears the question: "what must be done so that all the humans of the world to participate to cultural gods?5 It is observed here a "spiritual and moral maturity of humans,"6 defined as "new humanism".7 This new type of humanism is not a simple talk, but it represents a new "type of responsibility towards human and towards history."8 In this way, it appears the need of a new type of education because the nowadays human must be prepared to become creator and responsible to integrate in a global culture based on values as "intelligence, will, conscience and human fraternity."9 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a series of publications I have claimed that by contrast to standard formal languages, quantifiers in natural language combine with a general term to form a quantified argument, in which the general term's role is to determine the domain or plurality over which the quantifier ranges. In a recent paper Zoltán Gendler Szabó tried to provide a counterexample to this analysis and derived from it various conclusions concerning quantification in natural language, claiming it is often 'bare'. I show that Szabó's example fails, and that even if it were successful his conclusions would not be supported by it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the application of optical technologies to the plurality-of-worlds debate in the nineteenth century brought historical questions of determinism, providence and progress into the field of astronomical science. The development of the telescope and spectroscope, described by Richard A. Proctor in 1870 as 'light-gatherer' and 'light-sifter' respectively, informed the nebular debate and suggested that the formation of our planet was no different from that of other celestial bodies; stars' and planets' past histories were understood as the light transmissions which appeared to us on Earth as our history might appear to observers elsewhere. By taking light as the medium through which data about the origin and past of the universe were communicated, astronomers (professional, amateur and inexpert) who considered the possibility of other worlds were necessarily involved in other debates that were taking place in the nineteenth century. Cosmogony was understood increasingly in materialist rather than scriptural terms, and participants in the debate, for example Thomas Chalmers and William Whewell, had to coordinate their stances on plurality with both theological and scientific-methodological positions. The debate also served as a proxy setting for reflections on history itself, providing figures of primal horror and eternal return, and also for questioning the telos of human existence, whether conceived as divine providence or as cultural advance. These intersections between astronomy and other disciplines, in particular history, can help explain the use of astral figures to express historiographical scepticism of progress in the late-century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the philosophy of view of life which can be considered as the point where the life and worlds intersect and create fragments of life and fragments of worlds. It informs that a fragment is normally thought of as something left over and something hidden from the perspective of a divine eye. It reflects that life streams through various forms like a river surging forth through the waves of its current and manifest themselves as an independent centers of agency.

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