Africa is a European invention. When the Romans finally defeated Carthage, they turned the place into a province and called it Africa. Originally this referred only to a small part of Tunisia and Algeria, but it later became the name of the entire continent. The same happened to Asia, another province of the Roman Empire, in what is now called the Near East. The names of the two other continents demonstrate even more obviously their European origins: America was named after an Italian traveller – and not even Columbus! – and the term Australia comes from the fact that European voyagers who had some vague idea about the existence of this continent but knew nothing about it, called it ‘The Unknown Southland’, Terra australis incognita.

The concept of symmetry is omnipresent, although originally, in Greek antiquity, distinctly different from the modern logical notion. In logic a binary relation R is called symmetric if xRy implies yRx. In Greek, ‘being symmetric’ in general usage is synonymous with ‘being harmonious’, and in technical usage, as in Euclid's Elements, it is synonymous with ‘commensurable’. Due to the second meaning, which is close to the etymology of συ´μμετρoς, ‘with measure’ has likewise to be read as ‘being [in] rational [ratios]’ and displays the origin of the concept of rationality of establishing a proportion. Heraclitus can be read as a master of such connections. Exercising rationality is a case of simultaneously finding and inventing symmetries. On that basis a proposal is made of how to relate the modern logical notion of symmetry, a second-order concept, on the one hand with modern first-order usages of the term symmetric in geometry and other fields, and on the other hand with the notion of balance that derives from the ancient usage of symmetric. It is argued that symmetries as states of balance exist only in theory, in practice they function as norms vis-à-vis broken symmetries.

Jürgen Habermas’ recent work attempts to find ‘inspiring energy’ in the religious traditions, but without disturbing the rationality and freedoms of enlightenment modernity. Rather, the secular would assimilate the religious like a blood infusion, becoming more vibrant and stronger, but not losing its hard-won advantage. For Habermas, the post-secular problem lies in how best to preserve the secular democratic institutions, and keep them from being ‘violated’ through religiously motivated politics. Habermas criticizes Nicholas Wolterstorff, who would allow the religious to overrun the political, potentially violating vulnerable democratic institutions such as the parliament. Habermas suggests use of an ‘institutional filter’ to protect parliament from violation. Throughout his post-secular writings, he persistently employs Victorian-like innuendo bestowing masculine ‘inspiring energy’, ‘vitality’, and danger onto religion, which runs the risk of ‘violating’ effeminate democratic institutions symbolized by the parliament; thus the prophylactic device, the ‘filter’, which protects her virtue. One is reminded of Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's ‘Wrapped Reichstag’: in contrast to the Bundestag of today, with its glass dome (representing transparency) open to the public, we find in Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's work an enclosed, protective environment, a filter or prophylactic. In this vein, this paper will attempt to tease out from the language, word-choice, metaphors, and discourse of Habermas’ (post)secular dialectics that the religious enters solely on terms set by the secular, and plurality solely on terms set by stability/security.

There have been dozens of interpretations of Las Meninas but most critics assume that either the Royal couple, or their portrait in the Velazquez's large canvas shown in the picture, is actually reflected on a back mirror. I shall provide evidence, however, to support the view that this mirror never existed. And there is no evidence whatsoever that the double portrait was ever painted. In view of these facts I shall make a new proposal about the way the picture was painted and about the painter's intentions. I shall show evidence that the king was adamant that he did not want his portrait painted, since he did not want to show his age (he was more than double the age of his queen). It is thus reasonable to assume that Velázquez, in order to assuage the King's qualms, created the mirror, thus allowing him to produce a very diffuse picture of the royal couple, where no evidence of aging could possibly be discerned.

In many countries, we have seen an increase in economic inequality over the past 20 to 25 years. The populations might therefore have changed their attitude about how and how much different countries should intervene to reduce the extent of economic inequality. A question is whether there is any connection between changes in redistribution preferences and trends in economic inequality in the prosperous Nordic welfare states. This article contributes by examining whether there are differences in redistribution attitude and changes herein based upon socio-economic criteria, which might include self-interest arguments. Nordic countries are interesting because there have been differences in development, and even strong growth in economic inequality, especially in Sweden and Denmark, although these countries in the literature have been seen as highly equal societies. The analysis shows that support for redistribution is relatively stable over time in each country, but also that there are major differences between countries, with support being much higher in Finland compared with Denmark. Females, discriminated groups and the unemployed generally support redistribution to a higher degree. Ageing generally increases redistributional support, while more education reduces support for government redistribution in Finland. In all four countries, the highest income groups are less supportive of redistribution of income.

Students are often ill-prepared for the leap in expectations within disciplines when they make the transition from secondary to university-level instruction. Moreover, another equally large challenge exacerbates these vertical disciplinary gaps. At all levels, instruction takes place largely in disciplinary silos – in language and literature, history, mathematics, science, and so on. Learning goals in these silos are often phrased in very different language, e.g. ‘becoming a reader’ (or writer) in language arts, ‘inquiry’ in science, and ‘problem solving’ in mathematics. Such horizontal gaps result in instruction being far less coherent from the student’s perspective than it might be. The Teaching for Robust Understanding framework, known as TRU, may provide a means of addressing both kinds of gap. TRU focuses on the nature of learning environments that support the development of students as powerful learners. Through the lens of the TRU framework one can see commonalities across disciplines and across grade levels, and shape instructional practices accordingly. Within any particular discipline, treating students as active sense makers and arranging learning environments to provide opportunities for active sense making may help to bridge the gap between secondary and higher education.

The discourse on ‘knowledge society’ and ‘knowledge economy’ often implicitly or explicitly suggests that the natural sciences are at the forefront of the development towards worldwide mobility, communication and cooperation in the world of knowledge, while the humanities and social sciences look more frequently at the specifics of certain cultures and countries or lag behind in their intention to internationalize. On dits can be persistent in the domain, among other things, because systematic information on mobility and migration of scholars, as well as on their international activities is scarce. This contribution tries to extract what can be found on mobility and migration of scholars in Europe. The available information suggests that differences by disciplinary groups are unexpectedly small.

The most important ethical issues in the use of the Internet and World Wide Web in scientific research are considered together with some of the conceptual problems that arise as a result of applying new information technologies to old institutions. The paper concentrates on a set of issues relating to moral responsibility for the production, utilization and diffusion of scientific knowledge in a networked environment. A conclusion is that reliability of information and hence the individual scientist's capacity to take full moral responsibility may be compromised by the environment provided by the World Wide Web.

The reaction of Western trade unions towards Solidarność was extremely varied, ranging from enthusiastic support to the denunciation of Solidarność as ‘counter-revolutionary’ and in the pay of the CIA. These views depended on political, institutional, and cultural determinants and had much to do with the national circumstances of particular unions and their representatives.

It is not unusual to credit certain individuals with having put and end to the Cold War. This essay discusses some of the most important of these people, focusing on their role in the Polish crisis of 1980–82: Mikhail Gorbachev, John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and Lane Kirkland. The author arrives at the conclusion that the question of the extent to which individuals can be held responsible for the victory over the Soviet Union is wrong, because it neglects underlying processes, such as the economic crisis in the Eastern Bloc and East–West contacts established during the détente of the 1970s.

This article argues that European vernaculars were in closer contact with one another and with languages spoken outside Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries than they had been in the Middle Ages, when Latin dominated written communication. Increased contact led to borrowing, mixing and hybridization, some of it highly self-conscious (as in the case of ‘macaronic’ poetry and drama). Mixing in turn led to a ‘purist’ reaction, first in the case of Latin and then in the case of vernaculars such as Italian, French, German, Dutch and even – to a lesser extent – English.

Starting from a distinction between different historical and philosophical concepts of ‘form’ as they have been discussed by Władysław Tatarkiewicz, this article argues that visual poetry is constituted and concretely shaped by its implicit, sometimes even explicit, reflection upon ‘form’. In three paragraphs different concepts of ‘form’ are briefly discussed with regard to selected examples of visual poems: (1) form as ‘proportion’; (2) form as the counter-concept of ‘content’; and (3) form in the sense of ‘contour’. The first part focuses on examples of twentieth-century visual poetry playing with the sonnet form and exposes its rigidly proportional visual structure. In addition, the strategy of turning form to serial account is illustrated. There is a long tradition of engaging with the sonnetʼs history and generic features via the very sonnet form, either in order to defend this highly artificial poetic genre (as an example by August Wilhelm Schlegel illustrates), or in order to criticize or parody it. Visual poetry sonnets reduce this poetic genre to its proportions, thus questioning under which preconditions the reader identifies a ‘sonnet’ at all. The second section of the article presents two examples of concrete visual poetry (by Eugen Gomringer and Mathias Goeritz) that play with the notion of ‘content’ by foregrounding this ludic element and the poetic processes that are represented indirectly by the respective poems’ visual structure. The third section is dedicated to the complementary concepts of ‘outline’ and ‘dissolved contours’, focusing on the contrast between traditional instances of the contour poem and more recent examples (Carlfriedrich Claus, Eugen Gomringer) which expose the tension between form and its dissolution.

An important proportion of citizens do not manifest confidence in many basic institutions (parliaments, parties, unions, army, public bureaucracies, big business, courts, ecclesiastic hierarchy, police) nor in the political class. Such a deficit of trust is attested by a wealth of empirical data. Nonetheless, the legitimacy of democratic regimes is not challenged: European citizens do not conceive realistically of an alternative system of government. A new counter-power is playing an increasing and crucial role in advanced pluralist democracies – that of magistrates and journalists combined. France and Italy are considered as typical cases, concerning in particular corruption at the highest level of the State and society. What types of citizens are needed in advanced democracies? Ignorant, naive, deferential, credulous, believers in myths or well informed, rationally distrustful citizens? Today, democracy is permanently under the supervision of the public, as attested by surveys conducted periodically.

In this article, it is argued that in the process of cultural transfer, literary translation and reception, the recipient will often transform the cultural rules and literary discourse in the original texts to make them fit the rules and discourse of the recipient reader/audience to target the taste of new readers. This phenomenon, which we call literary ‘domestic appropriation’, is a kind of transformation on a deeper level. Domestic appropriation is what can we get from literary variation, and it is the core part of variation studies. In cultural and literary exchange and dialogue between Chinese and European cultures, it occurs in both literary works and literary theory. History has witnessed how Chinese literary works are translated and introduced to Europe, in the process becoming an integral part of the canon of European literature. Chinese literary theory, when interpreted by European theorists, blends with local theory and furnishes new perspectives.

The paper addresses the question of how, in a research-intensive university, choices should be made to determine strategies that are appropriate for ambitious and creative institutions committed to both teaching and research at a high level. The paper calls for accountable real leadership at the university level and at lower levels. It also calls for organizational flexibility and flexibility in the allocation of material and immaterial resources.

The process of European integration, the complexity of the problems involved and even the resistance it raises, astonishes observers in other parts of the world, especially in large states that have a long history of centralized government behind them. Is there really so little unity in Europe? If so, how can this be explained? Has European diversity generated only problems or has it, in fact, created new and unique opportunities? Is there a chance that growing concerns at EU-level about the cultural dimensions of European citizenship could, in fact, consolidate a sense of community? And, finally, how can historians contribute to the creation of a common European identity, if this is so weakly developed?

This article charts and tries to explain the changing use of ‘minority’ languages in Europe between the end of the Middle Ages and the 19th century. This period saw the beginnings of a decline in the use of certain dialects and separate languages, notably Irish and Scottish Gaelic, although some tongues such as Catalan and Welsh remained widely used. The article develops some models of the relationship between language and its social, economic and political context. That relationship was mediated through the availability of printed literature; the political (including military) relations between areas where different languages or dialects were spoken; the nature and relative level of economic development (including urbanization); the policy of the providers of formal education and that of the church on religious instruction and worship; and, finally, local social structures and power relationships. The focus is principally on western Europe, but material is also drawn from Scandinavia and from eastern and central Europe.

People identify with other people on many different grounds: family, locality, religion, professional interests, even hobbies. But the group identity that has had particular influence over the past century or so has been the nation – and this has drawn especially on the identity of language. With the development of global commerce and the establishment of regional blocs like Asean, Nafta, and of course the EU, languages least associated with nationality may well be seen as best fitted to provide the requisite linkage.

Given its special geographical location and size, Shanghai is a key hub linking world and locality, in this case China, in the implementation of anti-Covid-19 measures. By coordinating all the work according to the rule of law, Shanghai has outlined the basic framework for fighting the epidemic; by establishing the community grid governance model, Shanghai has soundly harnessed the ‘political potential energy’ and effectively filled in the internal mechanism of anti-Covid-19 and urban governance; and by respecting professionalism and the role of the masses, Shanghai seized the best opportunity to fight against the epidemic. Therefore, Shanghai has built up public value and gained spiritual support to fight against the epidemic and fundamentally improved the governance efficiency of the city. The experience of Shanghai’s anti-epidemic measures and governance forms an organic whole through mutual embedding and ultimately relies on efficient and fair governance.