Investigation of the construction of integrating world views Vrije Universiteit Brussel
(1) The construction of a model of the world: research ...
This project aims to deliver the first comprehensive study on the characterisation of women in Medieval Islamic philosophical texts. The study will primarily focus on Ibn Rushd (Latin: Averroes),
but will involve al-Ghazali, al-Farabi and Ibn Arabi as well. Ibn Rushd is best known for his commentaries on Aristotle. He played a decisive role in the Islamic world as an advocate for Greek philosophy and his belief in reason as superior to ...
The proposed project seeks to shed light on the evolution of Greek mythography after antiquity, more particularly in the Byzantine era. Despite the common interest in classical mythology, the genre of mythography (“writing about myth”) did for a long time not receive the scholarly attention it deserved. During the past two decades, however, we have witnessed a revival of interest in this classical genre. The proliferation of studies about ...
Since its emergence in the 18th century, monolingualism has had a strong impact on literature and culture. Despite its avowed global perspective, world literature still leans towards monolingualism. Not only does it focus on writers who write in major languages, while peripheral regions and minor languages are off the map, but it also favours monolingual works. Multilingual texts are often considered untranslatable or incomprehensible, which ...
This dissertation argues that the views of the unorthodox Flemish philosopher Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669) regarding the powerlessness of the human mind – in both the physical world and even in itself – were more complex and more influential than is usually recognised. It shows that those views gave birth a lively, if short-lived, tradition, which has up to this point been almost entirely unexplored.
Geulincx is perhaps best ...
I would like to do two things. Finish the project of the Bibliotheca Cumontiana, the editorial project of the Academia Belgica in Rome which holds the archives of the Ghent historian of religion Franz Cumont (1868-1947). I am one of the general editors of the Bibliotheca, responsible for seven volumes of so-called Scripta Minora. These volumes include critical historiographical introductions which reflect upon the methodology of Cumont and ...
This project is a historical and philosophical analysis of how the notion of spatial extension is employed in a dispute which engaged the immediate successors of Plato and Early Stoics. The matter of disagreement –grounded in the framework of the soul-body relationship– concerned the conditions for something to act upon something else.
According to the Stoics, Early Academics were wrong to believe the soul was incorporeal, for body ...
In recent years, protest events in a range of African countries have attracted widespread interest and public debate. The sharp increase in world food prices in 2007 and 2008, for example, was associated with the occurrence of a wave of food riots on the continent. In a number of countries, including Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia, protests erupted against high costs of living and frequently escalated into ...