« O.AKKERMAN. ‘The Bohra Dark Archive and the Language of Secrecy: A Codiciological Ethnography of the Royal Alawi Bohra Library in Baroda, PhD dissertation, Freie Universitat Berlin, 2014, 360 p. », Chroniques du manuscrit au Yémén 25 (janv. 2018), pp. 6-9. (original) (raw)

The Transformation of Religion and the Self in the Age of Authenticity

This article examines Charles Taylor’s argument that since the 1960s a culture of authenticity has come to define the late modern period. The “age of authenticity” thesis is based on a philosophical and historical approach that follows the development of Romanticism, culminating in the expressive individualism of late modernity. Taylor focuses on the lived experience of secularity and the development of a particular identity that revolves around choice, emotion, and an eclectic approach to religion. Further analysis of Taylor’s work is examined with sociological research on the sacred self and consumption, evangelical and pentecostal appropriation of authenticity, no religion as an option in the age of authenticity, and questions about the search for meaning and purpose.

Religion in Times of Crisis

2014

Religion is alive and well all over the world, especially in times of personal, political, and social crisis. Even in Europe, long regarded the most “secular” continent, religion has taken centre stage in how people respond to the crises associated with modernity, or how they interact with the nation-state. In this book, scholars working in and on Europe offer fresh perspectives on how religion provides answers to existential crisis, how crisis increases the salience of religious identities and cultural polarization, and how religion is contributing to changes in the modern world in Europe and beyond. Cases from Poland to Pakistan and from Ireland to Zimbabwe, among others, demonstrate the complexity and ambivalence of religion’s role in the contemporary world.

Socrates and the Socratic Dialogue, ed. by A. Stavru & C. Moore, Leiden/Boston 2018 (931 p.).

Socrates and the Socratic Dialogue assembles the most complete range of studies on Socrates and the Socratic dialogue. It focuses on portrayals of Socrates, whether as historical figure or protagonist of ‘Socratic dialogues’, in extant and fragmentary texts from Classical Athens through Late Antiquity. Special attention is paid to the evolving power and texture of the Socratic icon as it adopted old and new uses in philosophy, biography, oratory, and literature. Chapters in this volume focus on Old Comedy, Sophistry, the first-generation Socratics including Plato and Xenophon, Aristotle and Aristoxenus, Epicurus and Stoicism, Cicero and Persius, Plutarch, Apuleius and Maximus, Diogenes Laertius, Libanius, Themistius, Julian, and Proclus.

"Solon gardait-il la main dans son manteau ? Les enjeux de l’appel à la connaissance des juges dans la controverse entre Eschine et Démosthène", Mètis, N.S. 16 (2018), p. 169-189

Mètis, 2018

In their pleadings Against Timarchos and On the false embassy, Aeschines and Demosthenes both evoke a statue of Solon erected on the agora of Salamis which would show the legislator with his hand inside his cloak, a gesture indicating his moderation when he spoke in public. The controversy about this representation has already been analysed in order to deepen various questions such as the conflict between the two speakers, our knowledge regarding Solon, the history of the Greek statuary or the reception of the past in Antiquity. The quarrel can be reinterrogated thanks to the heuristic tool of the truth-telling mechanism, used here in the sense of all the procedures, arguments and rhetorical figures that allow litigants to claim the truth. Then, the statue is a privileged means for both Aeschines and Demosthenes to put forward the direct knowledge that the jurors have of the facts. It is a point of tension from which one can examine the articulation between sight and knowledge in Classical Athens.

The 13th Century Copto-Arabic Reception of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī: Al-Rashīd Abū l-Khayr Ibn al-Ṭayyib’s Risālat al-Bayān al-aẓhar fī ’l-radd ʿalā man yaqūlu bi-’l-qaḍāʾ wa-’l-qadar

Intellectual History of the Islamicate World, 2014

This article (re-)introduces Risālat al-Bayān al-aẓhar, a short and by all appearances unfinished treatise by the Coptic scholar al-Rashīd Abū ’l-Khayr Ibn al-Ṭayyib (d. after 1270), to exemplify the pivotal role played by the works of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī during the ‘Renaissance’ of Copto-Arabic literature in the 13th and 14th centuries. Rāzī’s œuvre left its mark on both content and form of systematic religious thought in Eastern Christianity. Whilst the Risāla is available in a partial edition since 1938, it has never been studied so far. As we shall see, Ibn al-Ṭayyib’s critique of Rāzī’s deterministic concept of human agency as outlined in the Muḥaṣṣal came in an attempt to counteract what he perceived as a detrimental effect of the mounting popularity which Rāzī’s works enjoyed among contemporaneous Christian readers. The critique is based on a rich patchwork of sources that is characteristic of 13th century Copto-Arabic encyclopaedism.