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Academic Articles English Blog

The Stranger and The Estranged

In this post, I posit the concept – the Estranged – as a dialectical opposite to Simmel’s concept of the Stranger. If the stranger is remembered for his ‘distance’ from the (host) group, the estranged is remembered for his ‘departure’ from the (reference) group. Simmel defined the Stranger as an “organic member of the group” (p. […]

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English Blog

How to Mark a Book by Mortimer J. Adler

“marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love.” You know you have to read “between the lines” to get the most out of anything. I want to persuade you to do something equally important in the course of your reading. I want to persuade you to write between the lines. […]

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English Blog Quotes

Camus and “one truly serious philosophical problem” → Suicide

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest-whether the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories-comes after wards. These are games …” — Camus, The Myth of […]

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Academic Articles English Blog

Urban vs. Rural Religion / Christianity vs. Paganismus and Heathenism

“Christianity was born among the urban Jews of the Roman Empire and spread gradually into the countryside. Even in largely rural Europe, monasteries functioned as surrogate cities and Christianity spread outward from these centers of structure and literacy. Pagus is the Latin word for “countryside,” and in the countryside the old polytheisms lingered long after […]

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English Blog Tidbits

The Qur’an was translated into Latin in 1142

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Academic Articles English Blog

Classification of Science(s)

“… some ways of classifying the various sciences. (1) Pure sciences versus applied sciences. It is widely held that we must distinguish: (A) science as a field of knowledge (or set of cognitive disci plines) from (B) the applications of science. It is common to refer to these as the pure and applied sciences. (A) […]