The aim of this paper is to present and critically discuss the long journey of the enterprise of culture from the modernist condition of “high culture” (or “elite culture”) to the contemporary postmodernist (?) condition of “popular culture” (or “mass culture”). It will particularly seek to illustrate and assess the nature, role and implications of the various “modes of reading and interpreting...

The teaching of political economy offers an alternative, and a challenge, to conventional economics education. Its emphasis on the competing currents of economic thought and their association with rival political philosophies adds complexity to the subject. However, this engagement with controversial issues creates more intellectual excitement than a narrow, ‘technical’ treatment of orthodox ec...

A survey of intellectual currents in the philosophy of knowledge and research methodology is given. This survey provides the backdrop for taking stock of the methodological differences that have arisen between disciplines, such as the methods commonly used in science, history or literary theory. Postmodernism and scientific empiricism are described and portrayed as two sides of the same coin we...

nation state to see this issue from the perspective of Japanese Kampo medicine. Japanese reformers in the early twentieth century shared the similar antiquarian fascination with the Treatise on Cold Damage and were even more immersed in the world of biomedicine than their Chinese contemporaries. They considered their attempts to revitalise Japanese Kampo medicine through their meticulous readin...

We investigate the phase structure of pure compact U(1) lattice gauge theory in 4 dimensions with the Wilson action supplemented by a monopole term. To overcome the suppression of transitions between the phases in the simulations we make the monopole coupling a dynamical variable. We determine the phase diagram and find that the strength of the first order transition decreases with increasing w...

This article analyses one of the ‘worst movies ever made’, Robot Monster (), demonstrating how text, through weirdness, pulpy absurdity and cinematic ineptitude, examines mediates on existential anxieties modern America during Cold War. Through strange language gorilla-robots alien invasion, text articulates those that arise from our awareness freedom vs. need to be contingent under increasingl...

the expressions of “esoteric” and “esotericism” have a wide range of meanings, however, they specifically apply to religious, mystical, and philosophical secret schools. in ancient greek world, i.e. before the hellenistic era, we come across some currents with esoteric tendencies. the various texts from this period show that the ancient greeks sought the source of the esoteric currents outside ...

We studied a behavior of monopole currents in the high temperature (deconfinement) phase of abelian projected finite temperature SU(2) QCD in maximally abelian gauge. Wrapped monopole currents closed by periodic boundary play an important role for the spatial string tension which is a nonperturbative quantity in the deconfinement phase. The wrapped monopole current density seems to be non-vanis...