Showing 252 articles
Many Cultures, One Humanity
Author: Sabine LeitnerJuly 6, 2022
A few years ago, I watched the documentary Babies by Thomas Balmes. It follows the first year of the lives of four babies from Mongolia, Japan, California and Namibia. The film does not contain any narration, it just lets the images speak for themselves, presenting the huge contrast that exists between these four cultures. It [...]
Ancient Britain
Author: Paul CummingsJuly 6, 2022
What is the history of the Prehistoric peoples of Britain, how far can we go back, and who were the people of these ancient Isles? Britain’s history of human occupation goes as far back as the Palaeolithic age, which means ‘Old Stone Age’. Archaeologists have uncovered remains of our early human ancestors dating to 40,000 [...]
The Fate of Empires
Author: Gilad SommerJuly 4, 2022
In 1976, at the age of 79, after a lifetime of service in the British army where he held high commands and fraternized with presidents and kings, Lieutenant General John Bagot Glubb, a.k.a Glubb Pasha, wrote a short but penetrating essay about the life cycle of superpowers called “The Fate of Empires”. In this small [...]
Crime – Can we Do Something about it?
Author: Gilad SommerJune 6, 2022
There is a plague that is wreaking havoc in our cities these days, causing distress, pain, and fear. I’m not talking about COVID, but about the pestilence of crime. In the United States it has been a political issue for big city mayors for many decades, much thought and money has been thrown at the [...]
Integral Education
Author: Istvan OrbanMay 25, 2022
Integral education is a popular term covering educational systems that focus not only on cognitive skills, but also on physical, vital, spiritual and psychological abilities. The idea of integral education is to provide a complex structure that can help to develop all aspects and all levels of the human being. Students who learn in this [...]
The Two Poles of Education
Author: Sabine LeitnerApril 30, 2022
Education is, has been and always will be of the utmost importance. According to Nelson Mandela it is “the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” And according to Plato, the “direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life.” Although the concept of education is universal [...]
History of Education in the Western World
Author: Jim PangApril 30, 2022
The history of education has also been described as the the history of civilisation. Education has a role in perpetuating and passing on knowledge and values to the next generation. Therefore, it has a culturally specific connection -“enculturation” as defined by the cultural historian C. Dawson. The education systems of the world are the product of centuries [...]
Iconology, the Magical World of Emblems
Author: Istvan OrbanApril 18, 2022
Iconology uses images and symbols to express a meaning or an idea. For many centuries, it helped to transmit religious and philosophical messages in an artistic way, when film or photography did not exist. Iconology is closely connected to iconography, which on the one hand is a branch of art history researching the interpretation of [...]
The METAVERSE, A Philosophical Perspective
Author: Ilanit AdarMarch 28, 2022
The Challenges of our Current Reality Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, many aspects of the reality that we have been accustomed to, have changed. All at once, reality has become an unstable and inconvenient place to live in. Many of our basic needs for social gathering and human interaction became very limited. This [...]
Stones of Time
Author: Zarina ScrewvalaMarch 28, 2022
“Sometimes there’s only a hint, a possibility. What’s magical, sometimes, has deeper roots than reason.” – Mary Oliver, Such Silence If you have visited Stonehenge on the Salisbury plains of England, perhaps you sensed a powerful feeling of mystery, of something hard to define. To the eye they are a series of immense standing [...]
Matrix 4 Film Review
Author: Pierre PoulainFebruary 24, 2022
The Movie The Matrix, released in 1999, and its two sequels (Reloaded and Revolutions), released in 2003, have together been an international phenomena. The first movie in particular, was known as a modern version of Plato’s Myth of the Cave, and the two subsequent parts are of the same universe – the real world and the [...]
Are we all Culturally Appropriating?
Author: Gilad SommerFebruary 8, 2022
The concept of cultural appropriation originated in academic circles in the 1980s. In the last decade, it had gained popularity, especially in the US, aiming to give autonomy to minority populations and to prevent the use of cultural elements to denigrate these populations and reinforce prejudice. Nevertheless, like many other things in the political correctness [...]