Georg Calixtus, Isaac Casaubon, and the Consensus of Antiquity

This article explores the relationship between Georg Calixtus (1586-1656) and Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614). It does this in order to highlight an oversight in the existing literature concerning Calixtus, and to encourage scholars to revisit the work of Early Modern figures who have previously been considered only from modern disciplinary perspectives. By emphasizing the relationship between Calixtus and Casaubon, this article argues that Calixtus was potentially exposed to much broader circles of intellectual debate than has previously been considered, and that a reevaluation of his work in light of these debates is therefore in order.

Curriculum and religion

Across continents and cultures and periods of history, religious beliefs have underpinned curriculum in institutions of education. More recently, the so-called culture wars and terrorism have moved religion to center stage. In both state and independent education sectors, deep-seated assumptions about the nature of reality, spirituality, ethics and knowledge converge and clash in the curriculum documents of science, history, literacy education, and the like. With a focus on textual genres of power, starting with antiquity, this chapter argues that little has changed through millennia as the secular mysticism of price has replaced theology today in constraining the potentials of education.

Large igneous provinces and silicic large igneous provinces : progress in our understanding over the last 25 years

Large Igneous Provinces are exceptional intraplate igneous events throughout Earth’s history. Their significance and potential global impact is related to the total volume of magma intruded and released during these geologically brief events (peak eruptions are often within 1-5 Myrs duration) where millions to tens of millions of cubic kilometers of magma are produced. In some cases, at least 1% of the Earth’s surface has been directly covered in volcanic rock, being equivalent to the size of small continents with comparable crustal thicknesses. Large Igneous Provinces are thus important, albeit episodic episodes of new crust addition. However, most magmatism is basaltic so that contributions to crustal growth will not always be picked up in zircon geochronology studies that better trace major episodes of extension-related silicic magmatism and the silicic Large Igneous Provinces. Much headway has been made on our understanding of these anomalous igneous events over the last 25 years, driving many new ideas and models. This includes their: 1) global spatial and temporal distribution, with a long-term average of one event approximately every 20 Myrs, but a clear clustering of events at times of supercontinent break-up – Large Igneous Provinces are thus an integral part of the Wilson cycle and are becoming an increasingly important tool in reconnecting dispersed continental fragments; 2) compositional diversity that in part reflects their crustal setting of ocean basins, and continental interiors and margins where in the latter setting, LIP magmatism can be silicicdominant; 3) mineral and energy resources with major PGE and precious metal resources being hosted in these provinces, as well as magmatism impacting on the hydrocarbon potential of volcanic basins and rifted margins through enhancing source rock maturation, providing fluid migration pathways, and trap formation; 4) biospheric, hydrospheric and atmospheric impacts, with Large Igneous Provinces now widely regarded as a key trigger mechanism for mass extinctions, although the exact kill mechanism(s) are still being resolved; 5) role in mantle geodynamics and thermal evolution of the Earth, by potentially recording the transport of material from the lower mantle or core-mantle boundary to the Earth's surface and being a fundamental component in whole mantle convection models; and 6) recognition on the inner planets where the lack of plate tectonics and erosional processes and planetary antiquity means that the very earliest record of LIP events during planetary evolution may be better preserved than on Earth.

Molecular phylogeny, biogeography, and habitat preference evolution of marsupials

Marsupials exhibit great diversity in ecology and morphology. However, compared to their sister group, the placental mammals, our understanding of many aspects of marsupial evolution remains limited. We use 101 mitochondrial genomes and data from 26 nuclear loci to reconstruct a dated phylogeny including 97% of extant genera and 58% of modern marsupial species. This tree allows us to analyze the evolution of habitat preference and geographic distributions of marsupial species through time. We found a pattern of mesic-adapted lineages evolving to use more arid and open habitats, which is broadly consistent with regional climate and environmental change. However, contrary to the general trend, several lineages subsequently appear to have reverted from drier to more mesic habitats. Biogeographic reconstructions suggest that current views on the connectivity between Australia and New Guinea/Wallacea during the Miocene and Pliocene need to be revised. The antiquity of several endemic New Guinean clades strongly suggests a substantially older period of connection stretching back to the Middle Miocene, and implies that New Guinea was colonized by multiple clades almost immediately after its principal formation.

The iconic and the critical

Theodor Adorno was opposed to the cinema because he felt it was too close to reality, and ipso facto an extension of ideological Capital, as he wrote in 1944 in Dialectic of Enlightenment. What troubled Adorno was the iconic nature of cinema – the semiotic category invented by C. S. Peirce where the signifier (sign) does not merely signify, in the arbitrary capacity attested by Saussure, but mimics the formal-visual qualities of its referent. Iconicity finds its perfect example in the film’s ingenuous surface illusion of an unmediated reality – its genealogy (the iconic), since classical antiquity, lay in the Greek term eikōn which meant “image,” to refer to the ancient portrait statues of victorious athletes which were thought to bear a direct similitude with their parent divinities. For the postwar, Hollywood-film spectator, Adorno said, “the world outside is an extension of the film he has just left,” because realism is a precise instrument for the manipulation of the mass spectator by the culture industry, for which the filmic image is an advertisement for the world unedited. Mimesis, or the reproduction of reality, is a “mere reproduction of the economic base.” It is precisely film’s iconicity, then, its “realist aesthetic . . . [that] makes it inseparable from its commodity character.”...