The paper circles around difficult issues that concern the relationship between life and poetry, trying to create a new paradigm through their ultimate identification. Poetry of life might prove to be the oldest paradigm for both literature and human existence and a challenge for this millennium. As paradigmatic literary feasts from Homer’s Iliad to the love dinner in Pavić’s best-selling novel Dictionary of the Khazars show, representations of real life are not the only thing making a poetic creation ‘seem’ alive. A Homeric transgression from tragedy to the vital power of poetry, embodied in Achilles’ transformation from a hero into a poet, comes after politics and after poetics. It also appears to be necessary if we truly wish to eradicate old conflicts and prejudices that have haunted the Balkans, among other parts of the world, for too long.

The ranking of higher education institutions, as well as the ranking of countries based on their scientific achievements, draws a significant amount of attention. Nevertheless, the ranking of countries according to their educational structure provides a completely different view. This article introduces a new approach to ranking, proposes certain changes in defining the parameters that should be included in the ranking process, and compares the results to the available Education index. This provides a new perspective on the evaluation of a country’s educational structure, which can speak volumes about its overall educational development.

This article explores the national and global significance and impact of Beijing’s hosting of the 2008 summer Olympic Games. The discussion is organized into four main parts. First, I locate the 2008 Beijing Olympics in the context of wider processes of globalization; in particular, I explore how China ‘glocalized’ the Olympics, by giving the event distinctive meanings that were then experienced by global television audiences. Second, I employ the concept of ‘soft power’ to explore how, in hosting the event, China sought to advance its international influence and appeal; I introduce the concept of ‘soft disempowerment’ to examine how there may have been some negative impacts for China in staging the Olympics. Third, I discuss issues of security surrounding the Beijing Olympics, given the growing focus on such questions for sport mega-events in general following the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Fourth, I outline some of the key issues regarding sporting legacies for China, following the 2008 Olympics, with particular reference to Chinese football.

The legal framework regulating property in Kosovo has been defined as ‘A jumble of laws, regulations, administrative instructions, court practices and directives combine to create a complicated and seemingly impenetrable system for determining contests over immovable property ownership in Kosovo. At the highest level, international human rights standards affect property rights…’1 As in other areas of legislation, laws addressing property issues derive from different periods in Kosovo’s history, that is to say the Yugoslav time, the so-called discriminatory period of the 1990s, UNMIK’s rule of the first decade of the 2000s and, finally, independent Kosovo. Laws are scattered through several legal texts, regulate different aspects of property rights, and often refer to institutions that no longer exist. This paper focuses on the specific issues affecting property law in Kosovo, a sector where international organizations and bilateral cooperation are massively intervening. While assessing legal acts in force and data collected on the field, the author argues how, for an effective reformation of the sector, a clear and coordinated strategy will have to be adopted by the two main donors which, in the next few years, will be launching several technical assistance contracts. Comparing European best practices with the proposed intervention suggested by the European Union and USAID will also give the chance to illustrate how a strict adherence to ECHR standards in the field of property, as the Constitution of Kosovo requires, will bring to light problems already seen in other European countries, that is to say a clash between domestic civil legislation on property, on the one hand, and the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights on Article 1 Protocol 1, on the other. The author will also notice that the tendency to adopt a too political approach, typical of international organizations and donors, in an area characterized by legal principles of a more technical nature, will be cause for additional confusion.

In the past 30 years, teaching Chinese as a foreign/second language (TCSL/TCFL) has made great achievements in Mainland China. However, TCSL/TCFL is at a crucial point at present, and its global development in the 21st century presents us with new questions and challenges. There are many issues involved as TCSL/TCFL adapts to this rapid change from a largely domestic context to a global one. This article attempts to address such issues as the significance, challenges and strategies of TCSL/TCFL in mainland China by outlining its brief history and development since the 1950s, and calls for the establishment of an international ‘framework of reference’ for Chinese language teaching.

A. Fraenkel and Y. Bar-Hillel in their classic Foundations of Set Theory (published in 1958) wrote ‘There is probably no country which has contributed, relatively to the size of its population, so much to mathematical logic and set theory and Poland. Leaving the explanation of this curious fact to sociology…’.1 However, the development of logic (and any other scientific field as well) in a given country, is not a linear function of the size of its population. In fact, there are several factors that conditioned the enormous development of mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics in Poland, particularly in the years 1918–1939. The following circumstances can be taken into account as elements for a sociological explanation of this fact (curious or not, but that is another matter): the philosophical context (the rise of the Lvov-Warsaw School), the mathematical context (Polish Mathematical School and the Janiszewski program, the co-operation of philosophers and mathematicians in teaching and doing logic, the amount of logical teaching in secondary schools and universities, and several organizational enterprises (the place of logic at universities, journals, scientific societies).

The erudite and encyclopaedic prose of Milorad Pavić has been rightfully compared to the works of the famous Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The question for the modern interpreter is the extent to which this critical view prevents us from observing less remarkable similarities between Pavić’s novel and Latin American literary traditions. Interlaced motifs of time and text in the prose of Milorad Pavić can, with equal right, be linked to a masterpiece of the Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. The distinction between male and female time or between male and female versions of the book in Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars is well-known. Less known is that in One Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez the relationship of time to text also depends on the sex of the characters. Comparing Dictionary of the Khazars and One Hundred Years of Solitude offers a new possibility for approaching the issue of cultural dialogue.

This paper is concerned with Twardowski’s role as a teacher and a founder of the Lvov-Warsaw School of logic and philosophy as well as with his main contributions to philosophy: the distinction between the content and object of presentations and his defense of objective truth, which initiated a debate on the eternity of truth in the School. It would perhaps be no exaggeration to say that the emergence of the Lvov-Warsaw School was the result of the premeditated efforts of one philosopher, namely Kazimierz Twardowski. Therefore, I will first present Twardowski’s role as a teacher and founder of the School and then move on to his theoretical achievements.

This paper’s argument is that in the case of Ibero-America, the literary or cultural insertion of elements from other places is not only or predominantly determined by the meaning that the element had in its supposed place of origin, but, rather, by the specific context where this element is subsequently placed. It is the study of this context that can generate better explanations not only about the reasons for this (and not another) element having been ‘imported’ but also about the meaning that it will have in the new context, in connection with the other elements that are also present there. After giving some answers from a selected number of scholars to the question of how does a given literary or cultural element, with an assumed origin in a given context, insert itself in another context, this paper will present, as a case study, the supposed ‘importation’ by Machado de Assis of the ideas of Théodule-Armand Ribot, demonstrating that the Brazilian author did not reproduce ‘imported’ elements, maintaining them in the terms in which they were articulated in the work of the French writer in their original context, but rather transformed them into something else.

Yeltsin’s oligarchy1 was 15, or even 20 or even 50, very rich people who featured all the time in the mass media. They were very ambitious. They were prepared to go openly i1nto the government or Duma, or to finance a political party. They were well known because they were popular. However, it would be difficult to argue that they controlled any part of the real economy.

The most famous achievement of Jan Łukasiewicz (1878–1956) was to give the first rigorous formulation of many-valued logic. In this paper I discuss his motivations for this, which were philosophical, and the legacy of his work.

In 1868, Japan embarked on its unique journey to become a modern country that was deemed successful and advanced by Western standards. But what characterized Japanese civilization at the outset of this quest and how did the makers of modern Japan conceptualize their goals? To answer this question, we will look at the long tradition of the Mito School, with special attention for the works of the Later Mito School, and to the thinkers and practitioners of the Bakumatsu and Meiji periods. This shall enable us to determine the aim, the nature and the success of Japan’s quest for its own path to modernization. The dissemination of the paradigm of modernization thereby attained to Korea and China shall be followed through and evaluated.

This paper investigates the resistance, and life-saving activities during the Shoah, of the greatest Hungarian democratic political thinker of the 20th century, István Bibó – one of the most original political theorists of his time. It places this in the context of his intellectual development, and provides an overview of his later thought on Anti-Semitism and the various forms of Jewish identity.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, a part of mathematical research was focused on unification: the goal was to find ‘one sort of thing’ that mathematics is (or could be taken to be) about. Quite quickly sets became the main candidate for this position. While the enterprise hit a rough patch with Frege’s failure and set-theoretic paradoxes, by the 1920s mathematicians (roughly speaking) settled on a promising axiomatization of set theory and considered it foundational. In parallel to this development was the work of Stanislaw Leśniewski (1886–1939), a Polish logician who did not accept the existence of abstract (aspatial, atemporal and acausal) objects such as sets. Leśniewski attempted to find a nominalistically acceptable replacement for set theory in the foundations of mathematics. His candidate was Mereology – a theory which, instead of sets and elements, spoke of wholes and parts. The goal of this paper will be to present Mereology in this context, to evaluate the feasibility of Leśniewski’s project and to briefly comment on its contemporary relevance.