Search Results

This chapter discusses the paradox that is Maimonides’ life. The same thinker who taught that the true human perfection and the ultimate end of man is only achieved through solitude and isolation, himself lived an unceasingly active and incredibly public life as private and court physician, business man, and Jewish communal leader, judge, and rabbi — a life which afforded little time for food and sleep, let alone the privacy requisite for contemplation and the intellectual worship of God. The chapter then presents three solutions to this paradox. It also looks at the purpose of the Guide of the Perplexed and Maimonides’ understanding of the Account of the Beginning and the Account of the Chariot. Finally, the chapter considers the parable of the sultan’s palace, as well as the limits of knowledge.

This chapter looks at some of the Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) Plowshare experiments. The first one, Project Chariot, was motivated by US Information Agency Director Arthur Larson’s suggestion to conduct a nuclear excavation blast in Alaska. Two were named Oilsands and Gnome, while the other one was unnamed. The AEC and its supporters believed that together, these four tests would prove the multitude of uses for the peaceful atom, while simultaneously protecting America's military and economic security. The focus for Gnome was heat and isotope generation; for Oilsands and the unnamed experiment, it was the stimulation of petroleum production. Chariot was intended to create a harbor beneficial to the people and corporate interests of Alaska. More importantly, it would provide crucial information to what would become the keystone of the Plowshare program: the construction of a sea-level isthmian canal.

This chapter examines the bioenvironmental studies sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in order to determine whether Project Chariot could safely take place. Botanist Albert Johnson invited wildlife biologist Les Viereck to join the studies as his assistant, which the latter accepted. Joining them as an independent contractor was geographer Don Foote, who had extensive experience in studying Arctic climates. Their studies ranged from the ecology of the ocean near the Chariot site to marine mammals and limnology. Driven by their determination to defend US security as they defined it, AEC officials made two assumptions: that the researchers could complete these comprehensive studies no later than August 1960 with the appropriations provided, and that the studies would alleviate any concerns Chariot’s detractors had about the safety of the blast. Ultimately, these assumptions proved invalid.

This concluding chapter initially focuses on theoretical physicist Edward Teller's proposal to construct a waterway across the Kra Isthmus using nuclear explosives. At the time, Plowshare was in the process of its slow death. All aspects of the peaceful-use program, besides stimulation of natural gas, had perished—but Teller hoped to save it. Ultimately, the Kra Canal failed to materialize; yet, Plowshare still continued to draw interest in the United States. The environmental studies conducted in relation to Project Chariot, the isthmian canal, and other projects gave scientists valuable data on the flora, fauna, and people of the regions in question. Other developments, such as hydraulic fracturing, also raise the possibility of Plowshare's revival.

This chapter discusses the similarity between the allegories of the soul as chariot in Plato's Phaedrus and the Katha Upanishad. It begins by investigating the methodological assumptions underlying such cross-cultural comparison in the absence of pertinent historical documentation. Then the congruences and discrepancies between the two texts are reviewed. The allegory is integral to Upanishadic thought in a way that is unparalleled in Greek thought, and this supports the conjecture of diffusion in a westward direction. The paramount difference between the two texts is the idle passenger, absent from the Phaedrus but central to the allegory in the Katha Upanishad. This difference is significant as a watershed between Upanishad-based Indian and Plato-influenced Greek philosophy.

Chariots in both Greece and India involved danger and intense experience in their various uses, and were used metaphorically for the interpretation of various abstract domains. They were vehicles of gods such as the sun, and symbols of royal power and prestige. Similar use (actual and metaphorical) of chariots in Greece and India had already been established before they provide a metaphor in both cultures for the inner self and its liberation. Cognitive analysis of the metaphor (and of its differences in the two cultures) brings out philosophical preconceptions prevalent in abstract domains associated with the inner self. In late antiquity, which saw the end of the light and fast chariot and of a certain ideal of embodied self-mastery, chariot imagery ceased to be fully 'functional'.

The genealogy of chariot imagery in India and Greece is best explained not by influence between the cultures but by understanding the place of each text within its own cultural tradition. The chariot journey described in the prologue of Parmenides is influenced by the chariot race in Iliad book 23, which also influenced Empedocles and Socrates. In the Katha Upanishad the chariot is a metaphor for sacrifice and fire altar, and a redeployment of the chariot imagery and narrative setting used in the earlier Katha Brahmana.The metaphysics of the Katha Upanishad should be contextualised as the component of a hieratic canon.

This chapter identifies land claim agreements in Alaska in 1971 and the western Canadian Arctic in 1984 as the culmination of a century of environmental transformation and colonial intervention. These agreements are placed in the overlapping contexts of the elaboration of the petroleum economy, the emergence of ecosystem ecology, and implementation of environmental impact assessment policies. It is argued that notions of a disturbed Arctic linked activist environmental scientists and Inuit political organizers as both parties grew concerned over the impacts of oil and gas exploration on the tundra. The analysis traces relations among these parties in Alaska from Project Chariot to the inaugural Inupiat Paitot meeting to the near simultaneous discussions of the Trans Alaska Pipeline Inquiry and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. It links these episodes with their counterparts in the western Canadian Arctic, including the Coppermine Conference, the formation of the Committee for Original People’s Entitlement, the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, and the Inuvialuit Final Agreement in 1984. The chapter ends by discussing the differences and connections between the North Slope of Alaska and the Inuvialuit Settlement Region as regards the role of science in environmental decision making structures enshrined by land claim agreements.

This chapter examines the work of APCM missionary Edmiston, a Fisk University graduate and skilled linguist, who in the first decades of the twentieth century controversially wrote the first dictionary and grammar of the Bushong (Bakuba) language. Shortly after her fellow Fisk alumni Du Bois used African American spirituals as signposts for his groundbreaking tour through U.S. history and culture in The Souls of Black Folk, she also contributed to the APCM’s effort to translate religious hymns into Tshiluba by adding African American spirituals such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” to the Presbyterian hymnal. The translations by Edmiston and her colleagues insured that Tshiluba developed not only as the language of the colonial state, but also as a language that was shaped by the sacred texts of postbellum African American culture.