This article addresses the question whether and how literary documents can be used to further our understanding of a number of key issues on the agenda of the philosophy of biology such as "complexity" and "reductionism". Kant already granted a certain respectability to aesthetical experiences of nature in his third Critique. Subsequently, the philosophical movement known as phenomenology often...

The creators of the Hindu scriptures known as the Brahmaand Bhāgavatapurāṇas lavished a great amount of descriptive detail on mythical and ‘mythologised’ places where important discourses were enunciated: the Naimiṣa forest, Mt Meru, Kurukṣetra, and Ānanda on the banks of the Ganges. At first glance this might appear to be idle expression of literary virtuosity, but I suggest that this careful ...

We consider the problem of automatically inferring latent character types in a collection of 15,099 English novels published between 1700 and 1899. Unlike prior work in which character types are assumed responsible for probabilistically generating all text associated with a character, we introduce a model that employs multiple effects to account for the influence of extra-linguistic information...

This article describes a joint research work between Monash University and the University of Alicante, where software originally meant for plagiarism and copy detection in academic works is successfully applied to perform comparative analysis of di erent editions of literary works. The experiments were performed with Spanish texts from the Miguel de Cervantes digital library. The results have p...

There were two forms of nativism1 during the Tokugawa period. The first was literary in orientation. Literary nativists undertook exhaustive and comprehensive studies of Japan’s classical literature, and both poetry and prose works were central to their scholarship. An array of luminary intellects mostly from the eighteenth century made their mark on this form of nativism, including Keichū (164...

pursuing literary studies based on chaos theory: Turbulent Mirror (Briggs and Peta) and Chaos: Making a New Science (Gleick), two monographs aimed at the non-specialist; Does God Play Dice? (Stewart); The Beauty of Fractals: Images of Complex Dynamical Systems (Peitgen-Richter), a visually amazing scientific treatise; and Computers, Pattern, Chaos and Beauty: Graphics from an Unseen World (Pick...

Translation of a literary text is a difficult task, for understanding literature requires knowledge of various linguistic levels of a literary text in addition to strategies and methods of translation. To this should still be added cognitive-based translation training which helps practitioners preserve the aesthetic aspects of a literary text. Focusing on short story as a genre with both ...