The growth of anti-mathematics sentiment at the beginning of the 19th century

At the threshold of the nineteenth century, the collapse of the salons, the new gestalten of education, a new role of literature and the occurrence of the pre-romantic sensibility resulted in a remarkable increase of the yawning gap between the scientific communities and literary men. A prejudice against mathematics gave a new lease of life to the reintroduced belief that pursuing mathematics corrupts hearts and cools human imagination.

The aim of the present paper is to restore the epistemic and ideological background that allows one to understand the terms of the debate and to identify opposing ideas. With this end in view, the paper focuses on the cultural and philosophical opinions of François-René de Chateaubriand whose The Genius of Christianity (1802) extremely polarizes the attitudes of supporters and opponents towards mathematical thinking and abilities.

“Tormentone” or “the recurrence of the identical”

“Tormentone”, an extreme torture, is a typically Italian word describing a catchphrase, a running gag, an earworm, a summer hit or anything related with reiteration accentuated by the various media: advertisement jingles, journalists’ abusive metaphors, viral content on the internet. In this paper we attempt to understand if the audience is aware of this occurrence and willingly accepts being “tortured”, applying some theories about television and seriality proposed by Umberto Eco.

Augustine’s critic of classical education from the New Rhetoric’s perspective

This paper shouldn’t be considered as a specialized study on Augustinian texts. Its ambition is much limited: to show how the New Rhetoric offers a frame which helps to supplely address the competition between argumentative configurations emerging from different socio-cultural backgrounds. Saint Augustine’s Confessions, and in particular the critique of classical education which was the author’s own education, allows us examine 4 aspects which seem intimately intertwined in the Perelman’s system: (a) the relation between epideictic and education (as both reinforce the adhesion to fundamental values in a given society), (b) the socio-historically situated character of those values and (c) the interest of considering the New Rhetoric as a philosophical project?

The word fresh in French and Czech: A contrastive analysis of corpora in a culinary perspective

The main goal of this paper is to compare a sample of neological loanwords from the gastronomic sector in French and Czech. The idea of the comparative conception mentioned in the title of the article is based on the international project entitled “EmpNéo” (Neological Loanwords), which aims to compare the diffusion of neological loanwords in various languages. In this study, we would like to focus on the word fresh and its perception in Czech and French. Our aim is to find out if this word is known to the general public or, on the contrary, it works as an argotic expression, which is only known to a limited audience. To answer this question, we analyzed the different kinds of corpus and also studied in detail the occurrence of this word in the press.

Speech management: a metadiscursive function

Metadiscourse (MD) is the unique property of human language to codify messages on language itself. It reveals the author’s presence in reference to speech management and other interventions or comments with which the author either illustrates their opinion on the subject or leads the interlocutor/reader to an understanding of their message. MD was traditionally distinguished from propositional material and considered “material not belonging to the object of discourse”. This paper argues that MD not only supports propositional content, but represents the crucial means by which the latter is perceived by the interlocutor/reader. It also includes a presentation of Ädel’s so-called reflexive model, which avoids the dichotomy between proposition and MD, takes both the author and their interlocutor/reader into consideration, and appropriately highlights the reflexivity through which the importance of the author’s awareness of the text is brought into focus. The empirical part includes the illustration of the metadiscursive functions of the discourse marker cioè.