The Authority of The Word in St. John's Gospel: Charismatic Speech, Narrative Text, Logocentric Metaphysics

Few topics are as suited for a celebration of Walter Ong's intellectual accomplishment as the Logos, for the Word in its kaleidoscopic manifestations and intriguing transformations constitutes the center of his lifelong scholarly attention. A masterful practitioner of words himself, he has repatterned the entire paradigm of Logos and logoi toward a new synthesis, the relevance of which extends beyond the broad range of the humanities and social sciences to the so-called hard sciences that shape our technocratic world. The Logos of the fourth gospel has served as a forceful intellectual stimulus both in biblical studies and in philosophical, theological deliberations on language and metaphysics. We wish here to pursue the study of the Logos in these two areas of biblical exegesis and philosophical, theological reflection. Because Ong's work has awakened sensibilities that are all too often left dormant in academia, it is incumbent on us to honor him by thinking through the issue of the Logos in a novel manner

The history of the closure of biblical texts

Mindful of the power of media in the ancient and medieval past, in modernity and in current biblical scholarship, this paper attempts an overview of the history of the biblical texts from their oral and papyrological beginnings all the way to their triumphant apotheosis in print culture. In macrohistorical perspectives, a trajectory is observable that runs from scribal multiformity, verbal polyvalency, and oral, memorial sensibilities toward an increasing chirographic control over the material surface of biblical texts, culminating in the autosemantic print authority of the Bible.Issue title: Oral Tradition in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Oral tradition in Bible and New Testament studies

Modern biblical scholarship is largely a child of the high tech of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. It developed its basic assumptions about and approaches to biblical texts in working with the print Bible, the first major, mechanically constructed book in early modernity. For this reason, the historical, critical scholarship of the Bible has risked laboring under a cultural anachronism, projecting modernity's communications culture upon the ancient media world.Not

The case of the Gospels : Memory's desire and the limits of historical criticism

Conceivably, insight into a mnemonic craft of thought that stored much that was considered worthy of remembering in iconic style may cast an illuminating light on our present media situation, which--in part at least--is characterized by an extreme inundation of images.Not

Mechanisms, functions and ecology of colour vision in the honeybee.

notes: PMCID: PMC4035557types: Journal Article© The Author(s) 2014.This is an open access article that is freely available in ORE or from Springerlink.com. Please cite the published version available at: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00359-014-0915-1Research in the honeybee has laid the foundations for our understanding of insect colour vision. The trichromatic colour vision of honeybees shares fundamental properties with primate and human colour perception, such as colour constancy, colour opponency, segregation of colour and brightness coding. Laborious efforts to reconstruct the colour vision pathway in the honeybee have provided detailed descriptions of neural connectivity and the properties of photoreceptors and interneurons in the optic lobes of the bee brain. The modelling of colour perception advanced with the establishment of colour discrimination models that were based on experimental data, the Colour-Opponent Coding and Receptor Noise-Limited models, which are important tools for the quantitative assessment of bee colour vision and colour-guided behaviours. Major insights into the visual ecology of bees have been gained combining behavioural experiments and quantitative modelling, and asking how bee vision has influenced the evolution of flower colours and patterns. Recently research has focussed on the discrimination and categorisation of coloured patterns, colourful scenes and various other groupings of coloured stimuli, highlighting the bees' behavioural flexibility. The identification of perceptual mechanisms remains of fundamental importance for the interpretation of their learning strategies and performance in diverse experimental tasks.Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC

Plant ecology meets animal cognition: impacts of animal memory on seed dispersal

We propose that an understanding of animal learning and memory is critical to predicting the impacts of animals on plant populations through processes such as seed dispersal, pollination and herbivory. Focussing on endozoochory, we review the evidence that animal memory plays a role in seed dispersal, and present a model which allows us to explore the fundamental consequences of memory for this process. We demonstrate that decision-making by animals based on their previous experiences has the potential to determine which plants are visited, which fruits are selected to be eaten from the plant and where seeds are subsequently deposited, as well as being an important determinant of animal survival. Collectively, these results suggest that the impact of animal learning and memory on seed dispersal is likely to be extremely important, although to date our understanding of these processes suffers from a conspicuous lack of empirical support. This is partly because of the difficulty of conducting appropriate experiments but is also the result of limited interaction between plant ecologists and those who work on animal cognition

The Passion in Mark : studies on Mark 14-16

Philadelphiaxvii,203 p.; 23 c