Tres buenas mujeres

“A menudo se reniega de los maestros supremos; se rebela uno contra ellos; se enumeran sus defectos; se los acusa de ser aburridos, de una obra demasiado extensa, de extravagancia, de mal gusto, al tiempo que se los saquea, engalanándose con plumas ajenas; pero en vano nos debatimos bajo su yugo. Todo se tiñe de sus colores; por doquier encontramos sus huellas; inventan palabras y nombres que van a enriquecer el vocabulario general de los pueblos; sus expresiones se convierten en proverbiales, sus personajes ficticios se truecan en personajes reales, que tienen herederos y linaje. Abren horizontes de donde brotan haces de luz; siembran ideas, gérmenes de otras mil; proporcionan motivos de inspiración, temas, estilos a todas las artes: sus obras son las minas o las entrañas del espíritu humano” (François de Chateaubriand: Memorias de ultratumba, libro XII, capítulo I, 1822).&nbsp

Stories as personal coaching philosophy

The importance of coaches developing and articulating a personal coaching philosophy which encapsulates their values and beliefs is widely recognised. Yet it is also acknowledged that many coaches resist what appears an abstract task or find it to be of limited use in their day-to-day practice. In this paper we explore the potential of an alternative approach to developing and articulating a personal coaching philosophy: storytelling. Following a discussion of the potential of stories, we present a story written by one coach which expresses her personal philosophy in a way that is firmly rooted in her coaching practice. Storytelling approaches, we suggest, can reveal the connections between abstract/general philosophy and the personal embodied experience of coaching. We reflect on the possibilities and problems of using stories as philosophy and offer some suggestions for how coaches may be supported in developing their coaching philosophy through storytelling

A Vaidade de Montaigne

Problematizando a confissão de Montaigne sobre a vaidade que encontra em si mesmo, na Apologia de Raymond Sebond, tentamos defender a hipótese de estarmos diante de uma estratégia retórica, possivelmente destinada a ocultar posição cética do autor perante os costumes religiosos

Love and history

In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the historicity of love requires an appreciation of the irreplaceability of the beloved. I do this through a consideration of ideas that were first put forward by Robert Kraut in “Love De Re” (1986). I also evaluate Amelie Rorty's criticisms of Kraut's thesis in “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds” (1986). I argue that Rorty fundamentally misunderstands Kraut's Kripkean analogy, and I go on to criticize her claim that concern over the proper object of love should be best understood as a concern over constancy. This leads me to an elaboration of the distinct senses in which love can be seen as historical. I end with a further defense of the irreplaceability of the beloved and a discussion of the relevance of recent debates over the importance of personal identity for an adequate account of the historical dimension of lov

Measurement of the dynamical dipolar coupling in a pair of magnetic nano-disks using a Ferromagnetic Resonance Force Microscope

International audienceWe perform an extensive experimental spectroscopic study of the collective spin-wave dynamics occurring in a pair of magnetic nano-disks coupled by the magneto-dipolar interaction. For this, we take advantage of the stray field gradient produced by the magnetic tip of a ferromagnetic resonance force microscope (f-MRFM) to continuously tune and detune the relative resonance frequencies between two adjacent nano-objects. This reveals the anti-crossing and hybridization of the spin-wave modes in the pair of disks. At the exact tuning, the measured frequency splitting between the binding and anti-binding modes precisely corresponds to the strength of the dynamical dipolar coupling $\Omega$. This accurate f-MRFM determination of $\Omega$ is measured as a function of the separation between the nano-disks. It agrees quantitatively with calculations of the expected dynamical magneto-dipolar interaction in our sample

"Allowing it to speak out of him": The Heterobiographies of David Malouf, Antonio Tabucchi and Marguerite Yourcenar

Under true pretences We know very little about the life of Ovid, and it is this absence of fact that has made him useful as the central figure of my narrative and allowed me the liberty of free invention, since what I wanted to write was neither historical novel nor biography, but a fiction with its roots in possible event. Thus starts the Afterword of David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life, a novel in which the poet Ovid, exiled from Rome, narrates his experience in the border outpost of Tomis, near the delta of the Danube on the Black Sea. ‘Relegated’ among the Getae at the edges of the Empire and ‘expelled form the confines of [the] Latin tongue’ (IL 26), this glittering and cynical poet undergoes a series of changes or metamorphoses. Initially pining for Rome and its sophisticated, complex language, he learns to overcome his hostility towards the barbarous people and their language, but when he discovers a wild Child that had been raised by the wolves in the forest and captures him with the intention of teaching him to speak and to be human, he soon realises that he himself has to learn from the Child another language, based not on symbolization and arbitrary convention but on an intuitive identity with things, on becoming the things signified in silence. After the death of the village’s elderly chief, which the villagers blame on the child’s demonic powers, the poet and the Child escape north across the frozen river. Ovid’s death is the poet’s final transformation, perhaps a literal metamorphosis like the ones described in Ovid’s great poem. Malouf’s Afterword concludes: My purpose was to make this glib fabulist of ‘the changes’ live out in reality what had been, in his previous existence, merely the occasion for dazzling literary display. (IL 154) Is Malouf’s novel then a fantasy inspired by ‘mere’ literary dazzle or, as ‘a fiction with its roots in possible event’, is it a work that, while not claiming to the factual accuracy of biography or the broad reliability of the historical background of a historical novel, can however still claim to be rooted in verisimilitude, in events that, although not documented, are nevertheless possible, as would be the case with a realist novel, or in Aristotelian poetics? The Afterword thematizes a tension between the desire to anchor the novel to history and the desire to free Ovid from historical necessity. How can Ovid live out ‘in reality’ the metamorphoses to which he is subjected, if metamorphoses are but the occasion for ‘literary display’? This tension also defines, more widely, the large number of novels written as if they were the autobiographies of historical personages, novels that gesture towards historical factuality and literary fictionality, towards ‘truth’ and invention, and exist under the sign of an essential structural displacement (the ‘autobiography’ is written by another) that brings to the foreground structural, narrative, and ethical issues also central to autobiography itself. (First paragraphs of submitted version