Ukázky textů k překladu z anglického jazyka

1. Jacob Milgrom: Leviticus. A Book of Ritual and Ethics

         Values are what Leviticus is all about. They pervade every chapter and almost every verse. Many may be surprised to read this, since the dominant view of Leviticus is that it consists only of rituals, such as sacrifices and impurities. This, too, is true: Leviticus does discuss rituals. However, underlying the rituals, the careful reader will find an intricate web of values that purports to model how we should relate to God and to one another.

         Anthropology has taught us that when a society wishes to express and preserve its basic values, it ensconces them in rituals. How logical! Words fall from our lips like the dead leaves of autumn, but rituals endure with repetition. They are visual and participatory. They embed themselves in memory at a young age, reinforced with each enactment.

         To be sure, when rituals fail to concretize our theological commitment they become physical oddities, superstitions, or small idolatries. Ritual is the poetry of religion that leads us to a moment of transcendence. When a ritual fails because it either lacks content or is misleading, it loses its efficacy and its purpose. A ritual must signify something beyond itself, whose attainment enhances the meaning and value of life. This, I submit, is the quintessence and achievement of Leviticus. 

2. G. E. R. Lloyd, Science, Folklore and Ideology. Studies in the Life Sciences in Ancient Greece

The essays in this book are self-contained but interconnected studies of issues concerned with the development of the life sciences in ancient Greece. The establishment of science in Greece depended importantly on marking out the subject-matter, aims and methods of rational inquiry from popular or traditional patterns of thought. But although many Greek scientists self-consciously contrast their own investigations with other, especially traditional, systems of belief, they nevertheless often remain deeply influenced by such beliefs and in some cases may appear to us to do little more than attempt some rationalisation of their basis. Many of those who explicitly discuss methodological and epistemological questions emphasise the need to reject all unexamined assumptions and to found their knowledge of the physical world on the secure basis of reason, experience or some combination of the two. But that did not prevent large segments of popular belief from being incorporated into would-be scientific systems – not that those systems are otherwise devoid of genuine grounds for claiming to be in some sense scientific. Ancient science is from the beginning strongly marked by the interplay between, on the one hand, the assimilation of popular assumptions, and, on the other, their critical analysis, exposure and rejection, and this continues to be a feature of science to the end of antiquity and beyond. This interaction provides the first major unifying theme of these studies.

3. Mary Carruthers: The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture

         When we think of our highest creative power, we think invariably of the imagination. “Great imagination, profound intuition,” we say: this is our highest mark for intellectual achievement, even in sciences. The memory, in contrast, is devoid of intellect: just memorization, not real thought or true learning.

         We make such judgements because we have been formed in a post-Romantic, post-Freudian world, in which imagination has been identified with a mental unconscious of great, even dangerous, creative power. Consequently, when they look at the Middle Ages, modern scholars are often disappointed by the apparently lowly, working-day status accorded to imagination in medieval psychology. Ancient and medieval people reserved their awe for memory. Their greatest geniuses they describe as people of superior memories, they boast unashamedly of their prowess in that faculty, and they regard it as a mark of superior moral character as well as intellect.

         Because of this great change in the relative status of imagination and memory, many moderns have concluded that medieval people did not value originality or creativity. We are simply looking in the wrong place. We should instead examine the role of memory in their intellectual and cultural lives, and the values which they attached to it, for there we will get a firmer understanding of what we now call creative activity.

4. Conflict in Medieval Europe: Changing perspectives on Society and Culture

         A question that recurrently perplexes medievalists is the degree to which the past reality that is our subject is explicable in terms of concepts and categories appropriate to our present. Is the deep past in essence familiar, and meaningfully and adequately comprehensible in terms of a set of late-modern analytical constructs? Or is it essentially different, and so unlike the present that its comprehension requires a thorough reassessment and recasting of that conceptual framework? Medievalists, much like social anthropologists though for different reasons, have oscillated between those two intuitive points of departure for adequate comprehension of our subject and population – that is, between the presumptive confidence and a presumptive scepticism regarding the adequacy of our concepts and categories for meaningfully understanding them.

         An especially important subject affected by such considerations is conflict in medieval Europe. In the present book, we define conflict broadly and inclusively to mean several kinds of interpersonal or intergroup tension, and several modes of managing that tension. One type of such tension is dispute, which may be specified as the phase of conflict which is articulated as a claim, between two or more parties, concerning some specific subject matter. But our focus extends beyond disputing, to encompass threats, promises, negotiation, ritual, use of force, and the associated range of emotions, all of which may precede, accompany, follow, or indeed take the place of, disputing.

5. Kozulin, A.: Psychological tool

         The concept of the psychological tool arose first by analogy with the material tool that serves as a mediator between the human hand and the object of action. The change in material tools has a reciprocal effect on the entire life of the individual: The entire existence of an Australian aborigine depends on his boomeranging - take the boomerang away from the aborigine, make him a farmer, then out of necessity he will have to completely change his lifestyle, his habits, his entire way of thinking, his entire nature.

         Like material tools, psychological tools are artificial formations. By their nature, both are social. However, whereas material tools are aimed at the control of processes in nature, psychological tools master the natural behavior and cognitive processes of the individual. Unlike material tools, which serve as conductors of human activity aimed at external objects, psychological tools are internally oriented, transforming the inner, natural psychological processes into higher mental functions. In their external form, psychological tools are symbolic artifacts such as signs, symbols, languages, formulae, and graphic devices. For example, if an elementary, natural memorizing effort directly connects event A with event B, then a higher function of memory replaces this direct connection by two others: A to X and X to B, where X is an artificial psychological tool, such as a knot on a string, a written note, or a mnemonic scheme. This transition from natural cultural functions occurs both historically and in individual development.