Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-historischen Klasse

The contributions collected in this volume deal with the complex history of the Indian deity Viṣṇu-Nārāyana. This conception of God evolved in various traditions in India, especially in South India, during the first millennium CE. The history of this development is reconstructed here by various means, including philological exegesis, the history of ideas, and iconographic evidence. In their respective discussions, the contributors examine a range of textual material in Sanskrit, Tamil, and...

The book contextualizes and analyzes the unknown or unpublished writings of the Carniolan-Slovenian Jesuit missionary Marcus Antonius Kappus (1657–1717). He is the first Carniolan known to have been sent as a Jesuit missionary to the Spanish Viceroyalty of “Nueva España” in North America. Kappus originally applied to serve as a missionary in the Orient, but was selected and sent to Sonora in Mexico, bordering today with the federal state of Arizona in the United States of America, instead. The...

We are currently confronted with disconcerting signs of polarization in the societies of many democratic countries of North America and Europe. The storm on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, is only the tip of the iceberg of such developments. Conflicts are manifest between the generations and the genders, between ethnic groups in individual countries and between religious denominations, between migrants and the residents of countries, between the so-called elite and the average citizens,...

"Voices from the Steppe" presents 101 sources on the history of the Kazakh Steppe and Russia’s South Urals region from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It offers a range of texts—local histories, songs, poems, letters, memoirs, religious-legal writings, and official documents—that shed light on politics, culture, spirituality, economic activities, gender, and daily life in one of the world’s great grasslands. The volume foregrounds the voices and experiences of ethnic non-Russians in...

The differentiation of derivation and inflection within morphology is a classical and always challenging topos of linguistics – both for individual languages and from a contrastive perspective. With ten recent contributions from different disciplines (language history, variational linguistics, language acquisition research), but also from different methodological perspectives of various disciplines (e.g. Arabic studies, Finno-Ugric studies, German studies, Romance studies), this edited volume...

The mantra known as Gāyatrī or Sāvitrī (Ṛgveda III 62.10) is one of the most frequently recited texts of mankind. Over the course of time it has not only been personified as the mother of the Vedas – the oldest religious literature of South Asia –, but has even come to be venerated as a goddess. Today many consider it the most important, most efficacious, or holiest mantra of all. In "Gāyatrī: Mantra and Mother of the Vedas", Dominik A. Haas reconstructs the history of the Gāyatrī-Mantra for...

Ausgehend von einer bibliographischen Rekonstruktion untersucht das Buch die Hofbibliothek der Qongrat-Dynastie von Choresm. Die Bibliothek wurde bei der Eroberung des Khanats Chiwa durch russische Truppen im Jahr 1873 als Kriegstrophäe beschlagnahmt und in die russische Hauptstadt St. Petersburg verbracht. Das Buch besteht aus zwei Teilen: Der erste Teil befasst sich mit dem Wesen und der Funktionsweise dieser Hofbibliothek, dem politischen, sozialen und kulturellen Hintergründen der...

This book brings together studies from a variety of different fields in an attempt to illuminate current multidisciplinary comparative research on ethno-cultural diversity in the Balkan and the Caucasus regions. The articles cover a wide variety of topics and include studies mapping the ethnic identity, archaeology and linguistics of these two very diverse geographical areas. Particular attention is paid to aspects of ethnic identity, migration and contact between the different ethnic groups...

The ten contributions to this collected volume are based on papers that were presented at the symposium “Transmission and Tradition – The Meaning and the Role of ‘Fragments’ in Indian Philosophy,” which was held at Shinshu University in Matsumoto, Japan, as an Austrian–Japanese cooperation. Drawing on the rich intertextuality of premodern Indian intellectual culture, the papers conduct in-depth investigations into philological and historical problems raised by textual ‘fragments’, by passages...

This volume provides the first modern translation of the recently found original Sanskrit text of Dharmakīrti’s Hetubindu (ca. 600 CE), the first Indian work of pure logic. The concise definitions and explanations of the central terms are enriched by several extensive digressions, such as on the pervasion (vyāpti) in the proof of momentariness of entities, with his conceptions of causality, and on the nature of non-perception or negative cognition (anupalabdhi), as well as by the supplement of...

In July 2018 the 64th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (RAI) and the 12th Melammu Symposium were held together in Innsbruck. The topic of the conference, “The Intellectual Heritage of the Ancient Near East”, represented one of the main scientific objectives of the Melammu Project and aimed to investigate the continuity, transformation, diffusion and legacy of Ancient Near Eastern cultures from the third millennium BCE until the rise of Islam and beyond. The conference, hosting more than...