This article explores some of the issues that prevent the existence of a more diverse canon in the field of world literature. It discusses extra-literary issues that have been effectively displaced onto the question of literary quality and outlines some of the concrete hurdles that face minority literatures, with reference to the literature of modern East Asia (China, Korea and Japan). The final section examines Pak Kyongni’s Land (1969–1994), a novel virtually unknown outside of Korea but revered there as the national epic. The discussion of a work that is regarded as ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’ by one nation yet remains practically unknown to the world will bring to the fore issues of ranking and status produced by the ‘worldification’ of literatures. In the process, it will consider some of the dynamics between nationality and universality, the relations between literature and nation, and what it means for literatures to be in dialogue when literatures and literary histories have been defined along national lines.

This paper describes Tarski’s project of rehabilitating the notion of truth, previously considered dubious by many philosophers. The project was realized by providing a formal truth definition, which does not employ any problematic concept.

The paper explores the notion of cultural dialogue in terms of a specific application: the contributions made by the sitar music of the Indian musician Ravi Shankar to the setting up of a conversation between the musical traditions of North India and their reception and partial assimilation by largely Western audiences. A survey of Shankar’s career, contextualized by a more general discussion of the problems and challenges encountered in bringing the musical conventions of one tradition into conversation with the musical expectations and assumptions of another culture leads to the conclusion that what Shankar achieved, over a lifetime of creativity and musical fusion, was a partial success: on the one hand, it disseminated the auratic aspects of this musical tradition to a wide global audience; but on the other, it did so at the cost measured by purists in terms of a simplification or dilution of the music as practised in its original cultural contexts.

This paper summarizes logical investigations in Poland in the years 1945–1975 conducted by logicians living and working in the country. We concentrate on mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics. Thus, we omit works in semantics (except logical model theory) and methodology of science; that is, other branches of general logic (logic sensu largo). We also skip investigations into the history of logic, one of the favorites of Polish logicians, except for mentioning reconstructions of some earlier systems. We also try to outline sociological circumstances relevant for the development of logic after the Second World War.