It is not unusual to credit certain individuals with having put and end to the Cold War. This essay discusses some of the most important of these people, focusing on their role in the Polish crisis of 1980–82: Mikhail Gorbachev, John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and Lane Kirkland. The author arrives at the conclusion that the question of the extent to which individuals can be held responsible for the victory over the Soviet Union is wrong, because it neglects underlying processes, such as the economic crisis in the Eastern Bloc and East–West contacts established during the détente of the 1970s.

This article is concerned with a closer investigation of the growing tendency for the state to intervene in contemporary party politics. It examines two trends. First, it looks more closely at the increased levels of regulation of party activity and behaviour in European democracies, discussing the empirical practice as well as the underlying normative paradigms of party regulation. Second, it examines the increased availability of public funding to political parties from a comparative perspective, while also exploring the motivations for its introduction in light of particular understandings of party democracy. It is argued that both dimensions constitute part of the way in which parties have strengthened their linkages with the state in recent years, and that parties, as a result of the increased involvement of the state in their internal affairs and external behaviour, have become increasingly defined as public utilities or semi-state agencies.

Most accounts of child language acquisition use as analytic tools adult-like syntactic categories and grammars with little concern for whether they are psychologically real for young children. However, when approached from a cognitive and functional theoretical perspective, recent research has demonstrated that children do not operate initially with such abstract linguistic entities, but instead on the basis of distributional learning and item-based, form-meaning constructions. Children construct more abstract, linguistic representations only gradually on the basis of the language they hear and use and they constrain these constructions to their appropriate ranges of use only gradually as well – again on the basis of linguistic experience in which frequency plays a key role. Results from empirical analyses of children’s early multiword utterances, the development of the transitive construction and certain types of errors are presented to illustrate this approach.

This paper summarises the development of pharmacology in the Graeco-Roman world. The number of medicinal plants recorded almost trebled between 400 BC (the Hippocratic writings) and AD 250 as the Greeks and Romans discovered more about the regions beyond the Mediterranean. The transfer of medicinal substances was almost entirely from East to West, and from South to North with Alexandria and, later, Rome as the major entrepôts. Two Greek writers were of great importance because they were translated into Syriac, Arabic, and Latin, among other languages, and set the agenda for subsequent work in pharmacology. The descriptions of medicinal substances by Pedanius Dioscorides (fl. AD 67) created a model that others followed down to the 17th century. Galen theorized about the way in which drugs worked, and his suggestion that one might correlate illnesses and drugs in terms of four degrees of intensity (a suggestion never followed through systematically by Galen himself) led in the Middle Ages to the classification and investigation of drugs in these terms.

This contribution presents a model of morphological productivity that allows some points of comparison with the concept of productivity in economics and in other disciplines. It is a two-step model: in the first step, degrees of productivity of morphological rules are established on the so-called syntagmatic axis of language, i.e. how a word is changed in its linear make-up, e.g. English boy becomes boy-s in the plural or is changed to boy-friend, boy-hood, boy-ish in word formation. In the second step, rule application is compared on the so-called paradigmatic axis with possibly competing productive rules, e.g. in adjective formation from nouns, suffixation with -ish (e.g. boy-ish), is compared with suffixations with -y (e.g. fier-y), -ly (e.g. friend-ly), -ic (e.g. syntact-ic), -ical (e.g. morpholog-ical). Then supportive psycholinguistic evidence is presented from online tests and first language acquisition, an area of crucial evidence for linguistic theories, since any constructs of a model must be learnable by children.

Party patronage is generally associated with social, economic and political underdevelopment, and is hence seen as largely irrelevant in the context of contemporary European politics. In this article, we argue to the contrary, proposing that patronage reappears on the stage of European politics as a critical organizational and governmental resource employed by political parties to enhance their standing as semi-state agencies of government. In order to illustrate our main contention, we first define party patronage, disentangling it from other notions of political particularism that are often used synonymously in the literature. Second, we provide a brief overview of the literature on the past and present of patronage practices in Europe, arguing that rather than declining, patronage is still likely to be a relevant feature of contemporary party politics in Europe. Finally, we analyse the role of party patronage in the light of recent developments in several European countries, identifying three distinct patterns of patronage practices in the region.

From the ninth to the 13th century, numerous works on pharmacology were written in Arabic in Eastern as well as in Western parts of the Islamic world. Starting from Galen and Dioscorides, the Islamic authors greatly improved on the Greek heritage. Among the theories they developed, two major trends stand out. The first trend emphasized medicinal degrees of primary qualities, and thus could lead to the promotion of mathematical rules. The second trend, on the contrary, focused on ‘the whole form’ of the substances, and opened the way to an experimental approach. Both these trends will continue in European pharmacology up to the Modern period.

France was one of the main supporters of Solidarność. The events in August and September 1980 immediately gained the interest of the French media. Trade unionists started to collaborate with their Polish colleagues, for instance by setting up exchange programs or by introducing Solidarność to international trade unions. Organisations of solidarity were founded and started to collect food, clothes and drugs. After the proclamation of Martial Law in Poland, this grew into a mass movement, involving many layers of the French population. Both workers and intellectuals were drawn to the idea of a ‘second left’: an alternative to the old and radical socialism.

The representation of language in the brain is one of the lively topics in recent cognitive neurosciences. The present paper argues that standard models of structures and mechanisms of the brain, which are essentially based on principles of activation spreading in neuronal nets and learning by synaptic strengthening through coincidental activation, cannot account for crucial properties of the Language Faculty and are misguided in central respects. In particular, the apparently elegant notion that working memory is just the activated state of long-term memory is shown to be incapable of accounting for structures and processes of language production and comprehension. Four types of problems are sketched that illustrate the impasses encountered by standard models of activation spreading.

The reaction of Western trade unions towards Solidarność was extremely varied, ranging from enthusiastic support to the denunciation of Solidarność as ‘counter-revolutionary’ and in the pay of the CIA. These views depended on political, institutional, and cultural determinants and had much to do with the national circumstances of particular unions and their representatives.

The purpose of this paper is (a) to point out some difficulties in the notion of European values, (b) nevertheless to present some ideas on what might be at least part of specific European traditions in bioethics, and (c) to outline a conceptual framework for further conceptual and empirical studies in this area. In European declarations and conventions, a number of important values are enshrined, including human dignity, integrity, freedoms, autonomy, health, safety and security, justice, prosperity, equity and equality, as well as solidarity. Since almost all of these values are also referred to in many other declarations, the notion of European values is problematic. Moreover, Europe is becoming increasingly multicultural due to immigration. If there is a particular European approach to ethics, based on European values, two possibilities suggest themselves. First, although the same terms referring to basic values also appear in, for instance, various UN declarations, these terms are interpreted in a particular way in Europe. Secondly, the difference lies in the ranking order between the values. In this paper, the second of these possibilities is explored. However, the notion of a ranking order can be interpreted in several ways, which are also discussed in the paper. The paper concludes with some remarks on the necessity of a global dialogue on ethical issues.

During the final decade of the 15th century and the first half of the 16th century, there were moves to harmonize pharmaceutical therapy in a number of areas of the Mediterranean and Central Europe. The most evident consequence was the appearance of books of compilations of simple and compound remedies specially selected from a wide range of earlier pharmacological literature. These compilations were set up as ‘standards’ by the authorities concerned with public health in many states. In theory, apothecaries were obliged to follow these ‘official’ instructions for preparing and dispensing drugs in order to ensure that the medicines prescribed by physicians were correctly made up and safe. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the persistence of Arabic drugs and recipes through the content of three of these handbooks between 1499 and 1618.

Bridging the gap between linguistic structure representations and neurocognitive representations is a difficult challenge. This article presents an outline of how a formally specified system of constituent structure grammar could be translated into a distributed hierarchy network of associated modules. A set of syntactic constituent rule units could be reinterpreted as complex neuronal modules, which interactively generate momentary binding associations. The iterating binding activity in the network corresponds to the syntactic structure representation of a given sentence.

In his huge ‘Pharmacognosy’ the universal scholar al-Bīrūnī (973–1048) equates, in 1116 paragraphs, about 4500 names of medicinal plants, and also foodstuffs, in 27 languages. Before the introduction of an internationally recognised botanical nomenclature this kind of literature served a practical need. Al-Bīrūnī’s work is now a mine of information for the linguist and also for world history. It testifies, for example, to the fact that the spoken Greek vernacular of the time had become already quite different from the classical language. Thus, the Byzantine emperors in their efforts to defend their state helped to conserve a cultivation of the humanities, which would have disappeared under Muslim rule. In the article on ‘capers’, al-Bīrūnī also offers a rare insight into a seemingly relaxed bit of small talk between Constantinus VII and an Arab ambassador.

In 2009 it will have been 400 years since Philip III expelled the Moriscos from Spain. It is therefore time to consider what remains of this tragedy in present-day Spanish collective memory. As opposed to the history as written by the victors it is necessary to also listen to the voice of the descendants of the victims, recovering their own historical memory. As a symbol of the reparation of an historical injustice the present-day Spanish state may grant the descendants of the expelled Moriscos the right to Spanish citizenship, as has already happened with the descendants of the Sephardim or Spanish Jews. In this article I consider four forms of memory of the expulsion of the Moriscos, embodied respectively in History, Literature, Art and Popular Culture. In the section on History, I analyze the works of Gregorio Marañón and Henry Kamen. Literary memory will be represented by the figure of the Morisco Ricote in Part II of Cervantes’ Quixote. For Art, I will look at a series of paintings commissioned by Philip III and at a painting competition held in Madrid under Philip IV. Popular culture is represented by the celebrations of ‘moros y cristianos,’ or ‘Moors and Christians,’ an old tradition that is still alive.

This article presents a brief analysis of the ways in which women’s healthcare was understood by medieval Jews, as well as how this sphere of medical activity was learned, practised and disseminated among western Jewish communities during the Middle Ages. It examines the paths of transmission and reception of theories and notions of female physiology, health and disease within the Hebrew medical corpus, and it analyses the influence of the Arabic and Latin traditions in this process. In connection with the understanding of women’s healthcare, it pays some attention to adornment and decoration of the body, as part of the technology that focused on intervening in the functioning of the body. It also discusses succinctly the process through which medical ideas and concepts, as well as healing practices, were received, and integrated or refused, by Jews.

Dante’s attitude towards Jews and Muslims in the Divine Comedy has been a controversial issue in literary studies of the medieval period. This article outlines the most central questions in this regard and argues that the treatment of the issue has often been misleading due to exaggeration and overstatement. Dante has been seen, respectively, as a summarizer of medieval culture and mentalities, as a medieval intellectual who was more open for non-Christian influences than his fellow Christians, and as a highly prejudiced conservative. In considering the constituents of Dante’s worldview, the article that follows argues that Dante should rather be seen as a medieval Christian whose cultural horizon was limited, whose political theory of world government was narrowly focused on a specific problem within European Christendom, and whose vision of redemption, although complex and original in various respects, could not but embrace all human beings as either righteous or corrupted Christians.

Over the past forty years our ideas about migration have changed dramatically. In fact, I know of hardly any other aspect of our daily lives that has seen such a complete reversal of appreciation. Until the 1970s, immigration was something to be proud of. Over the past few decades though, we seem to have forgotten that it is far better to live in a country that people are queuing to enter rather than one that they are desperate to leave. In fact, the modern migrant and the present-day smoker have something in common: both have become outcasts almost overnight. In the Netherlands, we even have coined a new term in order to express our dislike of the modern migrant: ‘fortune seeker’. That word seems somehow to make him or her different from, and less desirable than, the classic migrant of the past centuries.