AGE OF MONGOLIAN EMPIRE

T here is an enormous literature on the age of Mongolian Empire, that period extending from approximately the late 13th century, as prequel, through much of the 14th century, later in Russia, in which Mongols, their states, and successor states dominated the stage in much of the Old World. Unfortunately it is very uneven in quality, much of it in less common languages, and marred by an excessive concern for philological detail. There is also a notable lack of useful overviews, those available either being too popular, and inaccurate, or just plain silly, or so ponderous in detail as to be virtually unreadable by a general audience. Unfortunately, given the complexity of the field, with sources in so many languages, some of them still unpublished, and the decline that Mongolian studies has undergone in recent decades, in the United States in particular, this situation is unlikely to change any time soon.
The bibliographical survey of the field that follows is not even remotely complete, nor could it be given the limited space available for this article. My purpose in providing it is rather to offer a useful guide to what is available, including some items in less common languages, either because these items are extremely important, or because they are the only literature available in major areas of interest. Nonetheless, the main emphasis is on those works that are the most easily read and understood by the non-specialist.

White Fang-The Battle Of The Fangs

I
t was the she-wolf who had first caught the sound of men's voices and the whining of the sled-dogs; and it was the she-wolf who was first to spring away from the cornered man in his circle of dying flame. The pack had been loath to forego the kill it had hunted down, and it lingered for several minutes, making sure of the sounds, and then it, too, sprang a

White Fang-The she wolf

Breakfast eaten and the slim camp-outfit lashed to the sled, the men turned their backs on the cheery fire and launched out into the darkness. At once began to rise the cries that were fiercely sad - cries that called through the darkness and cold to one another and answered back. Conversation ceased. Daylight came at nine o'clock. At midday the sky to the south warmed to rose-colour, and marked where the bulge of the earth intervened between the meridian sun and the northern world. But the rose-colour swiftly faded. The grey light of day that remained lasted until three o'clock, when it, too, faded, and the pall of the Arctic night descended upon the lone and silent land.

White Fang-The Hunger Cry

The day began auspiciously. They had lost no dogs during the night, and they swung out upon the trail and into the silence, the darkness, and the cold with spirits that were fairly light. Bill seemed to have forgotten his forebodings of the previous night, and even waxed facetious with the dogs when, at midday, they overturned the sled on a bad piece of trail. It was an awkward mix-up. The sled was upside down and jammed between a tree-trunk and a huge rock, and they were forced to unharness the dogs in order to straighten out the tangle. The two men were bent over the sled and trying to right it, when Henry observed One Ear sidling away.

White Fang-The Trail Of The Meat

Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness - a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen- hearted Northland Wild.

The "Sin" of Galileo

Now I was being told that another deep aspect of nature was also unified with space and time -- the fact that there are fermions and bosons. My friends told me this, and the equations said the same thing. But neither friends nor equations told me what it meant. I was missing the idea, the conception of the thing. Something in my understanding of space and time, of gravity and of what it meant to be a fermion or boson, should deepen as a result of this unification. It should not just be math -- my very conception of nature should change... Whereas the math worked, it didn't lead to any conceptual leaps.
Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next [Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006 p.94, 96]

---

ancient pilosophy for children

Lao-Tsu, the founder of Taoism

It is difficult to separate out philosophy (the love of wisdom) from religion. It is also hard to separate philosophy from science and mathematics. All of these are parts of people's search to make order out of nature: for the victory of nomos over physis. They are people trying to make sense out of the things that they see happening.

socrates

Socrates
(469-399 B.C.E.)

Life and Teachings . . Defining Piety . . Methods / Aims . . Civil Obedience . . Knowing Virtue Bibliography Internet Sources

In his use of critical reasoning, by his unwavering commitment to truth, and through the vivid example of his own life, fifth-century Athenian Socrates set the standard for all subsequent Western philosophy. Since he left no literary legacy of his own, we are dependent upon contemporary writers like Aristophanes and Xenophon for our information about his life and work. As a pupil of Archelaus during his youth, Socrates showed a great deal of interest in the scientific theories of Anaxagoras, but he later abandoned inquiries into the physical world for a dedicated investigation of the development of moral character

The Ancient Greek Pilosophy

The Ancient Greek philosophers have played a pivotal role in the shaping of the western philosophical tradition. This article surveys the seminal works and ideas of key figures in the Ancient Greek philosophical tradition from the Presocratics to the Neoplatonists. It highlights their main philosophical concerns and the evolution in their thought from the sixth century BCE to the sixth century CE.