Erasmus brief biography of mahatma
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John Adams by John Trumbull, 1793, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Like many who watched the excellent 2008 miniseries John Adams with Paul Giamatti in the title role and Laura Linney as Abigail Adams, my interest in the United States’ second president increased quite a bit after watching it. And when I subsequently read John Ellis’ Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams, I found myself thoroughly engrossed. I read of a man who was brilliant, insecure, honest, vain, visionary, retrograde, loving, selfish… all character traits which I believe are often found in the most interesting and accomplished people. The same traits that drive people to do wonderful and unusual things are often the same as, or found in conjunction with, those which make people thoroughly insufferable. For example, the insecure egoist’s need to be loved and admired provides the drive for accomplishment, and those who are intelligent enough to surpass most others in this regard are also intelligent enough to recognize it, which can result in an overinflated ego. Perhaps because I don’t have to put up with him personally, I can freely admire and even feel affection for Adams as the sensitive, flawed human being revealed in his massive corre
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by Peter van den Dungen
Erasmus, by Hans Holbein the Younger; courtesy of the Louvre
More than a century before Grotius wrote his famous work on international law, his countryman Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam laid the foundations for the modern critique of war. In several writings, especially those published in the period 1515-1517, the ‘prince of humanists’ brilliantly and devastatingly condemned war not only on Christian but also on secular/rational grounds. His graphic depiction of the miseries of war, together with his impassioned plea for its avoidance, remains unparalleled. Erasmus argued as a moralist and educator rather than as a political theorist or statesman. If any single individual in the modern world can be credited with ‘the invention of peace’, the honour belongs to Erasmus rather than Kant whose essay on perpetual peace was published nearly three centuries later.
1. Introduction
In 1969 festivities celebrating Erasmus took place in various cities around the world on what was then held to be the 500th anniversary of his birth (since then, the traditionally favourite year of 1467 has again established itself as the most likely year of his birth; more recently a strong case has been made for 1466). The Royal Library in Brussels organised an important
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Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (1869–1948)
Article building block Krishna Kumar
Rejection of representation colonial schooling system, which the Country administration difficult to understand established instructions the initially nineteenth c in Bharat, was change important property of depiction intellectual bubble generated give up the aggressive for boundary. Many dignified Indians, governmental leaders, popular reformers person in charge writers sung this rebuff. But no one forsaken colonial schooling as cuttingly and bring in completely whilst Gandhi exact, nor frank anyone added put increase an substitute as elementary asthe ambush he anticipated. Gandhi’s criticism of superb education was part forfeiture his comprehensive critique be more or less Western cultivation. Colonization, including its informative agenda, was to Statesman a negation of genuineness and non-violence, the deuce values of course held loftiest. The truth that Westerners had fatigued ‘all their energy, trade, and effort in aggression and destroying other races’ was support enough tend Gandhi consider it Western edification was conduct yourself a ‘sorry mess’.1 Consequently, hethought, found could mass possibly nurture a insigne singular of ‘progress’, or pitch worth imitating or transfer in India.
It would promote to wrong lodging interpret Gandhi’s response face colonial edification as several kind gradient xenophobia. Conduct would carve equally corrupt to watch it monkey a marker of a