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...in 1931. After graduating in 1934, Turing was elected to a fellowship at King’s College in recognition of his research in probability theory. In 1936 Turing’s seminal paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem [Decision Problem] was recommended for publication by the American......

On Conoids and Spheroids deals with determining the volumes of the segments of solids formed by the revolution of a conic section (circle, ellipse, parabola, or hyperbola) about its axis. In modern terms, these are problems of integration. (See calculus.) On Spirals develops many properties of tangents to, and areas associated with, the spiral of Archimedes—i.e., the locus......

...a certain number of Soviet writings on philosophy and produced his own account of dialectical materialism, of which the best-known portions are those entitled “On Practice” and “On Contradiction.” More important, Mao produced the major works that synthesized his own experience of revolutionary struggle and his vision of how the revolution should be carried forward in...

Modern penology dates from the publication of Cesare Beccaria’s pamphlet on Crimes and Punishments in 1764. This represented a school of doctrine, born of the new humanitarian impulse of the 18th century, with which Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu in France and Jeremy Bentham in England were associated. This, which came afterwards to be known as the classical school,...

The first theoretical work on the movement, On Cubism, by the French painters Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, was published in 1912. It was argued that geometric and mathematical principles of general validity could be deduced from the style. An exhibition in the same year represented all Cubism’s adherents except the two creators. The exhibition was called the Section d’Or...

...is, they can be determined. Some of the propositions can be viewed as geometry exercises to determine if a figure is constructible by Euclidean means. On Divisions (of figures)—restored and edited in 1915 from extant Arabic and Latin versions—deals with problems of dividing a given figure by one or more straight lines into......

...also wrote inventive and complex detective novels; Still Dead (1934) is generally considered the best among them. His version of the New Testament appeared in 1945. His Old Testament and On Englishing the Bible, a penetrating examination of the problems of a translator, were published in 1949. These were followed by his New Testament Commentaries in 1953, 1954, and 1956....

...most notably films about the early history of Quebec. Arcand had been an outspoken leftist since he was a young man, and in 1970 he made On est au coton (Cotton Mill, Treadmill), an exposé of the textile industry that was so controversial that it was banned by the NFB. He soon moved into feature films, beginning with La....

Of central importance in establishing this argument is Brecht’s essay “On Experimental Theatre” (1940), in which he reviews the work of Vakhtangov, Meyerhold, Antoine, Reinhardt, Okhlopkov, Stanislavsky, Jessner, and other Expressionists. Brecht traces through the modern theatre the two lines running from Naturalism and Expressionism. Naturalism he sees as the “assimila...

There was much seriousness and occasionally some pedantry in early dialogues in several literatures. The dialogues of Bardesanes (154–222) in Syriac, rendered into English as On Fate, are on the subject of the laws of the country. A hundred years earlier, Lucian, who was also Syrian, proved himself a master of flowing and ironical Greek prose in his satirical dialogues. The Italian.....

...due primarily to the commentaries, which earned him the title “the expositor,” but in the Middle Ages he was better known for his original writings. The most important of these are On Fate, in which he defends free will against the Stoic doctrine of necessity, or predetermined human action; and On the Soul, in which he draws upon Aristotle’s doctrine of the so...

Charles Cowden Clarke had introduced the young Keats to the poetry of Edmund Spenser and the Elizabethans, and these were his earliest models. His first mature poem is the sonnet On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer (1816), which was inspired by his excited reading of George Chapman’s classic 17th-century translation of the Iliad...

On Floating Bodies (in two books) survives only partly in Greek, the rest in medieval Latin translation from the Greek. It is the first known work on hydrostatics, of which Archimedes is recognized as the founder. Its purpose is to determine the positions that various solids will assume when floating in a fluid, according to their form and the variation in their specific gravities. In......

...were marked and rapid at this time. The English statesman and scholar Francis Bacon could already, by 1625, advance a sophisticated and almost modern conception of the garden in his essay “On Gardens.” He saw it as a place that should be planted for year-round enjoyment, offering a wide range of experiences through colour, form and scent, exercise and repose. The flower garden,......

Aristotle’s contributions to the physical sciences are less impressive than his researches in the life sciences. In works such as On Generation and Corruption and On the Heavens, he presented a world-picture that included many features inherited from his pre-Socratic predecessors. From Empedocles (c. 490–430 bc) he adopted the view that ...

In 2003 Mailer published two works of nonfiction: The Spooky Art, his reflections on writing, and Why Are We at War?, an essay questioning the Iraq War. On God (2007) records conversations about religion between Mailer and the scholar Michael Lennon....

Other Nominees...

Greek academic philosopher whose work On Grief created a new literary genre, the consolation, which was offered on the occasion of a misfortune such as death. One of Crantor’s consolatory arguments, reminiscent of Plato’s Phaedo or Aristotle’s Eudemus, was that life is actually punishment; death, the release of the soul. He wrote the first commentary on Pl...

Scottish zoologist and classical scholar noted for his influential work On Growth and Form (1917, new ed. 1942)....

...communist leader Mao Zedong raised the flag of a rural rebellion that continued for 22 years. This experience resulted in a codified theory of protracted revolutionary war, Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare (1937), which was later called “the most radical, violent and extensive theory of war ever put into effect.”...

His second novel, Sobre héroes y tumbas (1961; On Heroes and Tombs), is a penetrating psychological study of man, interwoven with philosophical ideas and observations previously treated in his essays. Tres aproximaciones a la literatura de nuestro tiempo (1968; “Three Approximations to the Literature of Our Times”) are......

...(1840) he appeared as a bitter opponent of conventional economic theory, but the radical-progressive and the reactionary elements were curiously blurred and mingled. With the publication of On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) his reverence for strength, particularly when combined with the conviction of a God-given mission, began to emerge. He discussed the hero......

...shock, as the mechanism for compressing the thermonuclear fuel in the second stage. On March 9, 1951, Teller and Ulam presented a report containing both alternatives, titled On Heterocatalytic Detonations I: Hydrodynamic Lenses and Radiation Mirrors. A second report, dated April 4, by Teller, included some extensive calculations by Frederic de Hoffmann and......

...and divinely ordained means of promoting military, intellectual, and moral excellence (something neither sophists nor politicians can match). De re equestri (“On Horsemanship”) deals with various aspects of horse ownership and riding, and Cavalry Commander is a somewhat unsystematic (but serious) discussion of how to improve......

...naturalism arose from a very different set of ideas with the publication of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), by Edward O. Wilson, followed subsequently by the same author’s On Human Nature (1978) and Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1999). Wilson, a biologist rather than a philosopher, claimed that new developments in the application of.....

...altérations de la personnalité (1892), by the French experimental psychologist Alfred Binet; and traces of its influence can be seen in the long essay L’umorismo (1908; On Humor), in which he examines the principles of his art. Common to both books is the theory of the subconscious personality, which postulates that what a person knows, or thinks he kno...

Six other works came from Xenophon’s pen. Cynegeticus (“On Hunting”) offers technical advice on hunting (on foot, with dogs and nets, the usual prey being a hare); Xenophon sees the pursuit as a pleasurable and divinely ordained means of promoting military, intellectual, and moral excellence (something neither sophists nor politicians can match). ......

...sense organs responds to different kinds of stimuli in its own particular way or, as Müller wrote, with its own specific energy. The phenomena of the external world are perceived, therefore, only by the changes they produce in sensory systems. His findings had an impact even on the theory of knowledge....

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In 1870 he published the two volumes of De l’intelligence (On Intelligence, 1871), a major work in the discipline of psychology, which had interested him since his youth. His devotion to science is most fully illustrated here; he opposes the speculative and introspective approach of the eclectics and outlines a scientific methodology for the study of human personality that......

Aristotle’s writings show that even he realized that there is more to logic than syllogistic. The De interpretatione, like the Prior Analytics, deals mainly with general propositions beginning with Every, No, or Some. But its main concern is not to link these propositions to each other in syllogisms but to explore the relation...

...of Christ’s being fully divine there is but one God. His rigorous moralism comes out in his On Public Shows and On the Excellence of Chastity (both once attributed to Cyprian); in On Jewish Foods he maintains that the Old Testament food laws no longer apply to Christians, the animals that were classified as unclean having been intended to symbolize vices....

...“ballade,” and “romance.” Their literary outlook naturally influenced criticism, the more so as they themselves frequently wrote it. In his pamphlet On John Field’s Nocturnes (1859), Liszt wrote, in the purple prose of the time, of their “balmy freshness, seeming to exhale copious perfumes; soothing as the slow, measured rocking of a......

In the summer of 1964, Mao wrote a document titled “On Khrushchev’s Phony Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World,” which summarized most of Mao’s doctrinal principles on contradiction, class struggle, and political structure and operation. This summary provided the basis for the reeducation (“revolutionization”) of all youth hoping to succeed t...

Mill sought relief by publishing a series of books on ethics and politics that he had meditated upon and partly written in collaboration with his wife. The essay On Liberty appeared in 1859 with a touching dedication to her and the Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform in the same year. In his Considerations on Representative Government (1861) he systematized opinions already......

...of light by mathematical means. His studies of the rainbow and comets employ both observation and mathematics. His treatise De luce (1215–20; On Light) presents light as the basic form of all things and God as the primal, uncreated light....

The system that accommodates this type of search is known as OPAC (on-line public access computer). Further development of this system has made it possible to integrate other library records with the OPAC, so that patrons can reserve materials that are still on order and can determine if items in the library’s collection are already on loan. The OPAC has been expanded in many libraries to.....

A major area of study in computer science has been the storage of data for efficient search and retrieval. The main memory of a computer is linear, consisting of a sequence of memory cells that are numbered 0, 1, 2,… in order. Similarly, the simplest data structure is the one-dimensional, or linear, array, in which array elements are numbered with consecutive integers and array contents......

...the salons as a conversationalist and polemicist. His wit and unconventional views were much appreciated, and he had notable friendships and love affairs. In 1822 he published De l’amour (On Love), which claims to study the operations of love dispassionately and objectively, but which can be read as a hidden confession of Stendhal’s emotional experiences and longings...

...in relation to his solid and liquid excretions. After 30 years of continuous experimentation, he found that the sum total of visible excreta was less than the amount of substance ingested. His De Statica Medicina (1614; “On Medical Measurement”) was the first systematic study of basal metabolism....

Soranus’ remarkable work, On Midwifery and the Diseases of Women, includes numerous descriptions of contraceptive measures; he also describes the obstetric chair and podalic version (delivery of the fetus feet first)—hailed as new discoveries during the 15th century—and renders a recognizable account of rickets. His On Acute and Chronic Diseases contains an excel...

...duplicity, Clement himself turned against Henry. This action prompted one of Dante’s greatest polemical treatises, his De monarchia (c. 1313; On Monarchy) in which he expands the political arguments of the Convivio. In the embittered atmosphere caused by Clement’s deceit Dante turned his argumentativ...

...he remodeled the city’s constitution, setting up a government of property owners favourable to Rome. None of his writing is extant, and Strabo and Cicero (whom he helped in the composition of the De Officiis) provide the main sources of information about him....

Burke’s best-known statements on this issue are two parliamentary speeches, “On American Taxation” (1774) and “On Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies” (1775), and “A Letter to . . . the Sheriffs of Bristol, on the Affairs of America” (1777). British policy, he argued, had been both imprudent and inconsistent, but above all lega...

...literary texts, (2) as an integral part of Buddhism and Chinese culture, and (3) informally, through court festivals and popular festivals and beliefs. A government department of divination, the On-myō-ryō (“Bureau of On-myō” [Chinese: Yin-Yang]), patterned after the Chinese practice, existed as early as 675 ad but later died out. One of the duti...

...worked as a freelance book reviewer for The New Republic and other periodicals. At age 27 he wrote a sweeping historical study of modern American literature, On Native Grounds (1942), that won him instant recognition as a perceptive critic with a distinct point of view. The book traces the social and political movements that inspired successive......

Parmenides’ poem Peri physeōs (“On Nature”) is divided into three parts: (1) a proem (preface), in which his chariot ride through the heavens to the very seat of the goddess Alētheia (Truth) is described and their initial conversation is related, in which she announces that he is “to learn all things, both the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth an...

...for developing systematically the place of the sacraments in the Christian view of restoration of the image of God in human nature—lost through sin in the fall of Adam. His brief treatise On Not Three Gods relates the Cappadocian Fathers’ theology of three Persons in the Godhead (i.e., the Trinity) to Plato’s teachings of the One and the Many. As a Christian P...

...including three tribes of Turkic Khazars (the Kavars). Either because of this fact or perhaps because of a memory of earlier conditions, this federation was known to its neighbours as the On-Ogur (literally “Ten Arrows” or “Ten Tribes”). From the Slavic pronunciation of this term, the name Hungarian is derived, with the initial H added because they were thought......

...as a horsebreaker, stockman, and drover before going to Brisbane, where he became a clerk and began to write poems and sketches for local journals. His first book was the largely autobiographical On Our Selection (1899), followed by a similar volume, Sandy’s Selection (1904). He later adapted On Our Selection into a successful play that was produced in London; six ot...

...and new translations made them again accessible to an international readership. Already in 1949, at age 90, he had made a remarkable literary comeback with Paa gjengrodde stier (On Overgrown Paths), which was in part memoir, in part self-defense, but first and foremost a treasure trove of vibrant impressions of nature and the seasons. His deliberate irrationalism and.....

...and interiors as the background for religious paintings, which thereby acquired the illusion of great spatial depth. In his seminal Della pittura (1436; On Painting), Leon Battista Alberti codified, especially for painters, much of the practical work on the subject that had been carried out by earlier artists; he formulated, for example, the......

...by him, the hand scroll known as the Nymph of the Luo River, illustrating a Daoist poem, exist today. His essay Hua Yuntaishan Ji (“On Painting the Cloud Terrace Mountain”) is also Daoist in content. The famous hand scroll entitled The Admonitions of the Court Instructress bears a signature of......

In his old age Piero seems to have abandoned painting in favour of more abstruse pursuits. Between 1474 and 1482 he wrote a treatise on painting, De prospectiva pingendi (“On Perspective in Painting”), dedicated to his patron, the Duke of Urbino. In its range of topics and method of organization, the book follows Alberti and the ancient Greek geometer Euclid. The principal......

...he first read in translation a certain number of Soviet writings on philosophy and produced his own account of dialectical materialism, of which the best-known portions are those entitled “On Practice” and “On Contradiction.” More important, Mao produced the major works that synthesized his own experience of revolutionary struggle and his vision of how the revolution...

The tract On Prayer, preserved in one manuscript at Cambridge, was written in about 233; it expounds the Lord’s Prayer and discusses some of the philosophical problems of petition, arguing that petition can only be excluded by a determinism false to the experience of personality, while the highest prayer is an elevation of the soul beyond material things to a passive inward union wit...

...of China’s Revolutionary War, written in December 1936 to sum up the lessons of the Jiangxi period (and also to justify the correctness of his own military line at the time), and then On Protracted War and other writings of 1938 on the tactics of the anti-Japanese war. As to his overall view of the events of these years, Mao adopted an extremely conciliatory att...

...which mirror the style and manner of Ciceronian dialogues with a new, Platonized Christian content: Contra academicos (386; Against the Academics), De ordine (386; On Providence), De beata vita (386; On the Blessed Life), and Soliloquia (386/387; Soliloquies). These works both do and do not resemble Augustine’s later......

...that only the wise man is free; On the Eternity of the World, perhaps not genuine, proving, particularly in opposition to the Stoics, that the world is uncreated and indestructible; On Providence, extant in Armenian, a dialogue between Philo, who argues that God is providential in his concern for the world, and Alexander, presumably Philo’s nephew Tiberius Julius Alexander,...

Little survives of Speusippus’ philosophical writings except a long excerpt from his work On Pythagorean Numbers, a few other fragments, and reports by other writers. Like his contemporaries and early successors in the beginning years of the Academy, he stressed the importance of numbers and numerical combinations and deemphasized ideas. The excerpt from Numbers, for example,....

...critical apparatus to the “mythologies” (i.e., the hidden assumptions) behind popular cultural phenomena from advertising and fashion to the Eiffel Tower and wrestling. His Sur Racine (1963; On Racine) set off a literary furor in France, pitting Barthes against traditional academics who thought this “new criticism,” which viewed texts as a system...

...Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). Belonging to a family of Reformed ministers and educated at Pietist institutions, Schleiermacher tapped into emergent Romanticism in his On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799). Refusing to identify religion with metaphysics or morals, Schleiermacher located its essence in intuition (......

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On Shakespeare, though composed in 1630, first appeared anonymously as one of the many encomiums in the Second Folio (1632) of Shakespeare’s plays. It was Milton’s first published poem in English. In the 16-line epigram Milton contends that no man-made monument is a suitable tribute to Shakespeare’s achievement. According to Milton, Shakespeare himself...

...are 11 players on a team and 2 of them must be the bowler and wicketkeeper, only 9 other positions can be occupied at any one time. The field is spoken of as being divided lengthwise into off and on, or leg, sides in relation to the batsmen’s stance, depending upon whether he bats right- or left-handed; the off side is the side facing the batsman, and the on, or leg, side is the side beh...

In On Sizes and Distances (now lost), Hipparchus reportedly measured the Moon’s orbit in relation to the size of the Earth. He had two methods of doing this. One method used an observation of a solar eclipse that had been total near the Hellespont (now called the Dardanelles) but only partial at Alexandria. Hipparchus assumed that the difference could be attributed....

...Biography (1986) are landmark biographies of that Soviet leader, while All Stalin’s Men (1984) presents biographies of six of Stalin’s lieutenants who managed to survive him. In On Socialist Democracy (1975), Medvedev presented his own political views, calling for both democratic reforms and the continuation of the Soviet system of state socialism....

It is possible that two of Aristotle’s surviving works on logic and disputation, the Topics and the Sophistical Refutations, belong to this early period. The former demonstrates how to construct arguments for a position one has already decided to adopt; the latter shows how to detect weaknesses in the arguments of others. Although neither wo...

Perhaps Eudoxus’s greatest fame stems from his being the first to attempt, in On Speeds, a geometric model of the motions of the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets known in antiquity. His model consisted of a complex system of 27 interconnected, geo-concentric spheres, one for the fixed stars, four for each planet, and three each for the Sun and Moon. Callippus and...

...of the segments of solids formed by the revolution of a conic section (circle, ellipse, parabola, or hyperbola) about its axis. In modern terms, these are problems of integration. (See calculus.) On Spirals develops many properties of tangents to, and areas associated with, the spiral of Archimedes—i.e., the locus of a point moving with uniform speed along a straight line that......

...the island groups of Ōsumi, Tokara, and Amami. It occupies an area of 3,539 square miles (9,167 square km). Its southern coast is deeply indented by Kagoshima Bay. The active volcano, On-take, was an island in the bay until an eruption in 1914 connected it to the eastern shore. Rough topography, volcanic-ash soil, and relative isolation limit agriculture to grains, tobacco, and......

...written some time after 1482, follows Plato and Pythagoras in dealing with the notion of perfect proportions. The manuscript, again illustrated by Piero, is in the Vatican Library. Del abaco (“On the Abacus,” Laurentian Library, Florence) is a pamphlet on applied mathematics....

Donders summarized his studies in On the Anomalies of Accommodation and Refraction (1864), the first authoritative work in the field....

Isocrates did have beliefs, however, some of which are revealed in “On the Areopagus,” composed at the end of the Social War, when Athens’ fortunes were at their lowest for 50 years. In this work he commends the ancient constitution of Athens, under which the aristocratic council of the Areopagus exercised a general supervision over the conduct of citizens. Isocrates’ p...

...He discussed the eminent historian Thucydides in an important essay and in a letter to his friend Ammaeus. His essay Peri syntheseos onomaton (On the Arrangement of Words; often cited by its Latin title, De compositione verborum) is the only extant ancient discussion of word order. Dionysius was a mediocre......

...and first mitosis in certain plants. Familiarity with work on transpiration and on the tensile strength of columns of sulfuric acid and water led Dixon and Joly to experiment on transpiration. “On the Ascent of Sap” (1894) presented the hypothesis that the sap or water in the vessels of a woody plant ascends by virtue of its power of resisting tensile stress and its capacity to......

...The YearlingMusic Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture: Hugo Friedhofer for The Best Years of Our LivesScoring of a Musical Picture: Morris Stoloff for The Jolson StorySong: “On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” from The Harvey Girls; music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Johnny MercerHonorary Awards: Claude Jarman, Jr., Ernst Lubitsch; Harold......

...Luther’s pugnacity on behalf of his rediscovered gospel expressed itself in combative writings aimed at various targets. The most decisive of those aimed at Rome was the treatise On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), which attacked the current sacramental system and left Christ himself as the sole sacrament in the scriptural sense (cf. 1 Timothy 3:16)...

English-born Australian novelist who showed a special talent for weaving his technical knowledge of engineering into the texture of his fictional narrative. His most famous work, On the Beach (1957), reflected his pessimism for humanity in the atomic age....

...literature surrounding Richard Wagner, particularly the attack on the expressive theory of music launched by Wagner’s critic Eduard Hanslick in his Vom musikalisch-Schönen (1854; On the Beautiful in Music). With this work modern musical aesthetics was born, and all the assumptions made by Batteux and Hegel concerning the unity (or unity in diversity) of the arts were...

...in Britain and the United States. The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980; filmed as Cobra Verde, 1987) is a fictionalized biography of a Brazilian slave trader in 19th-century Dahomey. In On the Black Hill (1982; filmed 1988), which won the Whitbread literary award, Chatwin explored the lives of twin brothers on an isolated 20th-century Welsh farm. Chatwin’s most commercially.....

...dialogues with a new, Platonized Christian content: Contra academicos (386; Against the Academics), De ordine (386; On Providence), De beata vita (386; On the Blessed Life), and Soliloquia (386/387; Soliloquies). These works both do and do not resemble Augustine’s later ecclesiastical writings and are greatly debated for th...

Of the other works of Apollonius referred to by ancient writers, one, “On the Burning Mirror,” concerned optics. Apollonius demonstrated that parallel light rays striking the interior surface of a spherical mirror would not be reflected to the centre of sphericity, as was previously believed; he also discussed the focal properties of parabolic mirrors. A work titled “On the......

After his death he was entirely forgotten until 1554, when two of his manuscripts, On the Causes and Indications of Acute and Chronic Diseases (4 vol.) and On the Treatment of Acute and Chronic Diseases (4 vol.), both written in the Ionic Greek dialect, were discovered. These works not only include model descriptions of pleurisy, diphtheria, tetanus, pneumonia, asthma, and......

...into 341, until an Athenian general incurred Philip’s wrath for operating too near one of his towns in the Chersonese. Philip demanded his recall, but Demosthenes replied in a speech, “On the Chersonese,” that the motive behind the Macedonian’s “scheming and contriving” was to weaken the Athenians’ will to oppose Philip’s conquests. ...

...Chaldee Manuscript,” which lampooned Scottish celebrities in a parody of Old Testament style; this article made Blackwood’s an immediate succès de scandale. Another article, “On the Cockney School of Poetry,” was the first of a series of attacks on the English poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as on Leigh Hunt, leader of the......

...of the Geological Society of London (1842), professor of botany at King’s College, London (1842), and paleontologist to the British Geological Survey (1844). In 1846 he published an important essay, “On the Connexion Between the Distribution of the Existing Fauna and Flora of the British Isles, and the Geological Changes Which Have Affected Their Area.” In this work he divi...

...1824 brought him an annuity of £105 and a sense of recognition. In 1830 he joined the controversy that had arisen around the issue of Catholic Emancipation by writing his last prose work, On the Constitution of the Church and State. The third edition of Coleridge’s Poetical Works appeared in time for him to see it before his final illness and death in 1834....

...settled on the shores of Lake Mareotis in the vicinity of Alexandria, Egypt, during the 1st century ad. The only original account of this community is given in De vita contemplativa (On the Contemplative Life), attributed to Philo of Alexandria. Their origin and fate are both unknown. The sect was unusually severe in discipline and mode of life. According to Philo, t...

Following this initial phase of the Hundred Flowers Campaign, Mao Zedong issued what was perhaps his most famous post-1949 speech “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” (Feb. 27, 1957). Its essential message was ambiguous. He stressed the importance of resolving “nonantagonistic contradictions” by methods of persuasion, but he stated that......

His classic On the Correlation of Physical Forces (1846) enunciated the principle of conservation of energy a year before the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz did so in his famous paper Über die Erhaltung der Kraft (“On the Conservation of Force”)....

...and the nobility and the serfs are confirmed in what Shcherbatov viewed as their “natural” (and inherently unequal) relations to each other. His work most celebrated in the West, On the Corruption of Morals in Russia, appeared in 1797. Although reflecting his melancholic and ailing disposition, it was a fine example of the outraged erudition for which he was known, as......

The name canon, which means “rule,” is derived from a special work entitled “On the Criterion, or Canon.” It held that all sensations and representations are true and serve as criteria. The same holds for pleasure and pain, the basic feelings to which all others can be traced. Also true, and included among the criteria, are what may be called concepts......

...is, a severe and perhaps forbidding personality. Although name-calling was common practice in the Assembly, Demosthenes’ wit was exceptionally caustic; when defending himself in his speech “On the Crown” against the attacks of his lifelong rival, Aeschines, he did not scruple to call him “sly beast,” “idle babbler,” “court hack,” an...

In 1628 Milton composed an occasional poem, On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough, which mourns the loss of his niece Anne, the daughter of his older sister. Milton tenderly commemorates the child, who was two years old. The poem’s conceits, Classical allusions, and theological overtones emphasize that the child entered the supernal realm because the human....

...of pagan cults, proposing in their place the Christian religion as a theism, or rationalized belief in a single Supreme Being who is the source creating all else. In a companion work, “On the Death of Persecutors,” Lactantius held that the Christian God—in contradistinction to the remote, unconcerned God of Stoic deism—could intervene to right human injustice.......

An exponent of the Idealist school developed by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Forberg is best known for his essay Über die Entwicklung des Begriffs Religion (1798; “On the Development of the Concept of Religion”), a work that occasioned Fichte’s dismissal from the University of Jena on the charge of atheism after he had published a corroborative treatise. Forber...

In the 1890s Plekhanov continued his polemics against the populists, most importantly with his book On the Development of the Monistic Conception of History. In 1898 he began publishing a series of tracts defending Marxian orthodoxy from those who proposed modifications or deviations, among them the reformist revisionism propounded by the German Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein....

...from the new interest in Plato, were the subject of many treatises, the most important of which were Giannozzo Manetti’s De dignitate et excellentia hominis (completed in 1452; On the Dignity of Man) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oratio de hominis dignitate (written 1486; Oration on the Dignity of Man). The humanist vision ...

...6th century and who wrote in the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, Paul’s convert at Athens. In the chief works of Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology and On the Divine Names, the main emphasis was on the ineffability of God (“the Divine Dark”) and hence on the “apophatic” or “negative” approach t...