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  ~~~~~~~~~~~ WORKS IN PROGRESS: ACADEMIA ~~~~~~~~~~~


ACADEMIA
A BIOGRAPHICAL AND CHRONOLOGICAL REFERENCE TO
HISTORY AND EVERY MAJOR ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE
(hardcover and CD-ROM editions)


Academia (in full, Academia: A Biographical and Chronological Reference to History and Every Major Academic Discipline) is primarily being written to provide a truly interdisciplinary chronological and biographical reference to history and every major academic discipline in a single, unified source; and, secondarily, to do so in a manner that rectifies the shortcomings and omissions of existing references with regards to their coverage, translations or transliterations of non-English citations, and portraiture–all in a unique format that provides three separate contextual perspectives.

On Academia’s chronological and biographical coverage. Several chronological references are already available that provide excellent coverage of history, literature, music, the visual arts, and the sciences. And, there are a few whose coverage of the humanities also extends to religion and philosophy. However, it is difficult to find more than spotty coverage of any of the social sciences beyond their general knowledge landmarks, particularly of the advances of the past two generations.

Biographical references have virtually identical shortcomings in their coverage. Neither the major encyclopedias nor the general biographical encyclopedias and dictionaries include comparable coverage of social scientists as that afforded historical figures, artists, and scientists. Those sources exclude many of the most important sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, political scientists, jurists, and economists in the absence of some secondary celebrity beyond the importance of their contribution to the development of their respective disciplines. As a result, until now, it has been necessary to consult a myriad of specialized individual, discipline-specific, or area-specific biographical references and websites of varying emphases, formats, and quality to find entries on them.

On Academia’s translations and transliterations.    Having citations of non-English primary works given in English translation as well as the original language or romanized transliteration is an appreciated nicety as well as a useful resource. However, existing references are haphazard in their inclusion or exclusion of translations or transliterations. Those references were written by dozens to hundreds of different individuals assigned according to expertise, and given no apparent guidelines concerning when and if to furnish translations or transliterations. Some individual authors cite titles only in their original languages, others cite them only in English translations, and still others cite both, if only intermittently. Moreover, there is an even greater variance in their provision of transliterations of titles written in non-Latin alphabets. However, Academia was written by a single, consistent hand who made a concerted effort to furnish translations or transliterations for every cited work written in other than English wherever possible. And, the supplied romanized transliterations include not only Greek and Russian, but also such other major languages using non-Latin alphabets as Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, and Japanese.

On Academia’s portraiture.    In addition, existing references use truly unfathomable criteria for the inclusion or exclusion of portraiture. One representative example is The Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia (1994). It includes portraits for only c. 5% of its entries, and, using its literature and drama entries as an example, of that small percentage, it chose to include portraits of John Le Carré, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Nevil Shute, but not of Samuel Beckett, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, Henrik Ibsen, Eugene O’Neill, or Walt Whitman. By contract, every biographical sketch in Academia includes a portrait if one exists (c. 95%). And, if one does not exist, Academia specifies that there is no known photograph, portrait, nor rendering, thereby informing the reader or researcher that the lack of a portrait for a given sketch was not a matter of omission or choice.

On Academia’s format and contextual perspectives.   Academia is distinguished not only by a scope that provides comparable biographical, pictorial, and chronological coverage of all disciplines, including the social sciences, but also by a format that presents the work in three integrated, alternative, contextual perspectives: the individual, the interdisciplinary, and the intradisciplinary.

  • The main body of the work, Biographical Sketches and Portraits of Academia, provides the work’s individual-based context via its c. 3,000 biographical sketches and portraits of the most noted contributors to the development of academia, as well as the principal figures of history. In addition, all the entries are cross-referenced to their corresponding entries in the chronologies of Appendices A and B.

  • Appendix A of Academia is a single, unified chronology of history and every major academic discipline from about 100,000 BC to the present, which facilitates the consideration of any entry within its interdisciplinary and historical context. And,

  • Appendix B delineates that information in a series of 14 separate discipline or area-specific chronologies, which reveal the intradisciplinary context of any entry and more readily allows for the consideration of the historical development of individual disciplines, or groups of disciplines.

The alternative contextual perspectives afforded by Academia are illustrated in the table below using the entry of Nicolas Malebranche’s On the Search After Truth (1675) as an example. The entry is shown as it appears in the body of the work, in Appendix A, and in Appendix B within its individual, interdisciplinary, and intradisciplinary contexts, respectively.


ILLUSTRATION OF THE ALTERNATIVE CONTEXTUAL PERSPECTIVES AFFORDED BY ACADEMIA USING THE ENTRY OF NICOLAS MALEBRANCHE’S ON THE SEARCH AFTER TRUTH (1675) AS AN EXAMPLE

––––– Extract from: BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES AND PORTRAITS OF ACADEMIA (individual context) –––––















































CROSS-REFERENCE KEYS
      (AAP) = Asia, Africa & the Pacific;    (Am) = The Americas;    (ASE) = Applied Science & Engineering;    (E&R) = Europe & Russia;
      (L&D) = Literature & Drama;   (L&E) = Law & Economics;   (Med) = Medicine;   (Mus) = Music;   (Phil) = Philosophy;   (PS) = Political Science;
      (Rel)  = Religion;   (S&M) = Science & Mathematics;   (SPA) = Sociology, Psychology & Anthropology;   (VAA) = Visual Arts & Architecture.
         In Visual Arts & Architecture entries:   unspecified = painting;   if location given = architecture;   m. = motion picture;   s. = scultpure.
         In war and battle entries:  Emphasis indicates the winner of the conflict.  –And–  Posthumous works are dated the year of death.


Academia fulfills its intended goal of providing a truly interdisciplinary chronological and biographical reference that affords every major academic discipline its comparative due, and it does so while providing its information in alternative individual, interdisciplinary, and intradisciplinary contextual perspectives. In combination with its inclusion of portraiture and translations or transliterations throughout, Academia’s conception, features, and rendering make it a unique reference worthy of being the first stop for contextual research into academic history or biography, and an extremely valuable resource for portraiture research.

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Prospective publishers.

Academia is c. 1,600 pages long, and would likely be released in a 2 or 3-volume hardcover set, and in a CD-ROM edition. At present, 2,702 of Academia's biographical sketches have been written. Depending on publication scheduling considerations, the author can logically stop upon the completion of any one of four residual, self-imposed priority categories, namely:

1. Upon the completion of 61 more biographical sketches for a total of 2,763;
2. After completing another 119 sketches for a total of 2,882;
3. After completing yet another 139 sketches for a total of 3,021;
   or,
4. At any point between 3,022 and 3,220 total biographical sketches.

If you are interested in discussing the publication of the hardcover and CD-ROM editions of Academia, and/or the second edition of the Chronologium Academicus poster, please contact the author Guy Cutrufo by e-mail, ChronAca@gmail.com, and he, in turn, will put you in touch with his agent.
______________________________


The next section provides further information on the other work in progress the
SECOND EDITION OF CHRONOLOGIUM ACADEMICUS


Malebranche, Nicolas  (Nicolas de Malebranche)        1638–1715
French philosopher and theologian of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Largely through his theory of Occasionalism, Malebranche posited a reconciliatory synthesis of the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter with Christian thought in his masterwork On the Search After Truth. Malebranche held that thought can only spring from the relationship between an individual and God; physical and mental changes are caused by God, not by objects or individuals;
and, what are usually accepted as causes are actually occasions on which God chooses to intervene, hence occasionalism and the corollary “that we see all things in God.” The critical reaction to On the Search After Truth prompted its defense and elaboration in Treatise of Nature and Grace, and its further refinement in his Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion.

(Phil) ––>On the Search After Truth (De la recherche de la vérité) ......................................................... 1675
(Rel)        Treatise of Nature and Grace (Traité de la nature et de la grâce) .......................................... 1680
(Rel)        Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (Entretiens sur la métaphysique et sur la religion) ... 1688


––––– Extract from: Appendix A. UNIFIED CHRONOLOGY (interdisciplinary and historical context) –––––

(Am) King Philip’s War (Indians under Wampanoag Chief Philip vs. New England settlers) ........... 1675-76
(AAP)Reign of Guru Gobind Singh of the Sikhs of northern India, (militarized the Sikhs) ............... 1675-1708
(Mus)J.-B. Lully: Thésée ...................................................................................................................... 1675
(VAA)P. Lely: Nell Gwyn .................................................................................................................... 1675
(VAA)B. Murillo: The Pie-Eater .......................................................................................................... 1675 (VAA)       C. Wren: Saint Paul’s Cathedral begun in London .................................................................... 1675
(Rel)        P. Spener: Earnest Desire for a Reform of the Evangelical Church ......................................... 1675
(Phil) ––>N. Malebranche: On the Search After Truth (De la recherche de la vérité) .............................. 1675(ASE)       Greenwich Observatory was founded in England, (later became site of 0º longitude) ..................... 1675


––– Extract from: Appendix B. SEPARATE CHRONOLOGY OF PHILOSOPHY (intradisciplinary context) –––

(Phil)P. Nicole: Moral Essays (Essais de morale) .............................................................................. 1671(Phil)J. Rohault: Conversation in Philosophy (Entretiens sur la philosophie) .................................... 1671
(Phil) ––>N. Malebranche: On the Search After Truth (De la recherche de la vérité) ............................... 1675
(Phil)B. Spinoza: Ethics, Demonstarated in the Manner of Geometry (Ethica) ................................ 1677
(Phil)R. Cudworth: The True Intellectual System of the Universe ..................................................... 1678
(Phil)A. Arnauld: Concerning True and False Ideas (Des vraies et des fausses idées) ...................... 1683
(Phil)G. Leibniz: Discourse of Metaphysics (Discours de metaphysique) ........................................... 1685
(Phil)P. Bayle: Philosophical Commentary on the Words of Jesus Christ ......................................... 1686
(Phil)C. Thomasius: Introduction to Philosophy for Courtiers (Introductio ad philosophiam) .......... 1688