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In this paper I focus on a different perspective on Blaga’s epistemology and its particular relationship with his metaphysics of knowledge (part 1); in order to achieve that I will put together the elements of a reconstruction of Blaga’s conception on the possibility, the structure and the dynamics of science understood as an extraordinary anticipation of the historical trend in contemporary philosophy of science inaugurated by Th. Kuhn (part 2), on the one hand; from the methodological perspective on science, especially that in the Experiment and the mathematical spirit, I propose a new reading and analysis of the concept of „stylistic matrix”, where the „supermethod” will play a central role, on the other hand (part 3). This interpretation aims at highlighting new dimensions of Blaga’s reflections on science than those foreshadowing the historical trend in the philosophy of science inaugurated by Th. Kuhn that may advocate for an interpretation of his epistemology beyond the mere label of historical „relativism”, (that Kuhn himself was accused of after the first edition of his Structure of scientific revolutions). In this respect, I try to show how Blaga’s programme in the philosophy of science includes and exceeds the ideational core of some of his works, considered as foreshadowing the Structure...(1962), through a parallel with Kuhn’s standpoint from the answers to his critics, that also proposes overcoming the socalled relativism of the first edition of his work by reconfiguring its position, especially with respect to the concept of paradigm. At the end of my analysis I attempt to show a deep similarity in the epistemological standpoints of the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For one of the specific and significant features of the style of current scientific knowledge is the integration of the historical perspective in the actual scientific construction, due to the fact that the deep methodological and conceptual changes that affect the general frameworks, assumptions and structures require to put to work the entire history of science in order to determine its possible directions of future development, my paper is an attempt to set forth a brief account on French historical epistemology, mainly on Bachelard’s work and his influence on Foucault. Therefore, I will focus on his reflections on the relationship between consciousness and reality, rational knowledge and affective knowledge, on the significance of the “epistemological obstacles”, on the sources of errors in the process of knowledge, on how to purify the process of knowledge in order to ensure scientific certainty, with a particular emphasis on his “psychoanalysis of scientific knowledge”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I have argued that although a multitude of answers have been formulated that are intended to end once and for all the nature versus nurture controversy, many scholars observed the ‘open’ nature of the issue, that is, the fact that the debate does not, in fact, close and is periodically reignited, at different degrees of intensity. Following the historical development of the ‘nativist-nurturist’ controversy, I have identified a possible cause of this situation: although there is no major theorist who does not admit that neither the idea of nature nor that of nurture can function in isolation as an explanatory principle, but only an understanding of the two principles in their interdependence can help us build on their basis a consistent philosophical anthropology, yet a large part of the participants in the debate adopt a reductionist position and believe one of the two factors to be dominant, attempting to build an explanatory model that reduces to the minimum the influence of the other, seen as considered secondary, recessive, or even eliminate it completely. Then I reviewed the contemporary dispute between ‘nativists’ and ‘nurturists’ using James Tabery’s methodological distinction between the ‘variation-partitioning approach’ and the ‘mechanism-elucidation approach’. The conclusion is that the nature-nurture controversy has no chance of ending in the near future because the two methodological approaches are mutually exclusive: their practitioners aim to investigate distinct entities and phenomena, look for different correlations and causality relations, propose different explanatory mechanisms, and use distinct methods to highlight these mechanisms and provide an explanation for the investigated phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Kuhn explicitly states that the paradigm-shift implies a change of the world. This is because the paradigm is seen as constitutive for nature itself. In this paper I will try to interpret this thesis by inscribing Kuhn's theory in the larger kantian theoretical framework. As the last chapter of the „Critique of pure reason” shows, Kant thought that reson is inherently historical and evolves through revolutions. This dynamical perspective on reason comes clearly to light especially in the „Appendix” to the „transcendental Dialectic”, where the Idea of reason is seen as an abstract theoretical framework that makes possible and guides the understanding. It will be shown that the kuhnian paradigm and the kantian transcendental Ideea function in similar ways. Both serve as an orientation for scientific research, they make rules possible, and constitute nature in a weak, indirect, way. The relation between Ideea and understanding in the first „Critique” parallels in many ways the kuhnian relation between paradigm and normal science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although separated by centuries, Hegel and Kuhn support the same ideas concerning worldview change. Both consider such changes real „revolutions”. Through them, the human spirit (in Hegel) and science (in Kuhn) replace their old fundamental concepts with new ones. The paper also highlights the necessary relationship of the Kuhnian paradigm shift with the cultural background of the epoch in which such a shift occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the content of the cadre file of Henri H. Stahl preserved in the Archives of the University of Bucharest’s Rectorate. In the form in which it has been preserved after 1989, the personnel file of H.H. Stahl seems, from several points of view, atypical. If we compare it with the cadre files of the 1950s, it surprises by the apparent “goodwill” of the communist cadres towards H.H. Stahl. This ideological solicitude is manifested in the interpretation given to main cultural and political events in H.H. Stahl’s life. In other circumstances such political past could be labeled as unusable in a communist context. Equally curious and noteworthy is the issue of the ethnic origin attributed (and not necessarily real or assumed by the one described in the file), more precisely the issue of Stahl’s nationality ( Jewish) which was recorded in the file. Analyzing Stahl cadre file we can wonder if the integrity of this dossier has not been compromised by removing, extracting or modifying documents by the personel staff services or by someone else. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1934 and 1939, several hundred voluntary student teams went to Romanian villages to perform “cultural work,” i.e., to help and guide peasants to work more productively and to live healthier lives. In 1938, the Law of the Social Service was passed, stipulating that all university graduates, irrespective of gender and academic specialization, were required to take part in social intervention activities in villages to obtain their diplomas. In this paper, I argue that a new constellation of gender ideas, norms and expectations was drawn up in order to allow for enough room for young middle-class women to be part of student teams that were going to spend a couple of months away from their families and in the unknown settings of the rural areas. Therefore, I explore the discourses used in the main information and propaganda periodical published by the Social Service and I identify and illustrate some strategies and mechanisms employed in the production of the gender model needed for the social and national construction of the new and improved Romanian village. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the book of Henri H. Stahl, The Technique of the Sociological Monograph (1934) and delineates the author’s main achievements within the fieldwork methodology from the point of view of Romanian ethnology and folklore studies. As an important member of the interwar sociological school of Bucharest led by D. Gusti, Stahl was thoroughly interested in developing a comprehensive research methodology ready to be applied by the new members of the large research teams of the monographic campaigns. His method includes the attention devoted to getting in touch with the life of the village and the peasants while building psychological trust and empathy between interviewer and interviewee; this complex protocol of accommodation proves to be one of the first and the most sympathetic strategy in the history of anthropological fieldwork. Another aspect of primary interest in Stahl’s methodology is the fact it is drafted simultaneously with the development of peasant studies and rural sociology in the U.S., and the challenges that western anthropology faces in having to adapt its methods to studying peasant societies. Though Stahl often opposes in his studies the sociological school and the Romanian folklore studies, his contribution to Romanian folklore research was undoubtedly acknowledged and appreciated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper uses letters – some unpublished – from the mid-1940s and the second half of the 1970s exchanged by Mattei Dogan and Henri H. Stahl, to render the way sociological education was organized at the University of Bucharest immediately after the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to address the written and narrated memories of Henri H. Stahl who left behind two memorial works: Memories and Thoughts from the Old School of “Sociological Monographs”, published in 1981, and the collection of interviews from 1985-1987, which appeared in 2000, under the title Monography as Utopia. Although they were conceived only a few years apart, the two forms of memoirs show some significant differences. In the following study, I will present the specifics of each of them, in order to later propose a brief comparative analysis of the two texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I highlight mostly ignored aspects of the work of H. H. Stahl: his stance on the issue of “national specificity,” on village culture, and on the modernization of Romanian villages through “culturalization”. Reviewing some of his popularization and scientific texts from the 1930, but also his late contributions from the 1980, show a remarkable continuity and consistency of Stahl’s vision on these subjects. And it is not the kind of vision someone would expect from a socialist or Marxist social scientist. For Stahl, the village culture was the true (and unique) Romanian culture, a peasant culture that he was very fond of. In some respects, and, in fact, not so surprisingly, Stahl, what regards “national specificity” and village culture, is much closer to (the reactionary, traditionalist, autochthonous) Mircea Vulcănescu, his monographist fellow and personal friend, than any other leftist thinker in interwar Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public libraries have a special significance for the Finnish people and the favourable public opinion of libraries is also widely shared by the Finnish decision makers. The paper looks at Helsinki's new city library, the Helsinki Central Library Oodi, which was launched by the Finnish Ministry of Culture in 1998 and has opened its doors in December 2018. Located in the heart of the city opposite Parliament House, the Library has become one of the flagship projects celebrating the centenary of Finland's independence. This paper focuses on the practices of citizen participation which have been key in the planning of the library since its very beginnings, and considers how including the citizens and library users in planning the library's new services and functions has promoted grass roots democracy, openness, and a feeling of ownership of the new library. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The memory of the Holocaust in Romania (i.e. the Romanian authorities’ involvement in the atrocious crime of the Holocaust) was ideologically distorted and occulted during the communist dictatorship. This led not only to the impossibility of recovering the historical truth, but also to it acting as a deterrent when it comes to the depiction of the living memory (i.e. journals, memoirs), as well as of the artistic and cultural representations of this tragic moment in our recent history. It was only in the last two decades, more precisely after the discussions initiated by the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, chaired by Elie Wiesel, and especially after the publication of the Final Report (2004), that the Romanian authorities’ accountability for the Holocaust timidly penetrated the public discourse. This paper looks into the history of memorial occultation of the Holocaust in Romania by seeking to explore and explain the difficulties that the Romanian public discourse has had (and continues to have) when integrating this event into its cultural memory. Through a comparative analysis of how the memory of the Holocaust was embedded in the Western and the Romanian public discourse, we could notice that in Romania, in the last decades, these complications may be explained primarily through an absence in the manifestations of a prosthetic memory encompassing cultural representations of the Holocaust. Besides identifying the postmemorial artifact (i.e. the act of cultural and artistic reconstruction of the trauma of the Holocaust) as the main element of the prosthetic memory, this paper also describes a possible corpus of such postmemorial artifacts (film, literature), steadily growing in the Romanian culture in recent years, to be minutely analyzed in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public libraries have a special significance for the Finnish people and the favourable public opinion of libraries is also widely shared by the Finnish decision makers. The paper looks at Helsinki's new city library, the Helsinki Central Library Oodi, which was launched by the Finnish Ministry of Culture in 1998 and has opened its doors in December 2018. Located in the heart of the city opposite Parliament House, the Library has become one of the flagship projects celebrating the centenary of Finland's independence. This paper focuses on the practices of citizen participation which have been key in the planning of the library since its very beginnings, and considers how including the citizens and library users in planning the library's new services and functions has promoted grass roots democracy, openness, and a feeling of ownership of the new library. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper introduces the Association of Library and Information Professionals of the Czech Republic, known as SKIP. First of all, it provides historical background and shows that the current association builds upon a rich history. It introduces the association's mission and goals, gives a brief overview of how SKIP works as an organization and brings answers to fundamental questions regarding membership in the organization. The paper also presents major activities or projects which SKIP focuses on. It touches on the subject of SKIP's cooperation with other associations and concludes with remarks on SKIP's future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Gustian School aimed to study the society to better understand it, in order to improve it. Knowledge and social intervention go hand in hand when it comes to the monographs. In order to achieve what Gusti would call a ”militant sociology”, the interwar researchers would often employ interdisciplinary methods that range from ethnology to history or economy. This papers aims to prove that, although the Romanian monographs did not explicitly conduct their research according to the social history's precepts, however, we can retrace many elements that are specific to the field of social history. Many monographic studies employ implicitly methods and concepts that belong to the field of social history such as the comparative method, the qualitative approach or the social microscope method, oral history interviews, everyday life studies, all used around concepts such as family, social roles, kinship etc, from an anthropological and historical perspective. Furthermore, this paper argues that the Gustian School's production can be used as invaluable sources for a social historical approach to the Romanian interwar era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crime is a phenomenon that is not absent from human society and does not exclude its evolution. Demography, urbanization, economic development, social change, human personality are factors that influence both variations in crime and increasing its rate. Through the topic I want to emphasize that the study of the two types of crime, female and male, allows us to determine the place of criminal and tortious acts in society, to appreciate their character and the necessary relationship with certain phenomena. economic, moral, social, in order to finally be able to look for the different means that can stop this progressive march. All over the world, women have much lower arrest rates than men for practically all categories of crimes, with the exception of a few, namely prostitution, infanticide or abortion. The questions are simple, but to which the answers are multiple: Do women not commit crimes? Is there no female crime? Through this paper I want to highlight the fact that the gender issue of crime, although recognized for a long time in the construction of crime, is sometimes not studied in such detail, referring especially to female crime. Regardless of the disciplinary field studied, there are no studies that address the issue of women's participation in crime. In writing this paper, I tried to consider the literature, studies in criminology and legal psychology, as well as statistics on the dynamics of crime, both nationally and internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents Sanda Golopenția's professional paths in relation to the main theoretical and methodological perspectives explored by the Brown University professor during her remarkable career. Attracted early on to foreign languages both within her family and at school, Golopenția became a linguist and a folklorist and navigated easily between the two disciplines. During the 1960s and 1970s, fieldwork undertaken in various rural Romanian regions aroused an interest in language dynamics, conversational memory, and the nature of speaker creativity in linguistics innovation. The village of Breb in Maramureș becomes the locus amoenus of her anthropological fieldwork, where Golopenția discovers and conceptualizes the speech acts of a close-knit community. In the field of linguistics, the professor of French Studies is drawn to the theory of structural linguistics, generative grammar, and pragmatics, while also analysing folklore texts and literary works with the help of linguistic tools. Within folkloristics, she is mostly interested in the study of charms and charming from a general anthropological and pragmatic point of view, highlighting the special type of intelligence that folk magic reveals. One of the main concepts that she proposes, intermemory – grounded in the conversational histories of the people of Breb – accurately defines many of her intellectual interests and also the deep structure of the content of her edited works. In Romanian sociology, Golopenția is appreciated for publishing the books of her parents, Anton Golopenția and Ștefania Cristescu – two principal members of the Sociological School that was led by D. Gusti, thereby recovering a lost connection with interwar sociology. Finally, the author describes her encounter with the works of Sanda Golopenția, as well as a personal meeting with the esteemed professor. Given the occasion of this paper – the celebration of Golopenția's 80th birthday – the text is a general appreciation of her many contributions to Romanian culture, which could be defined appropriately in terms of what Claude Levi-Strauss called a "humanist anthropology". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent works on spatiality have proven that space is not a fixed and unchangeable but rather a fluid and mobile reality. This relativity of space has taken out space from the auspices of Kantian apriorism and the philosophy of positivism and signalled that it is a controversial juxtaposition of the real and the fictional, of perception and representation, of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Michel de Certeau assertes that space has to be understood as a "spatial practice", meaning that it is modulated by the spatial representations of the dweller. That points to the utility and practicability of space as opposed to a dominant supersaturated space that speaks in local laws. The "spatial practice" dilutes the frontiers and communicates to other spaces, from which results the transgressive quality of space. Having this spatial theory as a starter point, this paper points out the significance of storytelling as a marker for space. As de Certeau states out, storytelling invents space, because it has no hermeneutical encoding and only may be understood as a "making-do" process which says what it says without additional meaning. The focus of this paper is to analyze the stories of two Moldavian authors, Mihail Sadoveanu and Al. O. Teodoreanu. Storytelling becomes for the two writers a way to relocate the periphery into the center as Moldova has lost its political and cultural importance towards the capital Bucharest. Storytelling becomes marginality, a genius loci that carves a local specificity. The territory is mapped in fictional stories in which memory works as a catalyzer. De Certeau thinks that memory is the connection between storytelling and space because it modifies and constructs space according to the laws of the narrative. Memory is indeed an important issue in the stories picked up for analysis: Moldova becomes a fictional space for Sadoveanu and Al. O. Teodoreanu, the territory of passed glorious rulers, decadent boyars and archaic myths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the question of how and how much of the Romanian folk traditions related to New Year's Eve celebration have been transmitted from the last century to the present days in some Moldavian villages from the Eastern part of the country. It brings into discussion the specific alterations induced by communist cultural politics during the second half of the twentieth century, among which the most relevant for the ethnographic field seems to be the establishment of official festivals such as Cântarea României, comprising bits and pieces of popular rituals, reshaped by the former political regime according to its ideological criteria. In order to evaluate the present situation, in 2015 I conducted a field research in Țibănești and the surrounding villages in Iași county. There are two basic approaches in ethnographic research: studying the literature previously written on a particular topic, and backing it with specific fieldwork. This paper reflects the sequential use of both methods, which enables the results of one approach to respond in a better understanding of the other. Masque carolling and offering symbolic, as well as proper gifts on New Year's Eve – a custom most germane to traditional life in small communities – represent the main focus of the first part of my paper. Romanian ethnology has identified five traditional ways of carolling, of which masque carolling seems to be the most ancient. Romanian term colinda means both the custom of wandering through the village on festive occasions such as Easter, Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve or individual celebrations, in order to offer gifts and propitious wishes, and the songs sung on Christmas Eve by children or/and adults who go from one house to another bringing the good news of Nativity or awakening various mythological elements in the memory of the community. On the one hand, the continuity of such practices is guaranteed by the long-term mechanisms of tradition. On the other hand, communist authorities have interfered by trying to recreate the folklore and the popular culture according to their ideological criteria. Thus, a new series of (official) celebration emerged, aimed at replacing the old, untamed, and seemingly "irrational" popular ones. Official festivals turned peasants into stage performers. Could those peasants have regained their ancient heritage by now, after decades of ideological forced compliance? Applying this conceptual framework, I expected to find on the ethnographic field the results of merging the two sets of practices. Indeed, the celebration of New Year's Eve started in 2015 at Țibănești as an official contest among peasant companies delivering a stage performance. Then, once the winners had been declared and rewarded by the local authorities, the "performers" got off the stage and gathered at the local pub, which proved to be a real centre of community festive life. The atmosphere changed into that of an authentic popular feast, with people carousing and getting ready for the next part of the celebration, which was masque carolling through the village. The masque troupe is locally called Capra (The Goat). It is an assembly of dancers and instrument players who perform folk dances and drama, with the aim of symbolically putting an end to the ancient year and starting over a new one, which is meant to be perfect in every aspect of community and individual life. The troupes go from one house to another, wearing the Capra (Goat) mascoide, along with some heavy, furry masques such as the ones called Moșnegii (Old Men), ritual attires such as Ursarul (the Bear Master), grotesque ones, such as Țiganca (The Gipsy Woman, always performed by a man) or frightening ones, such as Lupul (the Wolf) and Moartea (Death). This paper contains the first part of the description of the present ritual New Year's Eve masque carolling in Țibănești (Iași county) and some hypotheses on the dynamics of the phenomenon. The topic will be continued in a future article, where the second part of the description and the conclusions will be delivered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to pay homage at the aniversary of Sanda Golopenția- Eretescu, Professor Emeritus at the Department of French Studies, Brown University of Providence USA, a writer, linguist, semiotician, ethnologist and translator. We focus on her professional activity, especially on papers that were published in translation into the Hungarian language in Romania and Hungary. In the present article I discuss translations of her work that were published in Hungarian as well as reviews published in Hungarian volumes and journals that appeared at the height of Romanian structuralism, a period when Hungarian philologists showed a special interest towards the research carried by Sanda Golopenția in the 1960's and 1970's, i.e. the period before she left communist Romania. I searched for proof and results of the Hungarian – Romanian co-operation and of the attention paid by Hungarian critics, whether they knew Romanian or not, towards the Romanian theoretical and critical literary phenomenon from that period. I revealed especially the cooperation between Sanda Golopenția-Eretescu and the Hungarian ethno-semiotician Vilmos Voigt and the prestigious Hungarian journal "Etnographia", as well as that between her and outstanding personalities of Hungarian philology in Romania: Gáspár Miklós Tamás, Zoltán Szabó, Olga Murvai. After Sanda Golopenția-Eretescu left Romania in 1980, neither the Hungarian publications, nor the Romanian journals showed any interest in her activity. However, the notes, reviews, translations she wrote during the two decades in which she focused on structuralism and semiotics, either in relation with literature and linguistics, or with the research of folklore were known in the Hungarian cultural environment. Adding to the hundreds of references from her professional bibliography previous to her exile from her native country; they offer a perspective on the intellectual collaboration between Romanian and Hungarian specialists in the field from a period of – apparent – political detente during the communist era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper, we aim to analyze several aspects linked to the content of the legal provisions, communication of law and theories about the truth. As social beings, our lives take place in groups and we rely on others and on society to achieve our individual purposes. In order to function properly, the society must be guided by a set of rules that are known and understood by all its the members. In the process of enactment and application of the law, a language is used to transmit the information. The language doesn't include all the intellectual input and the entire idea of the legislator, but there is no other way to communicate the rule. And, without communication, the law cannot be known, understood and obeyed. We present in the paper important arguments regarding the communication of the norms, the lack of precision of any language, and the necessity that the law to reflect reality. Law is the necessary frame for a quality life in society. Through a proper legal system, we are able to achieve our personal goals, search for happiness, keep our health, raise our children and so on. We also referred in the paper to the philosophical theories regarding the truth, as we consider that they are important for a good establishment of the law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to shed new light on an ethos of the subject as psychoanalysis conceives it. In order to do so, the paper is addressing Marc Richir's phenomenology and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis. The hypothesis that it makes use of is that there are some common grounds between the two theoretical approaches, especially regarding the problem of the self. Both theories support the idea that the self, i.e. self-image, represents a liminal point between the registers of the Imaginary and the Real. Thus, it represents a decisive point in approaching (or not) an ethics of the Real, facilitated by anguish and language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2020's are to be named (if not already) the pandemia times. The present paper does not aim to analyses the changes and consequences that this sanitary crisis has produced, or to determine possible scenarios about how the world (in all its dynamics and layers) will survive in the post-pandemia period. There are other academics and (already) plenty of scientific papers that tackled these issues (the social sciences scientific community has responded almost instantly to the COVID-19 effects). This research paper contains the idea of science that social research encompasses by analysing (from a socio-anthropologist eye and based on professional training) the data circulation vortex during the first semester of 2020. The results and the manner of research (constrained by the urgency and isolation restrictions), respectively the quest for the discrepancies between the information offered by governments and international organisations, and by scientific inquiries and academic sources, represent an original perspective on data legitimacy when used for the public. This paper's main aim is not to achieve the comfortable status of the academic "likes" (converted in citations and indexes). It aspires to become a manifesto about the approximation and the substitution of the daily life with the computed (technologically-mediated) narratives about it!. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to illustrate examples of exercises that are used during the practical course of Romanian as a foreign language. The course is entitled Oral and Written Communication I and is taught during the first semester of the preparatory year of Romanian language for foreign citizens at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. The exercises address topics pertaining to the first concepts assimilated in any foreign language (family, personal space/home, the university context, daily activities in personal, social or special situations - at the doctor's, travel, etc.), both orally and in writing. For more clarity and accuracy, the paper relies on examples taken from the personal experience of teaching a group of 25 foreign students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the situation of the food supply in Sibiu given the war conditions of the years 1939-1945. The author shows that the population of Sibiu increased suddenly after the Vienna Diktat from 30 August 1940, due to which Romania was obligated to give up the northern part of Transylvania to Hungary, because the University of Cluj, with over 3 000 people, moved here. Simultaneously, many refugees came from the ceded area. On 22 June 1941 Romania went to war along with Germany and its allies against the Soviet Union. The state of war caused difficulties in supplying food to the city's population. The paper presents the changes that took place in supply and consumption, price evolution, consumption limits, food quality, the population's reaction to the shortcomings in supply. Another aspect presented is the situation of public consumption supply: entertainment venues (restaurants, terraces, pubs etc.), as well as the canteens for pupils and students, for military units, for civil and military hospitals, which were numerous in the city on the Cibin river during the war. The author tries to outline the specifics of the supply and consumption situation in Sibiu and to compare it to the state of affairs of those years in other urban centers throughout the country and even from cities in Germany, the great power that dominated Europe in those years. The author concludes that the supply of Sibiu in the years 1939-1945 was seriously disturbed during the war years, although there were no battles in the city. Authorities did not find solutions for the satisfactory supply and equitable distribution of food, the lives of the people of Sibiu being thus much harder than those of the inhabitants of other less industrialized urban centers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main issue of this paper is the study of a group of amphorae of Heraclea Pontica origin which have been found during the late antique workshop excavations in the ancient theatre of Prusias ad Hypium. According to Memnon of Heraclea, the ancient city of Prusias ad Hypium was established by the Greek immigrants who were founders of the ancient city of Heraclea Pontica. Although the city joined the Bithynian Kingdom during the reign of King Prusias I, the most brilliant and powerful age of the city was during the Roman Empire period. The ancient theatre is the best preserved ancient architectural ruin in the city, although today most of the ancient city remains are under the modern town of Konuralp. It seems to be a Greek theatre due to its location on the slope but the use of vaults and its semi-circular plan and dramatic multi-stores stage building reflect its Roman character. In this context, this theatre is a Greco-Roman building and thus, it can be accepted as a transitional form between Hellenistic and Roman theatres. The archaeological excavations which have been conducted in the theatre since 2013 brought to light several archaeological structures belonging to the period when the theatre was abandoned. Among these remains, a structure belonging to a late antiquity workshop (specialised in bone tools production) is important. The commercial amphoras, found among other ceramic categories inside the workshop, represent a group of finds that should be evaluated and constitute the subject of the present paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For some ones, the topic of the paper may sound somehow outdated (“content” and “form”), since at least the tradition of the last century avoided the first and reduced the second to formal or rhetorical figures. The paper highlights, however, that the mentioned couple is not only present in a ubiquitous manner in the entire process of thinking/speaking/understanding, but also in the sophisticated theories about knowledge and language. The problems of the content of concepts and judgements are examined through the development of the logic of form and content in the popular intuition, the analytic philosophy of language, the relationship between the empirical and the abstract concepts, the abstract and concrete concepts. The truth is when we come to understand as comprehensively as possible the concrete object (in its particular characteristics). And this means that, first, we must name the way (i.e., formal) we understand the concrete object. The form is the set of patterns or formal frames, criteria, milestones without which there is no knowledge and which, therefore, have autonomy from the contents of knowledge. While in the modes of knowledge, the object to be known is the content to which the concept refers; thus, the content is the set of meanings of a concept. Therefore, it demands the transcendence of the unilateral view of things, that is, of concepts and judgments. The paper gives many current examples/concepts/problems that transform the apparently dry theories about cognition and comprehension into clear, familiar understanding. The content of knowledge is the synthesis of information and interpretation, involving overcoming and evaluating them from the point of view of certain criteria. From a concrete point of view, the criteria are historical, so the understanding is historical. But the criteria also have a methodological aspect, so universal, because only in this way it is possible to establish the meanings. The content is the one who refers to the telos, that is, to the complex purpose of the idea and its communication: therefore also to the purpose of the form. The telos of a concept is its content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reopens the discussion concerning the meaning of linguistic imaginary, a fairly new concept in Romanian scholarship that has been interpreted in three ways. Most Romanian researchers have been focused on this term from a metalinguistic perspective, according to which linguistic imaginary matches the speaking subject's representations on the language. In addition to this quite well-known approach, Elena Platon acknowledges another one, suggested by ethnolinguistics and cognitive linguistics. To be more precise, the aim of our study is to reveal the course imaginary from an ethnolinguistic point of view, provided by an author from Poland, Johanna Ewa Cholewa. According to her theory, each word has both cultural and linguistic images. From such a perspective, we will try to reconstruct the linguistic image of the concept „course”. In order to identify and interpret the linguistic representations of the course, our present paper aims to analyse the following elements: etymology, semantic problems, synonyms, derivatives, phonetics, proverbs, and expressions containing the word „course” and its derivatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering degradation and sexuality in its quest of reviving the readers need for representation, this paper challenges the possibilities of textual regeneration, problematizing the narrative practice as a way of voicing the multiple interfaces of the human body. Namely, through motifs like: the masturbating child, incest, sexual freedom of the mentally ill and the manipulator, this study explores the overlappings entailed in some of Ian McEwan's novels, such as: Cement Garden, Amsterdam, On Chesil Beach, The Confort of Strangers and Atonement. Furthermore, the paper will talk about sexuality and degradation using a series of concepts as the image that encrypts the directions of limit. Lastly, this paper will present the process of limit including the evolution of the author's narrative style and the way he treats schizoid universes through solutions such as degradation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims to highlight the concept of authenticity as a core and first objective of the 80`s literary generation with an emphasis on the prosaic sector of the time. In a hermeneutic approach, the paper relies on the presentation of a "new authenticity" differently marked from the modernist approaches and which is reflected in the concrete plan of writing, whose ontological investment or interaction with the (i)mmediated reality is attributed to the experimental context, but especially to the textualist paradigm of the generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the “Greek” (videlicet Aromanian) trading houses' archives as a paradigmatic sample, this paper advocates for the proper physical organisation of the archival material specific to old microeconomic entities, and for exorcising the traps set by collections. In order to dismantle the resistances that dictate maintaining these archives in a deficient statu quo, from the perspective of both scientific valorisation (constrained by the graeca non leguntur palaeographic obstacle) and archival treatment (marked by the antagonistic pairs: trading houses versus personal/family archival fonds, accounting books versus manuscripts, archival fonds versus collections), the paper presents the current state of the art and the archival research methodologies (which are not spared, in their turn, from vicious touches), along with successfully employed or failed archival steps, objectives, methods, principles, and remedies. The virtual documentary reassembly ‒ a solution that is useful for research, albeit a compromise one ‒ is displayed in the “Annexes”, by relocating the accounting books into their matrix-fonds and coalescing the series of archives of the Euro-Balkan trading houses that operated in the Romanian territories during the XVIIth ‒ XIXth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the question of how and how much of the Romanian folk traditions related to New Yearʼs Eve celebration have been transmitted from the last century to the present days in some Moldavian villages from the Eastern part of the country. It brings into discussion the specific alterations induced by communist cultural politics during the second half of the twentieth century, among which the most relevant for the ethnographic field seems to be the establishment of official festivals such as Cântarea României, comprising bits and pieces of popular rituals, reshaped by the former political regime according to its ideological criteria. In order to evaluate the present situation, in 2015 I conducted a field research in Țibănești and the surrounding villages in Iași county. There are two basic approaches in ethnographic research: studying the literature previously written on a particular topic, and backing it with specific fieldwork. This paper reflects the sequential use of both methods, which enables the results of one approach to respond in a better understanding of the other. Masque carolling and offering symbolic, as well as proper gifts on New Yearʼs Eve – a custom most germane to traditional life in small communities – represent the main focus of the first part of my paper. Romanian ethnology has identified five traditional ways of carolling, of which masque carolling seems to be the most ancient. Romanian term colinda means both the custom of wandering through the village on festive occasions such as Easter, Christmas Eve, New Yearʼs Eve or individual celebrations, in order to offer gifts and propitious wishes, and the songs sung on Christmas Eve by children or/and adults who go from one house to another bringing the good news of Nativity or awakening various mythological elements in the memory of the community. On the one hand, the continuity of such practices is guaranteed by the long-term mechanisms of tradition. On the other hand, communist authorities have interfered by trying to recreate the folklore and the popular culture according to their ideological criteria. Thus, a new series of (official) celebration emerged, aimed at replacing the old, untamed, and seemingly “irrational” popular ones. Official festivals turned peasants into stage performers. Could those peasants have regained their ancient heritage by now, after decades of ideological forced compliance? Applying this conceptual framework, I expected to find on the ethnographic field the results of merging the two sets of practices. Indeed, the celebration of New Yearʼs Eve started in 2015 at Țibănești as an official contest among peasant companies delivering a stage performance. Then, once the winners had been declared and rewarded by the local authorities, the “performers” got off the stage and gathered at the local pub, which proved to be a real centre of community festive life. The atmosphere changed into that of an authentic popular feast, with people carousing and getting ready for the next part of the celebration, which was masque carolling through the village. The masque troupe is locally called Capra (The Goat). It is an assembly of dancers and instrument players who perform folk dances and drama, with the aim of symbolically putting an end to the ancient year and starting over a new one, which is meant to be perfect in every aspect of community and individual life. The troupes go from one house to another, wearing the Capra (Goat) mascoide, along with some heavy, furry masques such as the ones called Moșnegii (Old Men), ritual attires such as Ursarul (the Bear Master), grotesque ones, such as Țiganca (The Gipsy Woman, always performed by a man) or frightening ones, such as Lupul (the Wolf) and Moartea (Death). This paper contains the first part of the description of the present ritual New Yearʼs Eve masque carolling in Țibănești (Iași county) and some hypotheses on the dynamics of the phenomenon. The topic will be continued in a future article, where the second part of the description and the conclusions will be delivered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an overview of the language for a specific purpose, especially of the one used in Technical English. General English and English for Specific Purposes are apparently equivalent but we need to highlight that each of them has its own style and vocabulary. We can speak of style in education, medicine, management, leadership, industry and many other fields of activity, but this paper will address the technical vocabulary from the field of oil and gas industry. Thus, we try to make reference to the semantic fields of the different words in our specific field, compared to the common language, in order to notice the lexical structure of the words considering the etymological, semantic, phraseological, verbal or even word formation. However, we must emphasize that, unlike the general language, the technical language consists of specific terms and concepts with limited use, being understood and used only by the specialists in the field of the oil industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Symbols represent a means by which complex ideas difficult to verbalize in natural languages are conveyed to the people who belong to the same culture; they agglutinate rich series of metaphors or associations. This paper starts from the assumption that initial 'primitive' human emotional reactions to nature turned into mythological explanations and eventually into beliefs conveyed from a generation to another. Stone as a symbol is as old as mankind. It has preserved its original significance: the rock and the hole in the rock (grotto, cave) represented a protective space associated to the womb, Mother Earth. Stone signifies strength, resilience, durability, eternity and points to the passage from the profane to the sacred, as can be illustrated by oronyms and toponyms in Romanian culture. As building material for shelters, places of worship and graves, stone has become a symbol of cultural transmutation assimilated to the act of creation and to the passage from obscurity to light. Stone represents the result of global perception which does not follow the logic of conceptual reasoning; it is multidimensional and communicates with other symbols while expressing various relationships: ephemeral-eternal, history-eternity, immanenttranscendent. This paper investigates which particular meanings have been attached to the symbol of stone in Romanian culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper aims to investigate if and how the theoretical assumptions and the ideological discourse of the Romanian literary historian and cultural figure E. Lovinescu can still be read and interpreted within contemporary, transnational frames and with new methodological tools. I propose for this study to discuss a couple of volumes, each one engaging in a different kind of approach to E. Lovinescu's impact on the Romanian cultural field, in order to test the viability of his theories, especially from a sociological and political point of view. The goal of my paper shall be to open a discussion on the ongoing role that canonical literary historians such as E. Lovinescu have on how we study, to date, Romanian literature, while also framing the rather unknown faces of socio-political discourse that this particular cultural figure has proposed over the time, aiming to present how they shaped the circulation of foreign ideologies and literary formulas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hysterical functional manifestations and hysterical personalities present, as Cottraux (2003) puts it, "a continuous spectacle" that translates into excessive emotional responses and a constant attempt to attract attention. Some traits, such as reflection, self-control and systematization are poorly expressed while expressiveness and exhibitionism are prominent, with the world around them being perceived as a „chorus of admirers". In the WHO classification, ICD-10 states that dissociative disorders of movement and sensation can be diagnosed when motor and voluntary activity disorders and sensations that mimic a neurological disease occur. The paper presents „George", who is a 17-year-old teenager from a rural area, a 10th grade student at a Vocational School, who was admitted for the second time in 2 months to the Child Neuropsychiatry Clinic and Adolescent Cluj-Napoca for a symptomatology manifested by severe pain in the lower limbs, especially in the thighs, walking impossible, being brought urgently with Salvarea lying on a stretcher. All these symptoms appeared in the same context of the conflicts with the neighbors, the adolescent presenting anxiety (18 in the HADS test-over 11 being pathological). During hospitalization, suggestive military psychotherapy was performed during two sessions, after which the symptoms subsided. The onset of symptoms was 2 months before the time of this hospitalization, with gait disorders followed by the inability to walk due to conflicts between his family and a neighboring family. He was investigated neurologically without finding anything pathological and underwent various drug treatments (anxiolytics), but without palpable results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over 5,000 years, various crops have used these herbal oils for a variety of health problems. The history of the use of essential oils has its roots in antiquity in countries such as Persia, India, Egypt, China. Essential oils are generally formed during the flowering period of plants and accumulate in flowers, fruits, leaves, roots or bark. The chemical composition of an essential oil obtained from a plant differs depending on the parts of the plant from which it was extracted. This paper lists information about Thuia shrubs which includes 5 species of trees, two of which are native to North America (Thuja occidentalis, Thuja plicata) and three from Western Asia (Thuja koraiensis, Thuja standishii, Thuja sutchuenensis). It presents taxonomy, chemical composition, pharmacological properties and notions about Thuja essential oils. The research part presents the identification of volatile compounds in thuja essential oil by GC-MS method and testing the antimicrobial effect of thuja essential oil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The abundance of scientific evidence has shown that many synthetic drugs can cause serious adverse effects in patients. Lately, the search for natural therapeutic agents with low adverse effects has attracted much attention. Considerable interest has been focused on edible and medicinal plants, which play an important role in human and animal diet and have been used for the treatment of diseases since ancient times. Crataegus monogyna Jacq. (hawthorn) is one of the most important edible plants of the Rosaceae family and is used in traditional medicine. Increasing evidence has shown that this plant has various interesting physiological and pharmacological activities due to the presence of different bioactive natural compounds. Moreover, scientific evidence suggests that hail toxicity is negligible. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to provide a review of the available scientific literature on pharmacological activities, as well as the botanical, phytochemical, and clinical impact of C. monogyna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to address the news regarding immunization against COVID-19 almost a year after the start of vaccination campaigns. We have effective vaccines, but we use them suboptimally. Hesitant attitudes toward vaccination lower the rate of immunization. We aim to answer some of the most frequently asked questions about these vaccines, increasing the level of vaccines acceptance. On the other hand, studies provide data that allow specific recommendations for certain groups of people (children, immunocompromised patients etc.), which we will review. We will also comment on the effectiveness of vaccines against viral variants and discuss the importance of booster doses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we want to make a contrastive presentation, in French and in Romanian, upon the way the unstressed pronominal forms having the function of complement in the Dative are used in proverbs. We also want to emphasize the similarities and the differences between the two languages – when we speak about the morpho-syntactic and the semantic levels. Such differences and similarities occur especially when it comes to the possession relationship. Most part of our study is dedicated to presenting some special values of the unstressed pronominal forms in the possessive Dative – including the variant of the Dative with an attributive function and the ethical Dative. We have done this research in order to establish to what extent the use of such constructions varies. We shall also emphasize the specific constructions in Romanian where the Dative has a neutral value and the analytic Dative is thought as a prepositional group in the colloquial language. In order to illustrate this phenomenon in a better way, we relied our study on a corpus of proverbs and adages which were selected from specialized collections and electronic versions of some dictionairies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to present some results of my research regarding the representation of holy women in the Moldavian churches during the reign of Stephen the Great. Most frequently, these images are found in the narthex of the church, a space of lesser spiritual intensity. A general explanation for the depiction of holy women in the narthex is related to the actual presence of women in this space during the mass and to their role in the funerary ritual and the commemoration of the dead which take place here. My study focuses on the cases of Saints Mary of Egypt and Marina the Great Martyr, the two most depicted saints in the Moldavian churches. Firstly, they have a specific way of representation, in a narrative scene. Saint Mary of Egypt is depicted as an ascetic figure together with Saint Zosimas from whom she receives the Holy Eucharist, while Saint Marina wears a red maphorion and is depicted hammering a demon. Secondly, they both have a well-defined place on the church walls, as a result of the hagiography, playing a symbolic role in the economy of space and in the iconographic program. Saint Mary of Egypt has a place in the passageway areas, in interaction with the architecture. Her representation offers an example of repentance for the believers, reassuring them of the mercifulness of God. Saint Marina is placed close to the entrances of the church, may they be doors or windows, for her role in protecting the sacred places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper sets out to explore Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue introducing Andrea del Sarto (1486-1531), a late fifteenth-century Florentine painter who was praised for his technical skills in painting but who lacked a spiritual dimension in his art, compared to the works of his contemporaries, Michelangelo Bunarroti (1475-1564) and Raphael (1483-1520). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper looks at the Romanian relationship between modernism and rural imagination in the Romanian 20th century debates. As in other cases of semi-peripheral or emergent literatures (the general framework builds on contributions from Frederic Jameson, Pascale Casanova and Wai Chee Dimock), the hegemonical pressure of the Eurochronology has put an embargo on rural prose, excluding it from the projects of modernist literature. The study asserts that far from being a collateral symptom of modernity, rural imaginary is essential for understanding its contradictory mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper analyses the emergence of a novel field of interest in the philosophical aesthetics of the 1960s in Romania: the aesthetics of everyday life. As such, it first starts by drawing out an overview of the aesthetic discussions in 1950s Romania by closely reading several articles from the main philosophical journal of the period: Cercetări filozofice. In this regard, I focus on two main aspects, namely the theory of reflection, which was the guiding principle of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics, and the theory of the social function of art. Further on I will sketch out how these two aspects defined the main traits of the local aesthetics of everyday life, a topic which took the center fold of aesthetic interest for almost a decade, and which has ever since the early 2000s found renewed interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper shows the impact of the InSitu measurements on the fitting of a hearing aid. The InSitu audiogram is obtained by using the hearing aid as you would use an audiometer in order to obtain results that are not influenced by the volume or shape of the ear canal. Using this procedure, we can avoid having an over or under amplified fitting for the patient’s real needs. If we have differences between the two audiograms, then we will also have a similar increase in gain following am­ plification. At differences of 5, 10, 15 and 20 dB, we will obtain a positive of negative growth by 12%, 24%, 36% and 48% in gain. Any variation of the gain other the one needed by the patient will automatically generate a drop in intelligibility and can even generate a sound so distorted that the patient will refuse to wear the hearing aid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No other man in history has influenced his era as decisively as Napoleon Bonaparte did. His life was that of an exceptionally gifted man, who knew how to make the most of all the opportunities offered by history. In this paper, we will approach the problem of dentistry, during the period when France was managed by the exceptional statesman, Napoleon Bonaparte, presenting in the second part of this material, the biographies of some personalities of French dentistry from that period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caracteristicile fibrelor determină posibilităţile de utilizare a speciilor lemnoase. Dimensiunile fibrelor influenţează obţinerea celulozei, durabilitatea şi proprietăţile fizico-mecanice. S-au investigat lungimea şi lăţimea fibrelor, lăţimea lumenului şi grosimea peretelui celular pentru şase specii lemnoase tropicale aparţinând a trei familii (Meliaceae, Sterculiaceae and Ulmaceae) pornind de la aşchii de 20x2x2mm din duramen, care au fost delignificate în acid acetic glacial 1:1 şi peroxid de hidrogen (la 60°C), spălate şi colorate. Lungimea fibrelor a variat de la 0.79mm pentru Holoptelea grandis (Ulmaceae) la 1.88mm pentru Khaya ivorensis (Meliaceae), similar cu media de 2mm pentru fibrele speciilor de foioase tropicale şi lungimea specifică fibrelor pentru celuloză (0.65-1.2mm). Speciile din familia Meliaceae au avut o lungime a fibrelor moderată (1.61mm), cele din familia Ulmaceae o lungime medie (1.19mm), iar cele din familia Sterculiaceae de 1.59mm. Specia Cedrella odorata (Meliaceae) a avut fibre late (36.5µm) cu lumen de 27.6µm, Celtis milbraedii (Ulmaceae) a avut fibre înguste (17.49µm) cu lumen de (8.97µm), toate variind în intervalul specific fibrelor pentru celuloză (9-40µm). Peretele celular al fibrelor a variat de la 3.31µm (pentru H. grandis) la 5.49µm (pentru Pterygota macrocarpa, Sterculiaceae) adică in intervalul specific fibrelor pentru celuloză (2.90-5.15µm). Grosimea peretelui celular pentru Meliaceae şi Sterculiaceae a fost gros (> 4µm) şi mediu (2-4µm) pentru Ulmaceae. Raportul Runkel de la 2.65 (pentru C. odorata) la 3.9 (pentru C. milbraedii) este mai mare decât cel specific fibrelor pentru celuloză (1.25). Coeficientul de flexibilitate (între 75-50) şi dimensiunile fibrelor pentru lemnul speciilor din cele trei familii indică faptul că speciile sunt potrivite pentru fabricarea celulozei. S-a preconizat ca industria construcţiilor să exploateze caracteristicile fibrelor de lemn pentru aplicaţii în structuri şi pentru produse pe bază de fibre de lemn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genetic disorders in small animals represent a well investigated area, with numerous genetic events being described along with their specific mechanism. However, for many of those, the diagnostic workflow tends to be tedious and prohibitive from the cost perspective, with costly instruments and reagents. Luckily, there are situations where the diagnosis involves the detection of relatively easy to reveal genetic events, such as point mutations or small indels. The present paper describes the implementation of a Real-Time PCR High-Resolution Melting HRM protocol for canine degenerative myelopathy diagnostic, with numerous advantages regarding sensitivity and robustness as well as ease of use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Septoplasty is one of the most common surgical techniques in the ENT field, and the main reason why it is performed is nasal obstruction. The present paper aims to address the main types of incisions made to approach the nasal septum, with their advantages and disadvantages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]