5th Interdisciplinary Conference at The Polis Institute. October 5-7, 2021.
Co-organized by Polis – The Jerusalem Institute of Languages and Humanities, Johns Hopkins University, University of Hamburg, and University of Notre Dame, the Conference From Logos to Person gathered scholars from the fields of philosophy, linguistics, philology, literature, anthropology, and theology to examine the notions of logos and person and their rich interactions throughout history.
The Conference explored how the use of speech shapes our identity and our attitude towards individuals and human communities, studying the rich history of the Greek notions of λόγος and πρόσωπον, and of the traditional Latin versions verbum and persona. Early Christian writers used both terms when discussing the revelation of a Trinity of Persons in God. Arabic translators chose the words كلمة and أقنوم to translate the Greek original. The Hebrew Bible uses the words דבר and פנים to refer to God’s act of creation and when interacting with human beings. The contributions to the Conference emphasized the place and role of the four linguistic traditions mentioned in forging this notion.
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For the Fourth Polis Institute Interdisciplinary Conference, held on April 16-17, 2018, the over-arching theme took a pedagogical turn: "Transmitting a Heritage: The Teaching of Ancient Languages from Antiquity to the 21st Century." In this year's edition of the Conference, more than thirty scholars and language educators gathered and/or submitted papers for the Conference's various talks and presentations that covered the teaching of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew through the centuries, learning how to write in ancient Sumer, the depiction of Latin teachers in film and historical themes, among others. Four continents were represented in this Conference with scholars coming from the Netherlands, Croatia, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria, Poland, Sweden, France, Italy, the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Israel, and Japan. A book containing the proceedings is to be published in 2021.
In 1916, three years after the death of Ferdinand de Saussure, the Cours de linguistique générale (CLG) was published in Geneva. This foundational work marked the beginning of a discipline that has profoundly influenced the development of the humanities ever since.
What sources influenced the CLG? Do the main concepts of this seminal work have the same validity today as they did in 1916? How has the recent development of language sciences influenced its reception? How does this text account for meaning and communication within the context of speech (parole)?
In order to explore these questions, one hundred years after the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's seminal work on General Linguistics, Polis--The Jerusalem Institute of Languages and Humanities held an interdisciplinary conference that gathered 14 international specialists from various disciplines: general linguistics, pragmatics, philology, dialectology, translation studies, terminology, and philosophy.
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Created and developed by the Ptolemaic kings, the Library of Alexandria was regarded as the world's main center of scholarship from the 3rd century BC until at least the reign of Cleopatra (48-30 BC). The dream to establish a gigantic library that could assemble all known texts of the Hellenistic period, the outstanding achievements of the scholars who worked inside its walls, and, finally, the mysteries surrounding its disappearance, have bestowed an almost mythic status on this monumental library.
Where was the Royal Library exactly located? What kind of texts were kept in that library? To what extent did the Library of Alexandria become a meeting point for different languages and cultures? Should we distinguish between the Museum and the Library from an institutional point of view? Were the book collections housed in separate buildings? What caused the destruction of those collections and how much was lost? Why did some ancient authors remain silent about the Library's disappearance?
Polis - The Jerusalem Institute of Languages and Humanities held an international conference to seek answers to these questions. The 2015 conference on the Library of Alexandria gathered historians, archaeologists, and linguists, as well as specialists on the Septuagint and on Greek literature. A book presenting the proceedings of the interdisciplinary conference was later published.
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Despite the fact that writing has arisen independently many times in various different regions of the world, including Egypt, Sumer, China, and Mexico, the concept of the alphabet was invented only once, somewhere between Egypt and Phoenicia, with all known alphabets going back to this single source. While it is possible, up to a certain point, for scholars to provide an answer as to how the alphabet came about, it is much more difficult to understand the cause of its origin: why did it come about?
In February 2013, Polis – the Jerusalem Institute of Languages and Humanities invited some of the leading experts studying the origins of the alphabet to Jerusalem for an interdisciplinary debate on this topic. Although the birth of the alphabet has been the subject of numerous international conferences and symposia, studies offering a linguistic, sociological or psychological perspective on the development of writing are extremely rare.
A volume (click here to access the publication page) was published in 2015, bringing together the proceedings of this conference. It shows that a broad consensus is emerging concerning the main factors and circumstances that surrounded the birth of the alphabet, accounting for such facets as the date of the first-known alphabetic inscriptions, the cultures involved in its invention, and the influence of the linguistic structure of the language spoken by the inventors.
Ancient Greek
Biblical Hebrew
Latin
Classical Syriac
Coptic
Modern Hebrew
Modern Standard Arabic
Spoken Arabic
Akkadian
Ancient Egyptian
Eblaite
Elamite
Ge'ez
Hurrian