Ana-Stanca Tabarasi-Hoffmann – författare

Geniale Entdeckungen wie auch gewöhnliche Praxen aus den Formal-, Ingenieur- und Naturwissenschaften prägen die Gartenkunst der Neuzeit. Seit jeher reagierte die Gartenkunst auf wissenschaftliche Revolutionen und gab wissenschaftlichen Ergebnissen, Methoden und Stilen einen ästhetischen Ausdruck. Umgekehrt nutzten Macht und Wissenschaft den Garten als Gestaltungsraum, um ihre Leistungsfähigkeit zu demonstrieren, und das Gartenmotiv, um ihre Utopien zu veranschaulichen.Die Beiträge des interdisziplinären Bandes greifen diese vielfältige und spannungsvolle Kooperation erstmalig sowohl im europäischen wie außereuropäischen Kontext auf. Sie machen deutlich, dass eine Gartenforschung, die über die geistig-literarische Kultur hinausgeht, besser imstande ist, die Perioden der Gartengeschichte zu erfassen und die gartenkünstlerischen Werke historisch angemessen zu bewerten.

Baroque novels focus on the psychology of love, while love in the context of nature is the subject of the pastoral genre. Introducing animals to such texts proves unexpectedly challenging. The inclusion of pets in the artistic representation involves a reversal of scale and various modes of comedy, including socio-political satire. At a time when some writers fantasize that children can be born of a human-animal couple, or question the degree of free will and physiological determinism influencing human or animal actions, scientific and philosophical enquiries threaten to reduce the whole animated world to a physiology akin to one of automatons. It is a criticism levied by the sentimentaires against the libertines. Eventually, the study must be initiated with the monitoring of the modulated and variable conceptions of the persons constituting a «couple» and the status of the «pet».

What is life? is a query that never dies… Most modern-day approaches to this enduring question attempt to define what life is, from the standpoint of science, philosophy, religion, medicine, etc. In this book, the conception of life in Western culture is explored through a host of words that has come down to us from antiquity. The author presents a flowing linguistic view of life from the distant past. The etymologic heritage is traced to ancient Greek – to the philosophical foundation of Western thinking. The author pursues a path into prehistory, looking at the development of words from roots in the Indo-European language family, which includes the classical languages of Greek and Latin, as well as English and many other Eurasian languages – ultimately, in the common ancestral Proto-Indo-European (PIE) tongue. In so doing, one finds a shared lexical genealogy underlying the linguistic source of the Western notions of life. The diversity of word-forms that are associative of life in today’s vernacular grew out of a seemingly labyrinthine – though, in reality, a highly integrative – state of comprehension of the affiliation between the mortal human being and the natural environment in the prehistoric PIE civilization. In the logos of ancient Greek thought, emanating from the ancestral mythos of the PIE and early Mediterranean peoples, the ideas of "life" and "nature" were fused into a unified vision of existence – as can be seen in the prehistoric origin of the verb be itself. This book concentrates on more than sheer words; it is also on how we – the living, sentient beings that we are – speak of our very being in space and time in the world around us. The birthright of a conjoined sentience of life and nature has branched-out through the ages of Western thinking. The legacy today is a fossilized linguistic Tree of Life, engendering a plurality of words for "life"; wherein, each of us must create our own meaning of "life."