Luka Boršić – författare

Liburnians and Illyrian Lembs: Iron Age Ships of the Eastern Adriatic explores the origins of two types of ancient ship which appear in the written sources connected with the protohistoric eastern Adriatic area: the ‘Liburnian’ (liburna or liburnica) and the southern Adriatic (Illyrian) ‘lemb’. The relative abundance of written sources suggests that both ships played significant roles in ancient times, especially the Liburnian, which became the main type of light warship in early Roman imperial fleets and ultimately evolved into a generic name for warships in the Roman Imperial period and Late Antiquity. The book provides an extensive overview of written, iconographic and archaeological evidence on eastern Adriatic shipbuilding traditions before the Roman conquest in the late first century BC / early first century AD, questioning the existing scholarly assumption that the liburna and lemb were closely related, or even that they represent two sub-types of the same ship. The analysis shows that identification of the Liburnian liburna and Illyrian lemb as more or less the same ship originates from the stereotypical and essentially wrong assumption in older scholarship that the prehistoric indigenous population of the eastern Adriatic shared the same culture and, roughly, the same identities. The main point made in the book is that two different terms, liburna and lemb, were used in the sources depicting these as two different kinds of ship, rather than being interchangeable terms depicting the same ship type.

Helene Druskowitz (1856–1918) was the first German-speaking women to acquire a PhD in philosophy. She explored free will, religion, metaphysics, and feminism. In the four small books presented in this volume, she discusses previous attempts to replace religion (esp. Comte, Mill, Feuerbach, Lange, Nietzsche, Duboc, Düring, and Salter), advocates replacing religion with knowledge-based worldviews, proposes a dualism between matter and transcendent reality, and argues for moral responsibility without free will.The paperback edition includes the English translations and a comprehensive introduction. The hardcover edition, which includes the English translations, a comprehensive introduction, and the German text, is available here:As a radical feminist, Druskowitz advocated for gender segregation and women-led societal reform, even proposing human extinction as a moral imperative. Her ideas on male dominance and environmental degradation anticipated later eco-feminist thought. Though not widely recognized in her time, Druskowitz’s work offers valuable insights into feminist philosophy, eco-feminism, and discussions on free will and criticisms of religion, providing historical context for these ideas’ evolution in the 20th and 21st centuries.