Em suma

Trivium

Randolph Starn. Who's Afraid of the Renaissance? in The Past and Future of Medieval Studies (John van Engen ed.) University of Notre Dame Press (1994).

There is some risk that histories of "Old Europe" would become merely accumulative, antiquarian, and annalistic, or like the new ethnic republics, fiercely separatist and partisan. Histories post-modern style, where everything wrought in the past is at once indiscriminately and historical and available in the present, have no anachronisms, and this would put historians out of work. Then too, the absence of overarching narratives promotes a kind of historiographical horror vacui and the proliferation of any number of particular tales. I don't know which prospect is more alarming: that historians will run out of new topics or that they will come up with ever more trivial ones.

the great tradition of medievalism

Randolph Starn. Who's Afraid of the Renaissance? in The Past and Future of Medieval Studies (John van Engen ed.) University of Notre Dame Press (1994).

Both medieval and Renaissance studies and their specialized constituencies have more or less distinct traditions, institutions, canonical texts, pedagogical styles, and so forth. I suspect that many scholars would gladly bid good riddance to some of these, though we would probably not agree about which were expendable. We sometimes take on the attributes of the people we study (and vice versa); the fact is that the stock medieval roles do not appeal to me very much, and I can imagine that, say, the persona of the Renaissance prince has limited attractions. Whether or not this is a liability or a virtue, Renaissance studies has fewer technical requirements, supposing that medievalists still do train in the languages, paleography, diplomatic, codicology, and other "auxiliary sciences" of the great tradition of medievalism. Many Renaissance scholars are like medievalists with insufficient training, but medievalists for their part, owe some of their impressive scholarly discipline to the fact that they have so little material to work with.

Mediævalia

Lee Patterson. The Return to Philology in The Past and Future of Medieval Studies (John van Engen ed.) University of Notre Dame Press (1994).

I want to suggest, in other words, that the uselessness of philology  —its indefensible unjustifiability— scandalizes contemporary literary studies because it represents its own greatest fear: that the whole enterprise cannot be justified in terms of social effectiveness. If social transformation is our goal, then is teaching Toni Morrison really more effective than teaching Chaucer, especially when compared with a direct involvement with social problems? It is my own hunch that direct social activism is probably of more importance than most of the things we do in our classrooms and certainly than all of the things we do in our studies. Is it not possible, in other words, that the institutional neglect of medieval studies derives in some measure from a guilty conscience? That the medievalist is an awkward reminder that the social changes so many support and desire will require something other than intellectual work?

If these are unpersuasive words coming from a medievalist, let me cite a more acceptable source. "As writers, teachers, or intellectuals, " writes Henry Louis Gates,

Most of us would like to claim greater efficacy for our labors than we're entitled to. These days, literary criticism likes to think of itself as "war by other means." But it should start to wonder: Have its victories come too easily? The recent turn toward politics and history in literary studies has turned the analysis of texts into a marionette theater of the political, to which we bring all the passions of our real-word commitments. And that's why it is sometimes necessary to remind ourselves of the distance from the classroom to the streets. Academic critics write essays, "readings" of literary, where the bad guys (for example, racism or patriarchy) lose, where the forces of oppression are subverted by the boundless powers of irony and allegory that no prison can contain, and we glow with hard-won triumph. We pay homage to the marginalized and demonized, and it feels almost like we've righted a real-world injustice. I always think about the folktale about the fellow who killed seven with one blow.

Reino Neovisigótico

Fonte: Observador: Há um problema com a nossa Constituição? 

Nos termos de um conceito fundamental de constituição, a elaboração de uma nova constituição pressupõe a transição para um novo regime ou forma de convivência política, em princípio desencadeada por uma revolução, um processo de integração federal ou um fenómeno de desagregação política. A transição tanto pode dizer respeito aos valores constitucionais ― por exemplo, a substituição do Estado de direito democrático por um Estado autoritário ou totalitário ― como à forma, estrutura ou existência do Estado ― por exemplo, a integração de Portugal numa «União Federal dos Povos Europeus» ou a desagregação do Estado português numa constelação de entidades políticas menores (tais como a anexação da região sul pelo Estado islâmico, a formação de uma «República Popular da Madeira» ou a criação nas regiões centro e norte de um «Reino Neovisigótico»). 

Os Académicos

W.B. Yeats. The Scholars.

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;
Wear out the carpet with their shoes
Earning respect; have no strange friend;
If they have sinned nobody knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

Neste tempo

Lady

No, prima a lei tocca!

Samuel Fleischacker. What is Enlightenment? Routledge (2013)

The debate between [the views of Rawls and Habermas] continues to this day, with their followers elaborating their respective positions in great detail. What interests me about the debate is not so much who is right as the fact that two of the most important contemporary schools of political philosophy are competing with one another to show how modest their claims are. In the middle of the twentieth century, philosophical competition went in the opposite direction; the Young Hegelians fought over who could draw the most extreme demands from the nature of reason. There remain, of course, contemporary philosophers who resemble the Young Hegelians more than they do either Rawls of Habermas, and insist that just one conception of the universe and how to live in it follows from reason properly pursued. [...] But on the whole there seems clearly to have been a great cultural shift, in what philosophers aim to do, over the past century and a half.

systema systematum

Samuel Fleischacker. What is Enlightenment? Routledge (2013)

[...] It is essential to the Hegelian dialectic to dissolve anything apparently outside thought into a manifestation of thought once we reflect n how we achieve consciousness of it. Turning matter into an externalization of reason was indeed the prime test case for Hegelian dialectic, and although Feuerbach's insistence that Hegel failed to "overcome the contradiction of thought and being" will resonate with any reader who has felt puzzled or irritated by the Hegelian dialectic, it is hard to see how Feuerbach can succeed in establishing this point within the Hegelian system, without simply refusing to allow the dialectic to play itself out. And indeed Feuerbach's repetitiveness and bald proclamation that, for instance, Hegel misuses the indexical "this" in the sense-certainty chapter of the Phenomenology suggests that he really has no argument that will convince a reader not already disposed to reject the Hegelian system. It is not clear that one can reverse Hegelianism with Hegel's own tools.