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A new English translation of a forgotten German text that influenced cultural understanding of money in the early twentieth century.

“On this subject, I only knew the excellent little book by the late Schurtz”—Marcel Mauss, 1914, Les origines de la notion de monnaie.

Heinrich Schurtz’s 1898 book has been a touchstone for economic historians, anthropologists, and philosophers interested in the nature and origins of money in various societies, including Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Marcel Mauss, and Karl Polanyi. In his brief book, Schurtz experimented with concepts about money, going beyond traditional economic paradigms. Drawing on an extensive range of archaeological and ethnographic sources, he reframed a theory of money to include its materiality, symbolic nature, relationship to forms of property, and its dual origin in “outside money” and “inside money.” While it is not well known today, it was important to the theorization of money in the first half of the 20th century and its innovative synthesis offers galvanizing questions and insights into how value relations are formed and how currency systems are interrelated.

The overarching research question which is answered in this study by means of several different angles is: ‘What kind of perspectives could an investigation of the Hebrews sermon o er to the homiletical praxis of people living in arduous times?’. This study want to indicate and illustrate that the Hebrews sermon o ers piercing perspectives for the discipline of homiletics and, moreover, the wider field of practical theology, especially dealing with the formative aspects of worship, preaching, and attitudes. Hebrews is on the God who speaks to us ‘today’ from the very start. But what in the world does it mean when we use this language in our four-dimensional space-time as it is mediated and embodied speech? It turns out that in this canonical sermon many directions for a homiletical theory are to be considered and to process. The three dimensions of time, the value of religious spaces, the art of persuasion, preaching Christ as sacramentum and exemplum which is listener-orientated communication at the same time, the bifurcation of explanation and application, the theology of language. Moreover, Hebrews is connected with the formation and developing of attitudes in the various spheres as cognitive, affective, behavioural, interpersonal, social and political. Each time has its arduous aspects. This study aims to stimulate preaching in these times, sometimes within weary and worn -out congregations, and to encourage the fainthearted preachers and listeners by means of a sermon as a song of love. If you would like to order the book for delivery outside of the Netherlands, please email orders@aup.nl

A groundbreaking analysis of Alfred North Whitehead’s thinking on aesthetics.
 
Though philosopher Alfred North Whitehead did not dedicate any books or articles specifically to aesthetics, aesthetic motifs nonetheless permeate his entire body of work. Despite this, aestheticians have devoted little attention to Whitehead. In this book, four scholars of aesthetics provide another angle from which Whiteheadian aesthetics might be reconstructed. Paying special attention to the notion of aesthetic experience, the authors analyze abstraction versus concreteness, immediacy versus mediation, and aesthetic contextualism versus aesthetic isolationism. The concepts of creativity and rhythm are crucial to their interpretation of Whiteheadian aesthetics. Using these concepts, the book interprets the motif of the processes by which experience is harmonized, the sensation of the quality of the whole, and directedness towards novelty.