Ibn Kahldun (Tunis, 27th May 1332 – Cairo, 17th March 1406) The medieval scholar Edouard Perroy, in his book Le Moyen Age (PUF 1955), refers to the chapters devoted to the 14th century as covering “difficult times”. The period was difficult for Christian Europe (the 100 years war, famine, the Plague) and also for the […]
The West, the Western World and the Occident The west is the cardinal point indicated by the setting sun. In French, the word Occident (from the Latin going down, falling) is at once an alternative to Ouest, and also commonly used to refer to the Western world, while in English it is used only to […]
To know the position of a place on «earth,» we need to know its position in «latitude» and longitude, that is to say its coordinates. In Jules Verne’s well-known novel Les enfants du Capitaine Grant, the Captain’s children have a document eaten away by sea water giving the coordinates of the place where the Captain […]
Latitude is a coordinate that, in association with “longitude”, enables the position of a point on the globe to be known. Certain cosmic characteristics of the movements of the Earth are used for this purpose. The Earth rotates on an axis between the poles joining the only two points that do not move with the […]
A model is a (provisional, of course) outcome in knowledge building. Facts of sensible world may well be registered, bases of assertions may well be translated in axiomatics, as long as knowledge will not be represented by a model that will support, let even say materialise, the view the researcher has built about its study […]