Art-historians of our time have concerned themselves mainly with research into the literary and philosophic sources of Renaissance works; this leads to a detailed philological commentary on its broader themes. However, it may be noted that neither iconology nor semiotics have yet observed the existence of various types of figuration in the plastic arts of that period.

Everything that happens that we experience outwardly, or even inwardly, persists in being strictly and unavoidably “what it is”: a chair is a chair; perceptivity is perceptivity. This self-identification with itself of every phenomenon and every object is a major ontological miracle whose persistent recurrence causes it to pass un-noticed.

The problem of culture may rightly be regarded as one of the cardinal problems of the 20th century. Why is it that in this century sociologists, philosophers, historians, anthropologists, art critics and many others have been dealing, ever more intensively, with general questions of philosophy and culture? Why has “culturology” arisen as a science and is being ever more widely established?

It is not impossible, it is almost inevitable, to conjecture the existence of laws so general that their jurisdiction would be affected neither by the nature nor the scale nor the level of their object—so that they would apply equally to the relations of numbers or of inert or organic matter, to the progression of rigorous thought or the flights of an amused or charmed fancy. If such laws did not govern the whole extent of the real, possible or conceivable world, or if, although autonomous, they could not be inferred from one another by some system of relations or transfers, I fear that human reflection, in spite of its partial successes, might seem condemned to reveal itself vain, since gaps, or fundamental absences of relationship, could put its cogency into question in a decisive fashion.

The discussion about the use of computers in the legal world began the year the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener was born. His fundamental work, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and in the Machine, was in fact first published in 1948. His suggestion there of legal problems as cybernetic problems probably influenced the article published the following year by Lee Loevinger, in which one found jurimetrics, i.e., the use of computers in the field of law, spoken of for the first time.

In the course of the last fifty years, there has been a slow, but continuous and decisive, transformation of the Iranian family.

In its traditional form, the Iranian family shows three basic characteristics: a certain inbreeding between relatives, a sense of masculine primacy, and a special attachment to the land where the father was born. The woman enjoys no social, professional or political freedom, while the male, the only breadwinner and the only one entrusted with any responsibility, is considered master after God. To belong to a kinship group, a lineage, represents for him an attachment to a respected, well-defined trunk, which guarantees the life and continuity of the family and grants him a place in society. Among the nomads, as well as in the villages, we see the family as the unit of production and of consumption. At the same time, in the cities, the family is not only the unit of consumption, but in the work of craftsmen (which is flourishing in the urban centers) we still see retained the familial aspect. This rule finds its origins not only in Moslem law and in the post-Islamic history of Iran, but also in the traditions and religions of ancient Persia.