Defending the House of Austria. Antineutralidad (attributed to Diego Saavedra Fajardo) and Habsburg political thought

A recently discovered political and legal treatise, Antineutralidad (1640), has been attracting attention in scholarship. This paper extensively scrutinizes the dating and authorship of the text. Sources found in several European archives have made it possible to establish with certainty the authorship of Diego Saavedra Fajardo and the precise period in which Antineutralidad was written (between January and March 1640). This determination is backed by a comparative analysis of early modern texts. Lastly, explorations based on themes and inner logic reveal highly sophisticated and superior planning, argumentation, structural cohesion and innovation, qualities which ennabled the author to create an overarching framework to defend the House of Austria, including key German and European political and legal themes, integrated and fused with both Spanish Habsburg and Christian universalist thinking. Keywords: Saavedra Fajardo, early modern political thought, Habsburg studies, imperial ideology, Spanish political philosophy.

Text coherence in Surat (Abs): Referral as a template: التماسك النصي في سورة عبس: الإحالة أنموذجاً

This study seeks to read the Qur’anic text from the standpoint of textual linguistics, and to clarify one of the various textual interconnections in its levels, and to stand at the features of textual cohesion by referring to the pronoun in the Qur’anic text and specifically in Surat Abbas, and after the study, the effect of the pronoun in forming the interconnection between the different verses is revealed. In her objective view that was the story of the great companion who came to the Prophet, may God’s prayers and peace be upon him, and that the Qur’an is the home for purifying souls, in addition to showing the condition of a disbeliever, and finally she expressed God’s blessings on His servants whose thinking leads them to guidance and faith in the Last Day, on the Day of Resurrection Its horrors and reminded the two teams that won and lost the paradise. This study reveals harmony and cohesion between the verses, despite their different topics and the effect of the conscience in shaping the general meaning of the surah, and by this, the effectiveness of its role appears in achieving the structural cohesion of the surah, and the descriptive approach that relies on observing and extrapolating the pronoun in the verses has been followed, and the study reached several results, including the large number Referral by pronouns in the surah, where he found fifty-five pronouns in comparison to other referral tools.

4. Paths and Semipaths: Reconceptualizing Structural Cohesion in Terms of Directed Relations

In a groundbreaking article, Moody and White (2003) introduced the concept of structural cohesion, simultaneously characterizing emergent communities and their internally embedded layers by the number of node-independent paths interconnecting individuals. Like many studies, however, they “corrected” the directionality discovered in some of their data. While often done for important purposes, doing so potentially confounds structural cohesion with unrelated concepts. Some relations, especially those relating to the dynamic aspects of social life, are inherently directed, in whole or in part, and it may prove worthwhile to respect this directionality. In this article, I recast structural cohesion in terms of directed social relations and identify four distinct ways of measuring it. In two example data sets—hiring relations among graduate programs and trust relations among neighborhood residents—I show that only strong embeddedness, a type of structural cohesion emerging from directed relations, proves to be a powerful, robust, independent explanatory factor. I further show that if the directionality in the data in these examples had been “corrected,” the importance of structural cohesion would have been dramatically undervalued.