France grapples with fundamental questions regarding republican identity and individual rights. This is vividly illustrated by its policies related to the wearing of the niqab and burqa. In his book, “The Republic, Secularism, and Security: France versus the Burqa and the Niqab” Raphael Cohen-Almagor addresses these issues by exploring the historical, theoretical, and contemporary dimensions of secularism.

The present article starts from the assumption that the dominant faction of the authors of the first phase of analytic philosophy – influenced mainly by the work of Gottlob Frege – had a more or less delimited idea of what logic should be, and that this idea founded their own ideology, understood as a standardizing set of ideas about meaning and its scientific parameters. We argue that devising principles for truth-value assignment based on semantic parameters (for effective selection of well-formed-formulas) has led to an ideological view that is in harmony with both empiricist-positivist dogma, as well as popular sociological perspectives about the conditions for mutual communication and understanding. These conditions are intended to parallel the standards for evidence and inference available in the natural sciences and the criteria for sociological standardization of shared assumptions for effective communicative exchange. In a short appendix we conclude the article by unfolding some perspectives for an alternative view of the concept of meaning, possible thanks to the flexibility of logical parameters (through non-classical logic and semantics) and the critique of the dogmas of the first phase of analytic philosophy (Quine).

Amongst the many achievements of Peter Brown may be included the ways in which he has taught us to understand and value the testimony of the Saints Lives and other hagiographic texts of Late Antiquity that often seemed baffling to scholars of earlier generations. On the other hand, sa small number of these hagiographic texts can appear so transparently historical in the nature and details of their content, as not to seem in need of such careful interpretation. In the western Mediterranean the Vitas Sanctorum Patrum Emeretensium is an outstanding example of such a work, that has been used to throw light on a range of topics, from medicine to architecture, beyond the confines of the events in later sixth century Mérida that it describes, and largely without raising any questions as to the reliability of its narrative. However, when this can be compared with that provided by other, more clearly contemporary historiographical sources, its account usually proves to be erroneous or misleading. This article reopens questions long thought closed, or which have been ignored, as to the origins, nature and purpose of the work, so as to enable the strengths and weaknesses of its evidence be better understood.