This article applies the concept of "cultures of violence" to the long-term violence directed against Christian minorities in the Middle East. It has a lon time perspective going back to the 1840s and the invasions of the Kurdish Leader Badr Khan up until the First World WAr.

The 'end of the world' opens up philosophical questions concerning the very notion of the world, which is a fundamental element of all existential, phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophy. Is the 'end of the world' for us 'somebody's' death (the end of 'being-in-the-world') or the extinction of many or of all (the end of the world itself)? Is the erosion of the 'world' a phenomenon that does not in fact affect the notion of the world as a fundamental feature of all existential-ontological inquiry?

This volume examines the present state of these concerns in philosophy, film and literature. It presents a philosophical hermeneutics of the present state of the world and explores the principal questions of the philosophical accounts of the end of the world, such as finality and finitude. It also shows how literature and cinema have ventured to express the end of the world while asking if a consequent expression of the end of the world is also an end of its expression.

Departing from a critical assessment of the most widespread and initiated definitions of Contemporary Art from the last decade and a half, sustaining a world-wide discourse on contemporary art and contemporaneity, by Arthur Danto, Hans Belting, Peter Osborne and Terry Smith respectively, I will concentrate this talk on two aspects of an immodest proposal captured by the keywords actualization and anachrony. While current discussions on contemporary art are arguably reproducing modernist assumptions on the primacy of novelty and innovation, bolstered by a veiled avant-garde logic, the proposal to regard contemporary art as actualized art upsets not only ideas on what art after postmodernism might mean, but the whole edifice of historicist historiography. An anachronic perspective, a bi- or polychronic situatedness of the work of art, could be used to liberate art from being defined according to its unique descent, and to embrace, instead, a chronologic open to art’s continuous “life” through its successive aesthetic accessions and actualizations in time.