Vergleichende Verhaltensforschung: Grundlagen der Ethologie

Abstract

Based on an extensive personal investigation and study of the ethnographic literature, three methods of observation that are still used for time measurement in various minority nationality areas in South West China are reviewed: observation of the terrestrial environment; observation of the celestial environment; and use of specially constructed instruments. The sequence of developments in time measurement and the motivations behind them are analysed from the point of view of the 'needs theory' of Maslow. Physiological needs are deduced to be dominant among those who obtain food by gathering, fishing and hunting. To fulfil these needs, such people initially consider changes in the terrestrial environment and determine time by observing objects in that environment. Because errors made in determining the time have caused people's safety to be jeopardised, 'safety needs' have emerged as an important motivation for finding more accurate means to measure time. In their search for more refined methods of measurement, attention has shifted from the terrestrial to the celestial environment, using data about the movement of the Sun, Moon and stars to determine time. When human culture becomes complex, people have more complicated needs and require more specific methods of measuring time. Thus, they create artificial instruments to fulfil what Maslow called 'high motivations', such as 'belongingness and love needs', 'esteem needs' and 'the needs for safety actualisation'.     

The Nanjing Massacre and the traumatic memory of Nanjing residents

ABSTRACT

The Nanjing Massacre of 1937 is a historical tragedy that is hard to erase from the collective memory of Nanjing residents. Since 1982, the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall and other monuments have been established as a Chinese response to the Japanese revision of their high school history textbooks, and these facilities have opened a mnemonic channel for the Nanjing people to link history to reality. In the Nanjing people’s traumatic memory, the historical facts of the Nanjing Massacre of the contemporary nationalistic sentiments are entangled and symbiotic. Many survivors have profound factual memory of the massacre, yet they have shown tolerance and forgiveness to the victimizers. While their memory has transcended the primitive stage of retaliation, the traumatic memory of mankind should be transformed into invaluable resource of the human endeavor to pursue peace.     

Sexual Selection,Automata and Ethics in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Olive Schreiner's Undine and From Man to Man

Abstract

This paper brings together two related areas of debate in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The first concerns how the courtship plot of the nineteenth-century novel responded to, and helped to shape, scientific ideas of sexual competition and selection. In The Mill on the Floss (1860), George Eliot strikingly prefigures Darwin's later work on sexual selection, drawing from her own extensive knowledge of the wider debates within which evolutionary theory developed. Maggie Tulliver's characterisation allows Eliot to explore the ethical complexities raised by an increasingly powerful scientific naturalism, where biology is seen to be embedded within morality in newly specific ways. The second strand of the paper examines the extension of scientific method to human mind and motivation which constituted the new psychology. It argues that there are crucial continuities of long-established ethical and religious ideas within this increasingly naturalistic view of human mind and motivation. The contention that such ideas persist and are transformed, rather than simply jettisoned, is illustrated through the example of Thomas Henry Huxley's 1874 essay on automata. Turning finally to focus on Olive Schreiner's Undine (1929) and From Man to Man (1926), the paper explores the importance of these persistent ethical and religious ideas in two novels which remained unpublished during her lifetime. It argues that they produce both difficulty and opportunity for imagining love plots within the context of increasingly assertive biological and naturalistic accounts of human beings.     

Religion,Politics and Liberation: A Dialogue between Gustavo Gutiérrez,the 14th Dalai Lama and Gianni Vattimo

Abstract

This paper explores the contributions to scholarship and to the globalized imagination concerning religion and politics by the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, the 14th Dalai Lama and the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo. Their common theme of "liberation," personal and political through a common humanity, love and compassion, with or without God, deserves a very detailed examination. The three of them have made an enormous contribution to conversations on religion and politics centred on a human commonality as human beings, and to the practice of religion and politics centred on the poor, on the commandment of love and of service to the marginalized as a way of life and in a new era of hermeneutics and commonality. This paper argues that the practice of a religion of love and a compassionate politics stressing commonalities rather than differences have a lot to offer to a contemporary practice and critical reflection on political theology.     

A Theo-Politics of the (Im)proper: Jacques Derrida vis-à-vis Graham Ward

Abstract

The contemporary situation of the "war on terrorism" provides a particularly challenging environment in which to seek to interpret and apply Jesus' commandment to love our enemies. This commandment received major emphasis during the first few centuries of the church, but subsequent interpretation of it has become increasingly complex. Nevertheless, I argue for the broad applicability of the commandment and show that it provides a check against the polarizing and dehumanizing tendencies which accompany modern warfare, because an understanding of the love of enemies reveals that the real enemy is enmity itself. Finally, the article examines a group of sermons preached in the immediate aftermath of September 11 and concludes that while the majority neglect to speak of love for enemies, those preachers that do are able to bring it to bear in relevant and powerful ways.     

L'illusion métabiologique

In this article, I explore the complex and unappreciated relationship between the moral and political thought of Cicero and Adam Smith. Cicero’s views about justice, propriety, and the selfish love of praise find new expression in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. I illustrate the important ways in which Smith adopts – often without attribution – Cicero’s precepts and moral judgments. I then go on to demonstrate how Smith strips those Ciceronian conclusions from their original justifying grounds in teleology and natural law. In their place, Smith injects his own psychology based in sentiments as a new account of why it is that we prefer virtue and justice to their opposites. By exploring this relationship, I hope to shed light on an important dynamic whereby modern thought has creatively adapted classical moral and political concepts.     

Philosophy,Eros, Judaism

Abstract

A careful reading of Caritas in Veritate shows it to be framed and permeated by two principles. The first is that human persons in their consciences and deeds are the principal agents of economic and political life, whether directly in interpersonal relations or mediated through their work in and for institutions. The second is that human persons as citizens are best prepared to promote “integral human development” and “the common good” when they are urged on by charity or love that is lived in truth. In these respects Caritas in Veritate is a clear continuation of the line of thought that Benedict developed in his earlier encyclicals Deus Caritas Est and Spe Salvi, and before that in his theological writings as Joseph Ratzinger. Benedict's work thus underscores the need modern societies and political communities have for charity, and thus for faith and for hope. We explicate this aspect of Benedict's political vision throughout this essay, anticipating and beginning to respond to some objections to the thesis that politics even in a secular age requires theological virtues to flourish.     

Love & loss in the 1960s

Roland Barthes observed that though there is a ‘lover's discourse’ shared by all those who are in love, it is a discourse ignored or disparaged by ‘surrounding languages’. Concerned that the discourse of heritage may participate in this closure against the ‘in love’ experience, I begin to explore ways the field of heritage studies might start speaking this language. Specifically, I ponder the ways that a young Chinese woman in the film Days of being wild, following the breakup of a love affair, becomes locked in a landscape of lost love that is populated with objects sticky with affect, objects which although they transmit painful affects nevertheless bind her by a dynamic that Lauren Berlant terms ‘cruel optimism’. I then turn to imagine the way a Balinese house compound gateway might, in a similar way, have become impregnated with affects relating to victims of the 1965–1966 killings in Bali and how, for those left behind, it might assume the ability to ‘presence’ a lost one. Archaeology and heritage studies have great potential to foster empathy with the experience of past others, but this calls for a sophisticated understanding of how objects become imbued with affect and how they transmit it.     

Notions of solidarity and integration in times of war: the idea of Europe, 1914–18

Abstract

This article argues that the First World War did not just aggravate nationalist sentiments but also encouraged intercultural exchange and a better understanding of other societies and ways of life. Indeed, the wartime prevalence of notions of solidarity and integration requires more attention and careful analysis. The essay explores three key issues, focusing in particular on solidarity practices and transnational interaction. It investigates military alliances, the collaboration between national independence movements, and the role of neutral countries as refuge and gathering place of pacifist groups and intellectuals. Many of these actors discussed and promoted forms of at least regional cooperation in post-war Europe.     

Expressions of the particular terms of love in the Song of Songs

ABSTRACT

This article discovers expressions of love by examining the particular terms of love in the Song. The expressions in various scenes show the excitement and pleasure of fulfillment in the sexual love relationship as the power of love. They also demonstrate the primary meaning of love in the Song is the celebration of joys of physical intimacy of human love relationship. The study of the chosen verses shows how the Hebrew text contains uncertainties and a variety of meanings which cannot be easily conveyed in other language. However, it portrays the significant of studying in the original language in order to bring about a better appreciation of the expressions of love in the Song.     

Base Ecclesial Communities and Community Ministry: Some Freirean Points of Comparison and Difference

Abstract

This article will expound the influence of Paulo Freire on Base Ecclesial Communities (BECs) in Latin America, and will examine if and how his work might be appropriated by middle-class Christians in the UK. Recognizing that the majority of churchgoers in Britain are middle-class, the article explores the idea that, if they really wish to ‘love their neighbour’, these Christians need to learn to dialogue in a Freirean manner with the marginalized, but in so doing they must be prepared to have their own thoughts and faith challenged, and must be prepared, with the poor and marginalized, to ask political questions of society, aware that such questioning is likely to invite conflict.     

Towards an Anti-Western Stance: The Economic Discourse of Iran's 1979 Revolution

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 saw the mobilization and cooperation of a variety of groupings that were brought together by their shared determination to overthrow the Shah. However, it was not only opposition to the Pahlavi regime, but also suspicion of and disdain for that regime's Western backers that united these revolutionary groups. Religious leaders (ulama), merchants (bazaaris), intellectuals and students alike all espoused the strong anti-Western sentiments that had been developing in Iran over the previous two decades. But what particular factors can be seen to have encouraged the adoption of these sentiments in the lead-up to the revolution, and in what ways were they articulated and subsequently put into practice by the leaders of the new regime? This article suggests that various domestic and international influences can be seen to have shaped the emergence of Iran's revolutionary discourse of “economic independence.” In particular, the paper argues that a peculiar blend of Shi'i concepts of social justice and Marxist-Leninist discourses of class struggle and anti-imperialism not only informed the economic outlook of Iran's burgeoning revolutionary movement during the period 1953–79, but was also enshrined in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic.     

Bradley Holt,Thirsty for God: A Brief History of Christian Spirituality

Abstract

In this essay, I consider the relationship between more radically open conceptions of democracy and the recent "return of religion" as the return of distinct, particular religions. The radical democracy of figures such as Derrida, Badiou, and Hardt and Negri is found to be not radical enough to be open to the particular religious other. Derrida's "religion without religion" does violence to the particularity of concrete religious traditions, Badiou appropriates Paul's universalism while abandoning the particularity and difference in his conception of collective identity, and Hardt and Negri advocate a "politics of love" while severing that love from its ground— namely, God. I then show a way of rethinking both society and Christianity so that Christianity finds a place in society and society makes room for Christianity. A radical Christianity devoid of self-privilege and triumphalism provides a model for an intersubjectivity of love in which the other really comes first. Paul's radical conception of membership in the body of Christ accomplishes precisely what radical democracy fails to do: it allows for heterophony as well as polyphony, and incoherence as well as commonality. It is only when church and society allow the possibility of incoherence and heterophony that they are truly open to the other, and it is only when they are truly open to the other that they satisfy the demands of a truly radical democracy and radical Christianity.     

The President the US Needs Next?

Abstract

A New Bottom Line in American society should be the primary focus of America's next president. Institutions (including corporations and governments), social practices, and even personal actions should be judged rational, efficient and productive not only to the extent that they maximize money and power, but also to the extent that they maximize love and caring, ethical and ecological sensitivity and behavior, kindness and generosity, non-violence and peace, and to the extent that they enhance our capacities to respond to other human beings as embodiments of the sacred, and enhance our capacities to respond to the earth and the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur of creation. Applying this focus to every aspect of American domestic and foreign policy would stimulate a spiritual revolution in American and global consciousness and open the possibility of global solidarity replacing chauvinist nationalism.     

The Tragedy of Politics: Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra

Abstract

In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare uses the story of the two lovers to dramatize the tragedy of politics. The excessive love of self that characterizes the two serves as a metaphor for the larger story of Rome's descent into tyranny. Unless love of country, that is, love of one's fellow-citizens, tempers self-love, a state loses its capacity to sustain even that degree of freedom that belongs to kingly rule. But Shakespeare also depicts the love of Antony and Cleopatra for each other as something noble; there is something worthy of our love that is higher than freedom. The tragedy of politics lies in the opposition of these two loves.     

Cosmology,creation, and the force of history

Abstract

At first sight, any attempt to understand the cosmos may seem overambitious. Cosmologists would claim, nonetheless, to have transformed their subject into a genuine empirical science, especially in the last three decades. This progress has proved possible because the universe possesses a surprising degree of overall symmetry and uniformity. It is complexity, and not sheer size, that makes a phenomenon baffling. In the fierce heat of a star and (even more surely) in the early universe, everything is broken down into its simplest constituents. So cosmology need not be the most intractable science. Our biological colleagues – studying the intricate multilayered structures of trees, butterflies, and brains – face challenges that may be even tougher.     

John Banville’s “monstrous child”: freedom and inheritance in Shroud

ABSTRACT

John Banville has described his novel Shroud (2002) – a fictionalised re-imagining of the 1988 scandal of Paul de Man, whose war-time publications for a collaborationist journal were discovered after his death – as his “monstrous child” that only he could love. This essay turns to Derrida’s thoughts on monstrosity, and in particular his framing of the future-to-come as an unforeseeable reckoning between Nietzsche and Rousseau, whose approaches to human freedom and authenticity remain philosophically irreconcilable. Shroud engages with these two inheritances on a thematic level, bringing them into conversation through the characters of Vander and Cass. The interruption of intergenerational love and the prospect of a child between them, however, makes Derridean monstrosity – that more properly deconstructive trope that opens to the future by unearthing traumatic inheritances from the past – into a structuring principle, and the means by which we might best understand the novel itself as a “monstrous child”.     

Looking Out,Looking In: The ‘Other' in the Journal of Geography in Higher Education

The Journal of Geography in Higher Education has a vision of being inclusive. This paper examines what the journal, throughout its history, has published on teaching and learning in relation to people and places referred to in contemporary scholarship as the 'Other'. It addresses themes of gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, and the 'Third World', noting especially the surprising paucity of material on the latter. In particular, the article explores ways in which teaching addresses aspects of students' values and attitudes, and the importance of linking knowledge, emotion, experiential learning and action.