Creative Thinking and Emotion in Human Social Life: The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms

Abstract

There is debate whether The Merchant of Venice is an anti-Semitic play. However, in this debate there has been insufficient attention paid to Shylock's relationship with Tubal. In his criticisms of Shylock, Tubal represents the larger Jewish community. This criticism shows that, in Shakespeare's view, Jewish self-understanding of what it means to be a good Jew is incompatible with the character of Shylock.     

‘Certainly the Muslim is the very devil incarnation’: Islamophobia and The Merchant of Venice

In this paper, we examine Shakespeare's sixteenth‐century play, The Merchant of Venice. Anti‐Semitism is a key theme in this play. The well‐known central character, Shylock, is a Jewish man ridiculed and victimised because of his identity. Much literary research has been done on the anti‐Semitism of the play, and many social studies have compared anti‐Semitism and Islamophobia, but scarcely any research brings a Shakespearean play from the sixteenth century into the context of twenty‐first century Islamophobia. There are a number of similarities between the manner in which Shylock is ostracised and the current victimisation that Muslim communities are facing in Europe and more specifically the UK. With this in mind, we explore contextual and thematic elements of this play and argue that it is possible to apply the way Shylock is unfairly victimised on stage because of his identity as a Jew to the treatment of some Muslims today. In particular, the treatment he faces shares stark similarities with the types, impacts and consequences of Islamophobic hate crime today.     

Anxious householders: theft and anti-usury discourse in Shakespeare’s Venetian plays

Usury occupies a centrality in early modern culture that no mere professional practice, however innovative or controversial, could have occupied. As recent scholarship has shown, the reason has to do with the fact that, in the final analysis, usury constitutes a mental disposition, a worldview. This article seeks to refine our understanding of the psychological phenomenon of usury by examining its troubled relationship with theft as enacted in Shakespeare’s Venetian plays. Both The Merchant of Venice and Othello link the usurious mindset to an anxious sense of dispossession: Shylock is represented as a householder whose paranoid concern with burglars has not been sufficiently emphasised; usurious Iago is revealed to act on a compulsive need to instil into his victims, most notably Othello, an equally irrational fear of theft. The article argues that the emergent monetary economy is thus associated with a nightmarish dread of deprivation that is shown to destabilise the domestic space of the oikos.     

Tocqueville and the End of History

Abstract

We argue for the relevance of a contemporary return to Shakespeare because his work prompts thinking about the “Body Politic,” perhaps the most vivid and enduring image in speech describing political community ever proposed. Shakespeare's meditation on this image invites us to reflect on the conditions under which a body politic can be made whole; that the constitution of any formal commonwealth requires a self-conscious articulation of the body politic and that this articulation could not happen without the parts themselves being aware of their partial character within the whole political order. The need for the consent of those parts in the political order to which they would belong thus becomes suddenly more evident. Shakespeare's plays show that this need for consent always emerges within discrete political communities. As such, the constituent parts of those communities must grant consent, exercise and enjoy their rights, and participate in the whole within the limitations circumscribed by their political boundaries and borders. His dramatic works thus help us reconsider contemporary attacks on the nation-state and illuminate the body politic as an essential means for bringing into being the preconditions and framework required for healthy political life, including liberal democracy, to flourish.     

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.     

Marriage and the Law: Politics and Theology in Measure for Measure

Abstract

In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare portrays a clearly political problem: a city whose citizens are so unable to govern themselves that only the most severe legal punishments appear capable of restoring civic order. Yet the play's conclusion, for all its dramatic fireworks, does not obviously resolve this problem. All that happens, it appears, is that everyone gets married. Understanding marriage's political significance, therefore, is key to unraveling the play's political teaching. By carefully framing marriage within Pauline language of sin and grace—and in particular by using the image of death and rebirth through baptism—Shakespeare offers a theological as well as a political image of a kind of self-government capable of easing the city's legal dilemmas and reconciling justice with mercy.     

Liberty,Equality, Nobility: Kolnai,Tocqueville, and the Moral Foundations of Democracy

Abstract

Though few would attach the label of liberal to Dostoevsky as a thinker his life and work can be seen as motivated by a concern for human freedom. As an editor and author he advocated a course of action for his nation's intelligentsia that would transform the Russian autocracy into a liberal regime. This course of action was dictated by his insight into the necessary foundation for a liberal regime, a principle of self-abnegation that rested in turn on the conviction that human beings share in an immortal principle. This insight points to and gives content to the true goal of the liberal regime, the recognition and protection of human dignity.     

Fragments of Boats from the Canale Anfora of Aquileia,Italy, and Comparison of Sewn‐Plank Ships in the Roman Era

Fragments of Roman sewn‐plank boats have been found, during rescue excavations, in the Canale Anfora, an artificial channel used by Roman ships to enter the Roman city of Aquileia. Remains were found in both 1988 and 2005 at the same site. Elements of what were probably two boats are analysed and compared to other finds of Roman sewn boats found along the coast of the Veneto and Friuli Venezia Giulia regions. They are evidence of the use of this technique, instead of the more widespread mortise‐and‐tenon system, in the quite limited area of the Northern Adriatic. These boats were used both for inland and for maritime navigation.     

国民革命时期长沙市商民协会会所被毁案

1926年12月长沙市商民协会正式成立后,促使湖南商民运动得到了迅速发展。但次年1月因苏广业店员联合会提出改良店员待遇要求,遭店主反对而导致劳资纠纷,商民协会参与仲裁时偏向店主一方,致使店员产生强烈不满而引发捣毁市商民协会会所案发生。在查处该案过程中,国民党湖南省党部虽竭力调解,但市商协对该案未得到迅速处置深为不满,以组织全体商家游行和罢市相威胁。省党部迫不得已,接受了市商协提出的改组店员联合会和惩处为首分子等一系列要求。其最终结果,不仅使总工会和苏广业店员联合会深感受到压抑,而且也并未使商民协会感到完全满意,似乎劳资双方都不无怨言。     

幽州镇与唐代后期政治探析

幽州镇位于河朔三镇最北端。偏处一隅,孤立的外部环境,特别是内部频仍的动乱,使它同魏博和成德二镇相比,对中央表现出较强的恭顺性,在平叛攘外、稳定唐室方面发挥了重要作用。另一方面,又应看到它所谓的恭顺是阶段性的、相对而言的,不宜绝对化。虽然唐廷河朔政策原则上视三镇为一体,比较注意维持三镇的平衡,但在实际政治生活中表现出比较明显的重魏博、成德而轻幽州的倾向。由于唐廷对幽州镇的限制乃至歧视政策,幽州镇又往往成为三镇叛乱的主要肇始地。它游走于恭顺和叛逆两极之间,构成了唐后期政治上一道独特的景观。     

The Modern Revolution and the Collapse of Moral Analogy: Tocqueville and Guizot

Abstract

I locate the Leveller John Lilburne within the broader literature on the history of political thought and I challenge scholars who associate Lilburne's Leveller political thought with Hobbesian liberty, with proto-libertarianism, or with proto-bourgeois political thought. I advance an understanding of Lilburne as creatively merging central tenets of proto-liberalism with central tenets of republicanism. To develop this amalgamation of ideas, I go considerably beyond the Agreement of the People and the Putney Debates to explore the larger Leveller corpus. Through this investigation I articulate Lilburne's account of key concepts in the history of political thought including: liberty, tyranny, rights, rule, political participation, popular sovereignty, civic virtue, self-interest, harmony, antagonism, and institutional design. I conclude by arguing that we should consider the Levellers, particularly John Lilburne, as offering an early example of what has come to be called liberal-republican political thought, a way of theorizing found within the writings of English Commonwealthsmen.     

诈骗罪与民事欺诈行为的区别

在司法实践中,如何正确区分和把握合同诈骗罪与民事活动中的民事欺诈行为,是一项具有探讨价值的法律问题,因为它关系到罪与非罪的区别与界定问题。对此,笔者通过合同诈骗罪与民事欺诈行为在构成特征、主观和客观方面的比较,对两者的区别作了进一步的探讨和分析。     

Technoscience,Neuroscience, and the Subject of Politics

Although narrative models have been employed for quite some time in historiography, in sociology, and in certain psychoanalytic theories, the tendency towards narrativization has also become more dominant in reference to the positive sciences. This article presents two postmodern versions of the narrative dissolution of certain modern scientific-metaphysical concepts in the wake of the establishment of technoscience and neuroscience: Vattimo's Heideggerian account of technoscience as immanent pluralization of worlds, and Dennett's cognitivist account of the emergence of the plural self. Both claim not only that former central agencies like the Cartesian cogito can be dismissed as metaphysical but that narrative pluralization entails an (at least implicit) endorsement of liberal democracy as the only viable political model today. Employing arguments put forth by ?i?ek and Malabou, some of the deficiencies of this affirmative short circuit of technoscience/neuroscience with liberal-democratic politics will be examined.     

Governance,the State and the Politics of Development

Current western aid and development policy aims to promote ‘good governance’ in the third world. Few would deny that competent, open and fair administration is both a worthy aim and a self-evident requirement of development. However, the current orthodoxy clearly illustrates the technicist fallacy, which is implicit in the following quotation from Pope, that the effective administration or ‘management’ of development is essentially a technical or practical matter. This article argues that development is fundamentally a political matter and that it is illusory to conceive of good governance as independent of the forms of politics and type of state which alone can generate, sustain and protect it. For Forms of Government, let fools contest; Whate'er is best administered, is best. (Pope, 1734: Bk 3, lines 303-4).