The Responsibility of Science for the Future of Mankind

Abstract

Science and technology have brought immense benefits to man, yet through them he has become divorced from nature and he has failed to understand them. Adverse effects have been deliberately hidden, and when they became obvious, have turned science into a scapegoat. Scientists are here presented as unconcerned with the social consequences of their work, whether it affects industry or politics. The endless scientific future is now seen to have strict limits, and, the author proposes, scientists must devote themselves to the problems of mankind's future. Above all, scientists must explain their work in a language which all can understand, so that man can feel again at ease in his scientific civilization.     

Chemistry: Facts not Fiction

Abstract

Brecht has said that ‘the task of science is to lighten the laboriousness of human existence’ and some examples are given of the way chemistry has contributed to this task. Yet great challenges remain – atomic war and the population explosion – and it is essential to achieve a just and informed balance between benefits and risks. Uninformed criticism of chemistry in the media is roundly condemned, and tribute is paid to antipollution measures taken by the chemical industry. The common language which unites scientists from all nations must be used to further peace and understanding in the world.     

THE MEANS MAY BE A COAL*

Policy analysts, especially those with an economics orientation, tend to talk in terms of goals that deal with (1) effectiveness in achieving benefits, (2) efficiency in achieving them at low costs, and (3) equity or equality of benefits and costs across various groups. Lay people and also policy analysts with a political science background often supplement those substantive goals with procedural ones that emphasize (1) public participation, (2) predictability of decisions, and (3) procedural fairness that facilitates proving one is deserving of benefits or innocent of wrongdoing. Those procedural goals are often sought even at the expense of the substantive goals, not just as means to scoring higher on the substantive goals. Examples can be given for each procedural goal. The notion of procedures as goals-in-themselves should be distinguished from controversies over transcendentalism-pragmatism, incrementalism- rationalism, and other social value controversies.     

重大事件对城市空间结构的影响:研究进展与管理对策

在全球化竞争日益激烈的背景下,举办重大事件已成为许多城市进行重新定位或推动城市跨越式发展的一种途径。重大事件为综合运用结构主义、制度主义等多种方法研究城市空间结构的演化与重构提供了一个难得的契机,但国内外学术界关于重大事件对举办城市空间结构影响的专门研究还比较缺乏,特别是对于事件背景下城市空间要素怎样发生演变以及城市如何借助事件契机对空间结构进行优化的研究还很薄弱。本文通过梳理国内外有关重大事件对举办城市空间结构影响的文献,初步厘清了重大事件对举办城市空间结构的影响因素及作用方式,进而为事件举办城市提出了指导性的战略管理框架,并指出了现有研究存在的不足与未来发展方向。     

TO WRITE THE HISTORY OF EQUALITY

This article discusses the history of equality and recent efforts to write that history in the context of a detailed discussion of Siep Stuurman's The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History. It begins by pointing out the surprising paucity of writing on the history of equality, particularly its conceptual and intellectual history, despite that notion's centrality in modern political and philosophical discussion. It proceeds to examine recent efforts to make amends for that lack. What Pierre Rosanvallon has described as the contemporary “crisis of equality” gives urgency to these efforts, while also, it is suggested, providing an opportunity to more fully explore the contingencies and complexities of this beguiling notion. Stuurman's examination of the invention and deployment of “cross‐cultural equality”—the basic equality of all people living in the world, regardless of gender, religion, ethnicity, or race—is an important step in this exploration. But as Samuel Moyn has emphasized in his own recent intervention on the history of social rights in an unequal world, it is not, on its own, enough. Future efforts to write the history of equality must integrate the social and economic dimensions of the idea more fully in an effort to better understand our contemporary dilemma.     

The Positive Economics of Inflation in Brazil

High and unstable inflation rates have prevailed in Brazil during the period 1985-92. All attempts to stabilize the economy have failed and ‘living with inflation’ has become politically feasible. The structure of the financial market in general, and financial adaptation mechanisms in particular, have played a crucial role in implementing and maintaining this political-economic option. Financial adaptation mechanisms sway the management of monetary and fiscal policies, with a direct influence on the credibility of macroeconomic policy announcements. More importantly, distributive asymmetries generated by those financial instruments, in association with differences in political motivation for different groups in the society, have created a stalemate regarding stabilization efforts. This article argues that, for the Brazilian case, the positive economics literature has failed to explain the inflationary phenomenon because it has not considered financial adaptation as an important linkage between political motivation of certain groups in the society and the correspondent desirable economic outcomes. The validation of social-economic objectives of certain classes became an important raison d'être of financial adaptation. Consequently, change of inflationary regimes carries costs and benefits far beyond those implied by fiscal reform alone.     

Foucault and Radical Deliberative Democracy

Deliberative democracy is a flourishing variant of democratic theory. John Dryzek and Iris Young are two of its more radical exponents, and here I bring some Foucaultian complications to their work. The radicalness I highlight in both thinkers owes to their different but comparable commitments to equality between different voices in deliberation. Foucault's histories are all histories of expert knowledges and the objects they usher into the world. In this sense, expert knowledges present problems for deliberative democracy, not only because they carry greater status than other knowledges but also because they have ontological effects. As I illustrate with the example of economics, although the programs of Dryzek and Young can cope quite well with the first, the second is a more serious problem, although possibly a positive one.     

Locke and the Elements of Natural Philosophy: Some Problems of Attribution

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that John Locke’s interactions with the Quakers and his reflections on their doctrines and behaviour provide the salient background for understanding the content and polemical orientation of the chapter on enthusiasm in An Essay concerning Human Understanding. The terms of reference and key features of the vocabulary of the chapter “Of Enthusiasm” that Locke added to the fourth edition of the Essay derive from the Quakers and from Locke’s critical reflections on their doctrine of immediate inspiration. While Locke acknowledged that the phenomenon was to be found among other religious groups, it was the Quakers whom Locke had in mind when he formulated his philosophical critique of enthusiasm.     

智力迁移国外研究进展

智力迁移是一种国际现象,是世界各国普遍关注的问题。目前有关国际智力迁移的理论成果尽管很丰富,有新古典经济学理论、二元劳动力市场理论、新迁移经济学理论、相对贫困假说、世界体系理论、社会网络理论和机构理论等,但这些理论都有其侧重点,都不能全面综合的解释智力迁移现象。在评述这些理论的基础上,把影响智力迁移的要素归纳为四种:经济、社会、政治和国家联系;重点分析了智力迁移对迁出国的不利影响,认为应该通过国家之间的补偿机制逐渐消除其不利影响。     

Wisse die Wege! Hildegard von Bingen zum 900. Geburtstag

Hildegard is regarded as one of the most important women of the Middle Ages. Her contemporaries from all over the world wrote letters to her searching for help and prayer. Universally working she wrote works about medicine, natural history, compositions of chants for the honour of God and his creation and more than three hundred letters to people all over the world including the popes and the emperor. Hildegard's work and the way she understood herself were strongly marked by vision and prophecy. Her works were of divine origin by vision and audition. Her aim was the religious interpretation of the whole universe and a Christian life in the sense of the bible. Heaven and earth, faith and natural science, medicine and religion, the human existence in all its facts and potentials, everything was a mirror of divine love to her. In her first work Scivias ("Know the Ways") she is considering on the history of creation and salvation, from the origin of the world and of man over Christ's salvation to the fulfillment at the end of times. In the centre is standing the human being as microcosm reflecting the whole world in all conditions and laws. Man is the main work of god, reflecting in his doing and thinking God's love. Man has to know the ways that means to live the life of love in all consequences including reproduction by creating a new human being for the praise of God.     

Developing economies and the demographic and democratic imperatives of globalization

In the past decade the world economy has witnessed both great progress and great inequities resulting in part from the liberalization of markets-including capital markets-that has accompanied the process of globalization, and from the intense pace of technological change. This article highlights the need for individuals, organizations and governments to counterbalance the excesses and abuses of capitalist societies while at the same time noting the importance of ensuring environmental safeguards. It recognizes, however, that efforts must be directed at maintaining the dynamic momentum of globalization and of extending its benefits to greater numbers. For this to happen, there must first be a debate about globalization, focusing on how to intensify its pace and extending its benefits, as well as curbing its excesses. Second, intellectually robust coalitions must be created between business, NGOs, the academic community, the media and other interested parties, to put pressure on national governments in both developed and developing countries, and on international government institutions, to improve, intensify and extend the process of both political and economic liberalization.     

国外旅游型海岛人地关系研究进展

基于文献资料的整理与分析,国外旅游型海岛人地关系研究中关注人对地的影响、人地关系相互作用过程,人地关系的调控途径;在野外调查、分区规划的基础上广泛采用生态经济学、管理学理论。借鉴国外相关研究,协调我国旅游型海岛人地关系中要整合人地关系研究,拓宽旅游型海岛的研究领域,重视乡、村级旅游型海岛的人地关系问题,尤其要先解决环境脆弱地区外来游客的影响和相关利益主体问题。     

世界遗产:现代人类中心主义的实证

面对全球性的生态危机,人类中心主义遭到种种质疑,现代人类中心主义应运而生。现代人类中心主义的产生与可持续发展战略的提出不仅具有时间上的相关性,而且具有相同的问题背景,二者的价值取向有着惊人的一致。只有自觉地坚持现代人类中心主义,人类才有可能有效地实施可持续发展战略,实现真正意义上的可持续发展。现代人类中心主义在实践上的全面落实是一个相当长的历史过程,在当前历史条件下,世界遗产为现代人类中心主义提供了实证,并可望成为实现现代人类中心主义的典范。     

Benefits of visiting heritage museums: Chinese parents’ perspectives

Abstract

The family, as a leisure unit, is an important museum consumer group. The literature on family leisure in museums concentrates on the cognitive and the learning aspects in science museums and art galleries in western contexts. It provides limited explanation of the leisure outcomes acquired from visiting museums. This work addresses this lacuna by exploring the benefits perceived by Chinese parents who take their children to a cluster of museums along China’s Grand Canal, a world heritage site in Hangzhou. A review of museum and heritage research, combined with 17 on-site, in-depth interviews, generated information on a range of benefits which was used to design a questionnaire that was completed by 450 respondents. Five perceived benefits were identified using factor analysis. In order of significance, they are family bonding, community attachment, cultural awareness, restoration and personal growth. These perceived benefits have implications for museums and other public facilities catering to the family leisure market, as well as for governments, community organisations, the heritage sector and other stakeholders that are charged with managing cultural heritage.     

Monnaie et richesse chez John Locke une politique de l'économie

Locke's works on money are not the clumsy outline of the liberal economic theories that developed later on but they are part and parcel of his philosophy. This study will then show that Locke's works on money are at the crossroads of three distinct lines of research. Firstly, inspired by the mercantilist analysis of wealth and its circulation, Locke endeavours to define the categories proper to monetary analysis. Secondly, metallic money being defined both as commodity and symbol, the problem then stands on the ground of a philosophical analysis of the notion of representation which brings into play the distinction, established in theEssay concerning human understanding, between substance, mixed mode and relation. Lastly, money provides the link between private activity and the whole of social life; so Locke examines its role from the point of view of property, labour and the collective aims both must fulfil. On the whole, money does appear to be a crucial issue in the thought of Locke, not a subsidiary theme due to circumstances.     

中国古代园林设计中的自然理想观

自然地理环境早先与现代都对人文传统的景观有很大影响。中国古代风景园林发源于自然生态环境的审美选择,进而以顺乎自然的设计指导思想求得"虽由人作,宛自天开"的审美标准,更有人与自然相与融洽的审美理想。西方古典园林中人造的几何规则景观超越于一切自然。在现代中国盲目模仿西方城市摩天大楼景观的时候,现代西方城市规划学者正致力于研究中国古代先哲的思想精髓和古代文化遗产,为塑造现代人居环境的自然协调寻找新的灵感启迪。     

Absent Regions: Spaces of Financialisation in the Arab World

This paper examines processes of financialisation in the Arab world, a region that has been almost completely absent from the wider financial literature. The paper shows that financialisation is much more than simply the expansion of financial markets within neatly bounded sets of social relations operating at the national scale. In the Arab world, financialisation has been marked by the growing weight of regional finance capital—most specifically, those capital groups based in the Gulf Cooperation Council—in circuits of capital operating at all scales. This has important implications for processes of class and state formation. Approaching financialisation in this manner—moving away from methodologically nationalist assumptions and the literature's largely singular focus on the advanced capitalist core—brings into focus the significance of cross‐scalar accumulation patterns, their spatial hierarchies, and geographic unevenness. The paper thus reaffirms the need for a more spatially sensitive approach to financialisation.     

The Prophethood of Work and the Gospels of The Souls of Black Folk

Abstract

W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the most important American thinkers of the social and the political in the first half of the twentieth century, was involved in labor politics for much of his life, but while some scholars are now beginning to appreciate the extent to which Du Bois is also a thinker of the religious, no one has tried to connect his stance on questions of labor and his religious thought. Yet his early book, The Souls of Black Folk, presents, among other things, a complicated theology of labor. Du Bois criticizes the principle of submission glorified by white American Christianity, and imposed by white Christians on black slaves. At the same time, he confesses a veritable faith in "work, systematic and tireless," but only as it functions as part of a broader cultural renewal, itself dependent on what I describe as a "missiology of cultural knowledge." To accomplish this project, Du Bois must deploy an inegalitarian principle, separating manual laborers from intellectual or cultural laborers as fundamentally different kinds of human being. This principle is obviously in tension with the great struggles for equality in which Du Bois participated all his life. At the same time, Du Bois is not simply interested in consecrating work as such, but in explaining the connection that ties together labor, the aesthetic, and the religious. Our reading of Souls is informed by the hermeneutic practices modeled by Jacques Rancière in his political philosophy.     

John Owen and John Locke: confessionalism,doctrinal minimalism,and toleration

ABSTRACT

The present article compares John Locke’s and John Owen’s approaches to toleration. Owen, a towering figure of the Puritan revolution and a Protestant scholastic whose work is still the object of significant appreciation in Reformed circles, was Locke’s dean during his time as a student in Oxford. There is a number of treatises on toleration by Owen, especially during the mid-1640s, and later again after the Restoration, in his role as a nonconforming divine. There has also been some speculation regarding the involvement of both Owen and Locke in the circle around Shaftesbury. Together with their writings against Parker and Stillingfleet, this would seem to draw Owen and Locke quite close to each other. Both authors are, however, divided in their approach to Christian doctrine: Owen represents classical confessionalism and Locke modern doctrinal minimalism. The article explores the ways in which these oppositional approaches to doctrine relate to their views of toleration.     

Transnational geographies: Indian immigration to Canada

Immigration from the Asia and Pacific area now accounts for over 50 percent of all Canadian immigration. Therefore, any consideration of Canada's linkages with Asia must address this issue. While much work has debated the impact of immigration in Canada's urban centres, less has been directed to understanding the transnational nature of such population movements, or their specific transnational geographies. In this paper, I consider the geography of immigration from India to Canada. Immigration from India has traditionally been tightly regionalised, with the majority of immigrants originating from the Doaba area of Punjab. Settlement in Canada is also highly concentrated at the provincial, metropolitan and suburban scales. Drawing upon a range of qualitative and quantitative data collected in both India and Canada, I illustrate the geography of immigration from India and highlight some of the processes that contribute to creating transnational networks between these sites .