An Apologia for Theoretical History

Karl Popper's critique of theoretical history remains formidable but contains serious flaws. Popper held erroneous views about the practice of the natural sciences and created overly severe strictures for theoretical statements in the social sciences. General theory and general theoretical statements play a legitimate role in the social sciences. Merton has promoted middle-range theories and models and Lakatos multiple ontologies. One can answer Popper's criticisms of either the impossibility or triviality of long-term historical laws by searching for stable constellations of local or middle-range laws rather than a universal law. Moreover, the successful use in the social sciences of various types of scales of measurement rather than an absolute scale shows that quantitative analysis is possible in history. Investigators need to find the boundaries, the frameworks of feasibility, in which historical trends and laws operate. Popper's maximalism plays into the irrationalist trends that he himself deplored. If historical investigators and theoreticians set appropriate goals for theoretical history, they can practice their discipline responsibly and find meanings, if not a single meaning, in history.     

Pascalian Suite. Elements of an Apologia

Abstract

This article considers the thought of Claude Lefort as a response to Leo Strauss. It compares their views on the task of political philosophy as such, and on its specific relation to modernity, religion, and democracy. For Strauss, the revival of political philosophy under modern conditions requires a return to its ancient roots. While Lefort agrees that such a restoration is necessary, he argues that this requires a departure from ancient thought: political philosophy must recognize modern democracy as a new kind of regime, independent of theologico-political norms.     

Liberal Evolutionism and the Satirical Ape

This article considers intersections between the doctrines of mid-Victorian liberalism and biological evolution using 1860s caricatures and satires from Punch. In the years following the 1859 publication of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, caricatures featuring satirical apes illustrated mutually supportive cultural attitudes about politics and science. Ideas of character united the discourses of mid-Victorian evolutionism with liberalism, and the confluence of these ideas, or what I term liberal evolutionism, dramatized this overlap for Victorian culture. My project shows that the apes depicted in Punch were often intended as not only whimsical responses to the theories put forward by Darwin and Mill, they also point to the formation of the British subject.     

Darwinian Evolutionism Is Applicable to Historical Archaeology

Over the past decade or so, an increasing number of archaeologists have begun to show interest in employing Darwinian evolutionary theory to explain variations in the material record. Epistemological and methodological issues surrounding the implementation of Darwinian evolutionism in archaeology are numerous, the most basic of which is that Darwinism embodies a materialist perspective, whereas archaeology traditionally has maintained an essentialist outlook. Stemming from this dichotomy are fundamental differences in such things as how units are created and how they are used to measure change. As archaeologists grapple with these issues, specific examples of how Darwinian evolutionism can be used to build historical narratives and create historical explanations are appearing with more frequency, but with few exceptions, proponents have focused specifically on the prehistoric record. This gives the impression that Darwinian evolutionism is not applicable to the more-recent material record, which is decidedly not the case. The kind of evolutionism proposed here transcends the age of the record under investigation.     

从摩尔根到塞维斯:酋邦理论的创立

塞维斯的社会发展理论,是否否定了摩尔根的根本学说?本文检视了摩尔根以后文化人类学的发现直至塞维斯的酋邦理论,认为,不像一些中国学者所担心的那样,塞维斯是摩尔根的敌人;而是,前者对后者的基本理论,进行了十分重要的修正、补充与发展:塞维斯是摩尔根学说优秀的继承者与发展者。     

The World Upside Down: Boas,History, Evolutionism,and Science

A new wave of neo‐Boasian anthropologists advocate retrieving Boas’s sense of historicity. In his theoretical writings, and especially his early exchange with Mason and Powell in 1887, Boas linked history to Alexander von Humboldt’s “cosmographical” method and to inductive science, accusing evolutionists of reasoning deductively on the basis of artibrary classifications. Boas, on the contrary, would not classify but would consider the “individual phenomenon”. Strangely enough, Boas’s presentation of his scientific procedure has more or less been taken at face value, and I question this Boas‐centric view of Boas. Examining Boas’s theoretical statements, his onslaught against evolutionism and his ethnographic practice, I find the accusation of deductive reasoning against evolutionists totally polemical. Furthermore, I discover neither induction nor history or cosmography in his practice, but a Linnaean‐type natural history. In brief, I uncover an inverse image of what Boas presented of himself, and no basis whatsoever for retrieving a historicity for contemporary anthropology.     

苏州古典园林

核心价值概述 苏州古典园林位于江苏省苏州市境内,包括1997年被列入《世界遗产名录》的拙政园、留园、网师园、环秀山庄,以及2000年扩展的沧浪亭、狮子林、艺圃、耦园和退思园.苏州古典园林的历史可以上溯到公元前6世纪的吴王苑囿,公元4世纪出现私家园林,18世纪达到鼎盛.现存的苏州古典园林仍有50余处,建造于11-19世纪的9处古典园林以其意境深远、构筑精致、艺术高雅、文化内涵丰富而成为中国古代文人写意山水园林艺术的典范,完美地诠释了中国古代文人士大夫的隐逸文化、美学思想与城市人居环境的和谐统一.     

Franklin's Classical American Statesmanship

Abstract

Herbert Storing has persuasively argued that American political thought and statesmanship breaks with the tradition of classical political philosophy and statesmanship, particularly its concern with shaping the character of citizens and leaders, and instead sides with modern political philosophy, which has tended to encourage statesmen to forgo shaping the character of citizens and leaders and to focus instead on shaping institutions that will function regardless of citizens' virtue (or lack of virtue). An exception to this general rule, however, is Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, in the tradition of classical statesmanship, sought to shape not only American political institutions, but also and especially the character and way of life of his fellow citizens. Yet the character and way of life that Franklin helped lead his fellow citizens to embrace is uniquely modern and American in spirit. Thus, Franklin can be said to offer us an example of classical, but uniquely modern and American, statesmanship.     

Classical Chinese Poetry in Singapore

The evolution of classical Chinese poetry in Singapore is closely related to the immigration experience of Chinese intellectuals in various periods. The travelogues of the foreign trips by Chinese officials dispatched to Singapore in the late Qing dynasty, such as Zuo Binglong 左秉隆 and Huang Zunxian 黃遵憲, focused on the depiction of exotic landscapes and aimed to open up horizons. The poems written by Khoo Seok Wan 邱菽園 and Pan Shou 潘受, and numerous works published in local newspapers from the period before the Second World War to the 1970s, represented the highest achievement of characteristically classical Chinese poetry in Singapore. After the 1980s, the new type of poetry writing reflected in the “Xin Sheng Poetry Society” (Xin sheng shi she 新聲詩社) and poetic columns online was characterized by diversity in the path of communication and the choice of subject matter, as well as an overall decline in creative quality. This article attempts to present the different stages of classical Chinese poetry in Singapore and its features over the course of the century within the context of Sinophone literature.