The Truro Halfway House,Cape Cod,Massachusetts

Historical Archaeology -     

The "Metaphor of Life": Herder's Philosophy of History and Uneven Developments in Late Eighteenth-Century Natural Sciences

The origins of the evolutionary concept of history have normally been associated with the development of an organicist notion of society. The meaning of this notion, in turn, has been assumed as something perfectly established and clear, almost self-evident. This assumption has prevented any close scrutiny of it. As this article tries to show, the idea of "organism" that underlies the emergence of the evolutionary concept of history, far from being "self-evident," has an intricate history and underwent a number of radical and successive redefinitions from the mid-eighteenth century up to approximately 1830 (the heyday of Romanticism and the period in which the first modern "philosophies of history" took form). More specifically, this paper traces some of these transformations in order to contextualize and shed some new light on Herder's philosophy of history and the complex process of its inception—a process that was not concluded by the end of his intellectual career. As the article shows, Herder did not actually succeed in solving some key problems involved in an evolutionary concept of history. The difficulties he found were analogous to those that emerged at that very moment in the development of a dynamic, onto-genetical theory (that is, a theory of the embryo's transformation), and both were ultimately linked to the combination of some uneven developments produced in the natural sciences of that time. Herder's philosophy of history thus appears as a paradoxical (and highly unusual, seen from a epistemological point of view) case of a system of thought that formulates problems which it is still radically unable to solve, lacking the tools to devise a possible solution for them.     

“皮鞋班”敲响“草根戏曲”锣鼓——回眸互助农民业余剧团发展历程

当我提笔写下这一标题时,仿佛听见土乡农民业余剧团敲响的锣鼓声,穿越160多载沧桑岁月的春风秋雨,在新世纪建设社会主义新农村中激起欢歌笑语…… 戏曲艺术作为中国传统文化绽放的奇葩,其根脉深深扎进以农村为主的广阔土壤里,在地处边远的青海高原尤其是这样,这是因为贫瘠落后的农村,最缺乏和渴望精神文化来滋润,最易用自娱自乐的戏曲来慰藉农民单调生活和精神压力。