Bons Procédés Entre Érudits

This article exposes certain functions of scientific correspondence during the second half of the 16(th) century. A professor of mathematics in Rome, Antonio Maria Pazzi, sends a mesolabe together with a letter to Barbaro, the humanist scholar of Venice. The latter would include parts of it in the Latin version of his commentary to Vitruvius. The analysis of the context of this publication shows that both arrive at aligning their personal intentions with the ideal of the "common good" by contributing to the spread of mathematical knowledge and practices.     

HISTORY AND THE MANIFEST IMAGE: HAYDEN WHITE AS A PHILOSOPHER OF HISTORY1

To claim that Hayden White has yet to be read seriously as a philosopher of history might seem false on the face of it. But do tropes and the rest provide any epistemic rationale for differing representations of historical events found in histories? As an explanation of White's influence on philosophy of history, such a proffered emphasis only generates a puzzle with regard to taking White seriously, and not an answer to the question of why his efforts should be worthy of any philosophical attention at all. For what makes his emphasis on narrative structure and its associated tropes of philosophical relevance? What, it may well be asked, did (or could) any theory that draws its categories from a stock provided by literary criticism contribute to explicating problems with regard to the warranting of claims about knowledge, explanation, or causation that represent those concerns that philosophy typically brings to this field? Robert Doran's anthologizing of previously uncollected pieces, ranging as they do over a literal half‐century of White's published work, offers an opportunity to identify explicitly those philosophical themes and arguments that regularly and prominently feature there. Moreover, White's essays in this volume demonstrate a credible knowledge of and interest in mainstream analytic philosophers of his era and also reveal White as deeply influenced by or well acquainted with other important philosophers of history. White thus invites a reading of his work as philosophy, and this volume presents the opportunity for accepting it as such.     

也论裴子野的《宋略》

《宋略》始作于永元二年五月之后 ,成稿于天监三年裴子野除右军安成王参军之前 ;是书采撷颇广 ,与沈约《宋书》同闻异述 ,其立意构思复因作者的经世情怀而迥异于前此诸编年史。由于时代需求的变易 ,曾长期饮誉史坛的传经之史《宋略》 ,最终散佚于两宋之际的兵燹之灾。     

Samuel Tissot’s Traité de l’épilepsie—250 years old

A quarter of a millennium ago, Samuel Tissot (1728–1797), a Swiss physician who had achieved a substantial European reputation, authored a monograph entitled Traité de l’épilepsie. The book was translated into several European languages and appeared in various editions over the following 70 years, although an English-language version was never published. In his Traité, Tissot provided a thorough account and critical analysis of the previous relevant literature concerning epilepsy, added data from his own experience in practice, and raised issues, some of which remain important today. The appearance of the book was propitious, occurring during the period of the European Enlightenment, when medicine was increasingly divesting itself of ancient modes of thinking and veneration for the opinions of great names from the remote past. At least in Western Europe, the Traité de l’épilepsie became an intellectual launching pad for the considerable expansion in knowledge of epilepsy that occurred over the century or longer that followed its publication.     

Roger Scruton's Conservatism and the Liberal Regime

Although Roger Scruton insists on the incompatibility of his conservatism and the fundamental liberal principles of individualism and consent, his political thought has much in common with classical liberal constitutionalism. This essay explores these relationships while arguing that particularly Locke's constitutionalism is more compatible with Scruton's ideas than he allows. Specifically, Scruton argues that authority necessarily precedes any individual claims, but Locke's civil society, in fact, subordinates individual rights to political authority and common goods. Similarly, Scruton's insists that the state is an end rather than a means, but his own account of the conditionality of allegiance approaches Locke's understanding of legitimacy in the practice of civic association. This narrowing of the differences suggests that a conservative teaching could begin with an education in liberal constitutionalism rightly understood.     

A shameful debate? A critical reassessment of the ‘Torossian debate’

ABSTRACT

For years now, a debate has been going on concerning the memoirs of Sarkis Torossian, published in 1947, and republished in a commented Turkish version in 2012. This latter publication sparked a debate among a number of Turkish historians, divided over the reliability or not of Torossian’s account of his participation in the Ottoman war effort as an officer, and his subsequent desertion following the realization that most of his family had fallen victim to deportation and mass murder. Some challenged Torossian’s narrative and evidence, based on inconsistencies and errors, coming to the conclusion that his story was largely fictionalized and his documents forged. Others, on the contrary, took Torossian’s defence, trying to reject or to justify these inconsistencies, and suggesting that this criticism was likely to stem from a nationalist, or even denialist stand regarding the genocide of the Armenians. The debate has to a large extent remained contained within Turkey, and its rare international repercussions, including an article by Taner Akçam in the Journal of Genocide Research, have more or less systematically sided with the ‘pro-Torossian’ side. The present article aims to set the record straight by showing that the criticism levelled against Torossian’s memoirs is extremely serious and solid, and that the debate has been corrupted by a gradual slipping of what should have remained a scholarly discussion into an uncontrolled conflict based on ad hominem attacks and political allegations. It is my contention that the authenticity or not of Torossian’s narrative and documents is of very secondary importance, compared to the much more problematic issue of the way in which ideological, political and moral concerns have ended up hijacking the debate. The ultimate relevance of the so-called Torossian debate may well be its capacity to reveal some crucial weaknesses of genocide research in a late Ottoman context.     

John Stuart Mill and voluntary slavery contracts

Mill's unwillingness to support the enforcement of voluntary slavery agreements is problematically related to his strong anti‐paternalism. Working on the assumption that it is too simple to charge him with inconsistency, this paper examines several interpretations of his remarks, and explores some of the deeper motivations that may have influenced his position. Several features of his argument are emphasized: the fact that his opposition is to slavery contracts and not self‐enslavement as such; the weight he allows to ‘the necessities of life’ in determining what freedom‐limiting contracts to enforce; the way in which enforceable slavery agreements would undermine the presumption in favour of liberty; the problematic character of carte blanche consent, and the possibility this raises that enforcement could make the law a party to criminable harm. Although Mill's argument is too cryptic to be persuasive, it is too suggestive to be given the off‐handed treatment often meted out by his commentators.     

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.     

Descartes' visit to the town library, or how Augustinian is Descartes' neurophysiology?

Rene Descartes was early accused of taking his central philosophical proposition from St Augustine. Did he also take his central neurophysiological concept from the same source? This is the question which this paper sets out to answer. It is concluded that the foundational neurophysiology propounded in L'Homme does indeed show strong and interesting resemblences to Augustine's largely Erasistratean version. Descartes, however, working within the new paradigm of seventeenth-century physical science, introduced a new principle: whereas Augustine's neurophysiology is pervaded throughout by a vital factor, the pneuma, Descartes' theory involved only inanimate material forces. It is concluded, further, that in spite of the interesting similarities between Augustinian and Cartesian neurophysiology there is no evidence for any direct plagiarism. It seems more likely that Augustine's influence was filtered through the Galenical physiologists of Descartes' own time and of the preceding century.     

时序“矛盾”与“增删五次”及版本传抄——《红楼梦》中时序“矛盾”考辨之四

现存《红楼梦》(《石头记》)所有的版本,都只是过录本。这些:过录本,完全有可能不是抄自一种版本,而是拼凑抄的,即都不是据曹雪芹的原稿抄录的(更不是曹雪芹的原稿),这样也就难免出现矛盾现象了。因此,《红楼梦》中存在的“矛盾”现象,不一定都是曹雪芹造成的,而有些是在后来的传抄过程中造成的。同时,还有一些是由于曹雪芹在“披阅十载,增删五次”的过程中,“修改未尽”而留下的“痕迹”。另外,也与作者的注重写意有关。     

Hugh Trevor-Roper and the history of ideas

A wave of recent publication connected to Hugh Trevor-Roper offers cause to take stock of his life and legacy. He is an awkward subject because his output was so protean, but a compelling one because of his significance for the resurgence of the history of ideas in Britain after 1945. The article argues that the formative period in Trevor-Roper's life was 1945–57, a period curiously neglected hitherto. It was at this time that he pioneered a history of ideas conceived above all as the study of European liberal and humanist tradition. Analysis of the relative importance of contemporary and early modern history in his oeuvre finds that, while the experience of Hitler and the Cold War was formative, it was not decisive.Trevor-Roper was at heart an early modernist who did not abjure specialization.However, he insisted that specialized study must be accompanied by “philosophical” reflection on the workings of a constant human nature present throughout history, a type of reflection best pursued by reading classical historians such as Gibbon and Burckhardt.Yet this imperative in turn fostered purely historical research into the history of historical writing – another branch of the history of ideas.     

Karl Marx's theory of history: A defense

A wave of recent publication connected to Hugh Trevor-Roper offers cause to take stock of his life and legacy. He is an awkward subject because his output was so protean, but a compelling one because of his significance for the resurgence of the history of ideas in Britain after 1945. The article argues that the formative period in Trevor-Roper's life was 1945–57, a period curiously neglected hit her to. It was at this time that the pioneered a history of ideas conceived above all as the study of European liberal and humanist tradition. Analysis of the relative importance of contemporary and early modern history in his oeuvre finds that, while the experience of Hitler and the Cold War was formative, it was not decisive. Trevor-Roper was at heart an early modernist who did not abjure specialization. However, he insisted that specialized study must be accompanied by “philosophical” reflection on the working sofa constant human nature present throughout history, a type of reflection best pursued by reading classical historians such as Gibbon and Burckhardt. Yet this imperative in turn fostered purely historical research into the history of historical writing–another branch of the history of ideas.     

葉德輝刻書活動探析

葉德輝是清末民初的文獻學家,其所致力包括藏書建設,藏書目録編製、讀書題跋撰寫、書史研究、藏書經驗總結、前人書目考證糾正和訂補等,並延伸到圖書刊刻領域。葉德輝一生共刊刻超過百種圖書。除刊刻内容嚴肅及與本人學術喜好相關的圖書,還刊刻遊藝、房中等流傳甚少的書籍,其刻書幾乎沒有禁區。他不僅重視刊刻個人著述與家集,也重視刊刻海內外未經傳刻或罕見之本,於保存文獻、羽翼學術,居功至偉。葉德輝亦精於校勘之學,一些孤本文獻賴其力得以保存。故葉德輝不愧爲清末民初具有代表性的刻書家,其貢獻應予肯定。     

‘Whatever Passed in Parliament Ought to be Communicated to the Public’: Reporting the Proceedings of the Reformed Commons, 1833–50

This article considers the opening up of parliamentary proceedings to greater public scrutiny in the two decades after the 1832 Reform Act. It examines developments in the publication of parliamentary debates, considering why proposals for an official parliamentary record were rejected in the 1830s. It also discusses two less well‐studied but equally vital means of publicising parliamentary activity: the publication of official division lists and the sale to the public of parliamentary papers. It argues that the 1830s was a critical decade of change, influenced by shifting perceptions of the relationship between the reformed house of commons and those it sought to represent. This was driven, in particular, by liberal notions of the importance of parliamentary accountability to public opinion: MPs were increasingly aware of the need to keep constituents informed of their parliamentary activities, whether in the chamber, committee room or division lobby. This article also highlights the extent to which the Commons' approach to publicising its activities was constrained not only by the fact that it remained a breach of parliamentary privilege to publish reports of debates, but also by the physical space that the Commons occupied. The destruction of much of the old Palace of Westminster by fire in 1834 provided an important opportunity to remodel existing arrangements, notably with the addition of a second division lobby and the construction of a reporters' gallery.     

Philosophy and literature,

Freedom as a natural right, the importance of consent, defending the idea that government should be in the hands of the most virtuous and reflective citizens, denouncing patronage, the need to link individual and political freedom … These are some of the characteristics of La Boétie's doctrine that I believe place him within the tradition that Quentin Skinner calls the neo-Roman conception of civil liberty. Of course, La Boétie did not write a positive defence of the rule of law, as Livy did in his History of Rome and as the English republicans do, but the Discourse can easily be read as a legal plea condemning absolute monarchy and any kind of arbitrary regime.     

Acknowledgements

Abstract

In 1858, the Italian Ermete Pierotti, a former Captain in the Corps of Royal Piedmontese Army Engineers, was appointed architect and engineer of Jerusalem by the Ottoman governor. This gave him the opportunity to explore various places in the city, including the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount), something which hardly any non-Muslims had done at the time. In 1864, Pierotti published in London a book entitled Jerusalem Explored. His theories, admittedly not presented in a scholarly way, differed widely from those of eminent representatives of the current Victorian establishment, who launched a violent attack against him, first for an alleged breach of copyright, and then by making public a document revealing some embarrassing aspects of his years in the Piedmontese army. Pierotti was thereby compromised and lost all credibility in the eyes of the British public. Morally broken and nearly destitute, Pierotti never recovered from this blow. The article attempts to identify some of the motivations that guided Pierotti through his adventurous life.