ERNST CASSIRER,MARTIN HEIDEGGER,AND THE LEGACY OF DAVOS

In 1929 Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger participated in a momentous debate in Davos, Switzerland, which is widely held to have marked an important division in twentieth‐century European thought. Peter E. Gordon's recent book, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos, centers on this debate between these two philosophical adversaries. In his book Gordon examines the background of the debate, the issues that distinguished the respective positions of Cassirer and Heidegger, and the legacy of the debate for later decades. Throughout the work, Gordon concisely portrays the source of disagreement between the two adversaries in terms of a difference between Cassirer's philosophy of spontaneity and Heidegger's philosophy of receptivity, or of “thrownness” (Geworfenheit), into a situation that finite human beings can never hope to master. Although it recognizes that this work provides an important contribution to our understanding of the Davos debate and to twentieth‐century European thought, this review essay subjects Gordon's manner of interpreting the distinction between Cassirer and Heidegger to critical scrutiny. Its purpose is to examine the possibility that important aspects of the debate, which do not conform to the grid imposed by Gordon's interpretation, might have been set aside in the context of his analysis.     

文明话语与帝国文化——关于义和团运动后传教士参与劫掠北京的一场争论

1901年义和团战争以后,美国社会围绕传教士参与对华劫掠兴起了一场争论,对这场争论的考察揭示出无论是马克.吐温和一些反帝国主义者,还是美国海外传教团体,争论双方都利用了当时流行的文明话语来论证自己的观点。这一文明话语为美国的扩张和海外非正式帝国的建立提供了支持和合法性,因而构成了一种帝国文化。     

Towards Hume – the discourse on the liberty of the press in the age of Walpole*

The liberty of the press became one of the main topics of public debate in the 1720s and 1730s in response to Walpole’s restrictive press policy. This debate was carried on mainly in newspapers such as the Craftsman and the London Journal. Country and Court writers did not limit their discussions to legal questions, but conducted a lively debate about what press freedom actually was, and what role the press should have in political life. Among other things, they discussed to what extent it was appropriate for the press to take on an anti-governmental role. This debate is important, not least because it is a foil for one of the ‘classical’ eighteenth-century texts on the problem of press freedom, David Hume’s essay ‘Of the Liberty of the Press’. The debate reveals to what extent, and in what respects, Hume was breaking new ground in this essay.     

The Sound of Debate in Georgian England: Auralising the House of Commons

St Stephen's Chapel, Westminster became the first permanent home of the house of commons in 1548. The building had to be adapted to conform to its new use. Visual and architectural adaptations to the space have been discussed in detail, but the building's new role also required improvements to the working use of the space as a forum for public debate. In this essay, acoustic techniques are used to explore how speeches and debate would have sounded during the Georgian period and consider how St Stephen's was adapted for this new use. The results demonstrate that, despite these alterations, the 18th‐century house of commons was not ideally suited to speaking or listening to debate. The listening experience was not uniform across the chamber, and its former use as a medieval chapel may have influenced how well certain positions in the chamber would have experienced speech.     

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.     

The Positivism Dispute in German Sociology, 1954–1970

This article offers a re-contextualization of the Positivism Dispute between the Frankfurt School and advocates of empirical sociology in the German sociological profession between 1954 and 1970. Investigating the reasons why the German Sociological Association convened in Tübingen in October 1961, it assigns a more peripheral role to Karl Popper and this now famous seminar. Focusing instead on the debate among German sociologists from the mid-1950s which prompted the convention of the seminar and the invitation for Popper to speak, the article maintains that philosophy of history was the central concern of the Positivism Dispute. In this debate, members of the Frankfurt School emphasized contingency in history and society, while sociologists such as René König, Helmut Schelsky, Ralf Dahrendorf, and Arnold Gehlen advocated sociology as the empirical study of ‘given’ social facts. By doing so the article questions the narrative of the Positivism Dispute advanced by Karl Popper and some of his followers, as well as interpretations which have focused on debates during the aftermath of the Tübingen seminar in the 1960s.     

刘师培的民族史研究及对蒙文通的影响

晚清时期有关民族问题的大讨论热烈而持久,这种现象,实为政治上“革命”之需要的产物。晚清革命派以民族问题的探讨为欠,吹响了倒清的号角,刘师培正是有力的吹鼓手。刘的民族学研究,既有政治的意蕴,同时也有一定的学术含金量,对于现代史学中民族史和人类学学科的发展产生了一定的影响。     

评陶希圣的中国社会史研究

大革命失败后中国革命向何处去的问题,引出了长达10年的中国社会性质、社会史问题的大论战。论战中陶希圣写下了大量的著作,其深度是当时绝大多数人不能比的,提出的看法直到今天仍能给人以启示。20世纪80年代以来,大陆学术界对本次社会史论战开展评论,不少人从陶希圣反对共产党的政治主张出发,认为他的社会史观点经常改变,所论也不符合中国历史的实际。我们认为这种评价政治倾向重于学术研究,又缺少对于陶氏社会史研究的具体分析,其做法是有违实事求是地看待历史问题的马克思主义史学观点的。     

The Intervention Crisis of 1862: A British Diplomatic Dilemma?

In the fall of 1862, William Ewart Gladstone opened a cabinet debate whether Great Britain should intervene in the American Civil War. Influenced by the staggering death toll and lack of results, the British cabinet contemplated a humanitarian intervention. Coinciding with the debate was a cabinet crisis in France over French policies toward Italy and more importantly the overthrow of the Greek king. The revolution in Greece reopened the Eastern Question and forced the Palmerston Government to carefully consider its foreign policy. By closely looking at the chronological overlap of the intervention debate, the French cabinet crisis, and the Greek Revolution, this article shows the interplay of the entangled global crises during the fall of 1862 and their impact on trans-Atlantic diplomacy. The British Government had to determine whether the situation in North America or the containment of Russia and the Eastern Question required attention more urgently. The British Government determined that threats closer to home mattered more.     

Whose Economy for Whose Culture? Moving Beyond Oppositional Talk in European Debate about Economy and Culture

This paper provides an overview of the economy-culture debate as currently rehearsed within European urban and regional change circles, explores some of the key theoretical inadequacies of this debate and outlines and illustrates one possible way of moving debate forward. The paper begins by identifying the different ways in which economy and culture, and economy-culture articulations, are thought about within this debate and by arguing that what purports to be a debate about articulation collapses in practice into the respective privileging of either culture or economy. Subsequently, after a critique of the "economy-culture as differential logics" argument, we forward what we consider to be the minimal conditions for conjoining economy and culture theoretically. These entail according economy and culture equivalent conceptual standing, centring meaning and seeing meaning and practice as conceptually inseparable. We then illustrate this approach at the level of particularities, using a range of examples that span commodities, "productive" practices and processes of consumption and exchange.     

"The Ancient Economy": The Problem and the Fraud

Periodically since about 1860 the debate about "The Ancient Economy" has raged vehemently as oikos controversy , Bücher-Meyer debate , primitivists versus modernists or simply as the Moses Finley debate . Therefore, Hopkins rightly remarked: "The ancient economy is an academic battleground. The contestants campaign under various colours--apologists, Marxists, modernizers, primitivists Even within schools, there are sects." This still seems to be the case, although the author of this article does not belong to any school or sect but is looking for an anti-ideological controllable scientific truth. Whatever that may be it is, certainly, a critical venture where "fraud" is at stake. In 1986, by symbolic accident the year of Finley's death, he dared to start a new period in the debate and at present the controversy with all its usual tricks seems at its zenith again. Did the bell toll for the last round in this beloved controversy? After 150 years of debate, one can never be sure about that, but we will try again. The subject matter is no less important than the question "to whom belongs antiquity?" or "for what purposes does one study its history or culture?" The following article wants to introduce the debate in a few sentences, question its present relevancy as the Moses Finley debate and provoke readers into another one.     

The Queen's preferred chant and Greece's nineteenth century Orthodox‐Christian national problem

When in 1875 Queen Olga of Greece insisted a multi‐part chant be introduced in the Athens Cathedral, a widespread debate about the influence of Western European culture upon Greek‐Orthodox tradition was initiated in Athens. With a significant part of this debate originating in mid‐century Vienna, and Russian musical influences affecting the form of the otherwise ancient Byzantine chant, the issue of polyphony acquired cultural‐historical dimensions intimately connected to historical continuity and the Orthodox‐Christian musical tradition. The debate transformed rapidly from a musicological enquiry into a matter of national identity, and an otherwise innocent aesthetic choice showcased the musical dimensions of Greek national claims at continuity. This article examines the historical contingencies that fuelled this debate, showcases the importance of patronage for musical transference and highlights the potency of Greek national Orthodoxy as a carrier of historical continuity for the ethnic group, here seen through music.     

From Normative Debates to Comparative Methodology: The Three Waves of Post-Charter Supreme Court Scholarship in Canada

This article surveys the literature on the Supreme Court of Canada following the 1982 introduction of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and argues it has taken place in three distinct “waves.” The first involved tentative, prospective, and normative arguments about the impact of the Charter on national unity and Canada’s political institutions. The second was characterized by the legitimacy debate, the dialogue debate, and qualitative examination of how other political actors responded to Supreme Court decisions. By contrast, the third wave, initiated by American scholars drawing from American research, has been less normative, more comparative, and methodologically rigorous. While this comparative shift has been beneficial, the retreat from normative questions contributes to a misplaced sense that important debates are now settled. We urge scholars to engage in intellectual cross-fertilization by drawing from third-wave contributions to address normative questions about the Supreme Court’s increasingly important role in Canadian politics.     

Teaching critical thinking in world regional geography through stakeholder debate

Using a stakeholder debate based on a real-world case of regional construction – that of Turkey's application to join the European Union – improved students' critical thinking in an introductory world regional geography course. Such courses are a staple offering among US geography departments, and often the only exposure of non-majors to geographic thinking. A stakeholder debate highlighting regional construction, using structured learning activities and reflection on their own thinking, improved students' critical thinking. We describe the stakeholder debate and its revision after one semester, and provide data from assessment and thematic coding of students' reflection papers.     

An Assessment of the Effectiveness of Strategic Spatial Planning: A Study of Sardinian Municipalities

A political and technical debate about the effectiveness of strategic spatial planning results is ongoing. The debate has taken this direction, rather than focusing on the methods, procedures and organization of spatial planning, because it is difficult to contextualize the development of programmed steps within the time required for their implementation. This article explores the potentialities and challenges of this debate, focusing on its evolutionary excursus in Italy and the region of Sardinia. The aim of this article is to propose a qualitative assessment methodology, capable of comparing different spatial strategic plans, in order to understand the extent to which the plans’ stated objectives were achieved, and to assess what changes the implementation of these objectives achieved in the external environment over the medium and long term.     

Paragone: notes on hegemony and realism in the 1950s

This article focuses on the literary review Paragone and on the debate on realism articulated by the review and by the Cultural Commission of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the 1950s. By analysing the review’s internal composition, correspondence between its contributors, and records of the PCI’s Cultural Commission, this article highlights a series of issues relating to the debate on realism in the 1950s, as a critical time, in both aesthetic and political terms, for the determination of Italian culture’s identity profile. Specifically, the article discusses the key features of the debate on realism that unfolded in Paragone, and relates these to the debate simultaneously developing within the Cultural Commission. This comparison allows us to argue for a close connection between the aesthetic habitus displayed by an independent review and that embraced by a cultural institution with a distinctly political as well as cultural agenda.     

Selected writings on Philosophy,Religion and Politics

Benedetto Croce was the author of the most important and original theory of history in the 20th century. His theory was that of ‘absolute historicism’, and this necessarily entailed an acute critique of inherited ideas about the Enlightenment. This article studies both Croce's theoretical analysis of Enlightenment and his historical analysis of the Neapolitan Enlightenment. Croce's interest in the Enlightenment had political as well as philosophical roots. All over Europe in the 1920s and 1930s historical and theoretical research was occurring into in the Age of Enlightenment. The broad goal of such research was to bring forth a new concept of reason, which would have purchase in the contemporary debate about rationalism and irrationalism. This debate, which flourished in the era of totalitarian regimes, raised a series of further questions: What was culture? What was the task of culture in the fight against political irrationalism? What was the relationship between culture and the growth of public opinion? With respect to the latter relationship an important role was played by intellectuals, as evinced by the works of Benda, Max Weber and Croce himself. The genealogy of the modern intelligentsia led again to Enlightenment. In the third part of the article Croce's position on this issue is discussed in the light of his historical researches on Enlightenment by reference to his correspondence with two young historians, Delio Cantimori and Franco Venturi.     

Strands of indigenism in the Bolivian Andes: competing juridical claims for the ownership and management of indigenous heritage sites in an emerging context of legal pluralism

Within the broader debate to (re)define public archaeology, Grima's (2016) paper calls for an archaeology embedded in public archaeology, thereby focusing on this avenue of expansion instead of its own development as a singular discipline. Not fully rejecting this idea, this short paper aims to situate the debate a step beyond, towards a slightly different approach. Employing a historiographical perspective, it is argued that complementary visions about public archaeology help to enrich the discipline.     

Scaling from ‘below’: practices,strategies and urban spaces

Over the last 10 years, scholars in human geography have been paying increasing attention to the social construction of scale. Most of this literature takes its starting point in discourses of globalization and the way in which re-definition of scales operates through global political economics. This article is starting from an acknowledgement of the value of the scale debate for the analysis of urban everyday life and urban politics. Briefly, we reconsider the debate, in particular emphasizing the urban question as a scale question. However, we also identify some shortcomings in the debate so far. Even though many authors forward a conception of scales as relational, it is argued, they are often caught in a ‘hierarchical’ view of ‘scaling from above’. This is the background for an attempt to reverse the debate and consider the construction of urban spaces ‘from below’—from the practices and strategies of ‘ordinary’ people and organizations in the city. The interest in this article is how the diversity of everyday practices and politics interact with other scales in the construction of urban space.