The great war and the french people

Thomas Hobbes's theory of action seems to give up on the idea that actions are ‘up to us’. Thomas Pink has argued that this counter-intuitive stance should be understood as the implication of his radical assault on the scholastic Aristotelian model of action. Hobbes rejects the existence of the immaterial soul. This means that he must also reject the existence of so-called elicited acts of the will, which form the primary locus of human agency. In this paper an alternative interpretation is presented. It is argued that Hobbes's fundamental disagreement with the scholastic tradition is not over the existence of elicited acts of the will but over scope and productiveness of mechanical explanation. Hobbes aims to give an account of human actions as in our control and as ‘up to us’ while at the same time applying and defending his mechanical mode of analysis. This paper contributes to the contextualisation of Hobbes's views and furthers our understanding of his theory of action.     

Arthur’s Battles and the Volcanic Winter of 536–37

This article revisits a well-known religious conflict in Jacobean Leeds and presents an alternative interpretation of it as arising from differences within mainstream Calvinism, rather than the usual explanation of a clash between reformers and traditionalists. It places John Harrison, the renowned benefactor, centre stage in the opposition to the vicar, Alexander Cooke. They were both Protestants of a reformed stripe and prioritized preaching of the Word over ceremony, but held very different views on what this should mean in practice. Their dispute hardened Harrison’s position on the nature of order and authority, and when he built St John’s Chapel, several years later, he gave material expression to his views. Several long-standing puzzles about the interior fabric of this well-preserved chapel can be understood as his last word on the conflict.     

Theological Innovation from Spiritual Experience: Henry Alline's Anti‐Calvinism in Late Eighteenth‐Century Nova Scotia and New England*

The strident anti‐Calvinism of Nova Scotian revivalist Henry Alline (1748–1784), who left a substantial mark on the religious landscape of Nova Scotia and parts of New England, has been noted but largely neglected by historians. This article investigates Alline's anti‐Calvinism and concludes that it is best explained as arising from his own interpretation of his vivid spiritual experiences, particularly his dramatic conversion. Rather than simply rejecting Calvinist theology in favour of an emotive, experiential religion, however, Alline drew on his experiences to formulate an alternative anti‐Calvinist theology. Alongside other examples from the period, Alline's case suggests that evangelical “democratization” of popular religion in the eighteenth‐century transatlantic revivals could result in theological innovation rather than the abandonment of theology.     

Parliament in print: William Caxton and the history of political government in the fifteenth century

This article explores the narrative of parliamentary history in fifteenth-century England, specifically as found in the texts William Caxton printed. It investigates Caxton's approach to history and motivation for choosing texts, his translations and vocabulary, his editorial oversight and his audience. As his confidence in his own skill grew, and as he moved from a continental to an English context, his reading of parliaments changed. Initially it corresponded to his French texts, but by the early 1480s he understood the term ‘parliament’ to mean some variation of the contemporary English Parliament. Caxton's later understanding is reflected in the histories he published. This article emphasises the importance of Caxton's historical narratives to Parliament's legitimacy and to political discourse in a time when few parliaments were held.     

William James on a phenomenological psychology of immediate experience: the true foundation for a science of consciousness?

Throughout his career, William James defended personal consciousness. In his "Principles of Psychology" (1890), he declared that psychology is the scientific study of states of consciousness as such and that he intended to presume from the outset that the thinker was the thought. But while writing it, he had been investigating a dynamic psychology of the subconscious, which found a major place in his Gifford Lectures, published as "The Varieties of Religious Experience" in 1902. This was the clearest statement James was able to make before he died with regard to his developing tripartite metaphysics of pragmatism, pluralism and radical empiricism, which essentially asked "Is a science of consciousness actually possible?" James's lineage in this regard, was inherited from an intuitive psychology of character formation that had been cast within a context of spiritual self-realization by the Swedenborgians and Transcendentalists of New England. Chief among these was his father, Henry James, Sr., and his godfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson. However, james was forced to square these ideas with the more rigorous scientific dictates of his day, which have endured to the present. As such, his ideas remain alive and vibrant, particularly among those arguing for the fusion of phenomenology, embodiment and cognitive neuroscience in the renewed search for a science of consciousness.     

Calvin and Natural Rights

Abstract

This article applauds the recent rise of scholarly attention to studying the relation of religion to natural rights in general and Calvinism in particular. Against the strong belief in some quarters that appeals to nature, including the idea of rights, do not play a significant role in Calvin's thought, the article concurs with recent (and some not so recent) work to the contrary, arguing that such appeals do occupy an important, if ambiguous, place for Calvin. However, the article resists explaining the variations in his thought as the result of changing interpretations over time. Rather, it is contended that these matters were a source of tension throughout Calvin's career. He struggled not so much with the question of the natural knowledge of rights, but of the ability to choose to act on that knowledge. In conclusion, the article hints that Calvin's ambivalence on this issue sowed the seeds for significant divergence among his descendants.     

'Old Paris Is No More': Geographies of Spectacle and Anti-Spectacle

The term 'spectacle' has played an important role in recentcritical discussions of vision and visuality. In human geography it has often been used to designate new forms of capitalist urban development associated with display and show. This paper examines aspects of the term by addressing the critique of the spectacle developed by the situationist Guy Debord. It situates his writings on the subject back into the context of his engagements with the modern city between the 1950s and 1970s, especially in Paris, where hespent much of his life. In particular, it reads these writings in terms both of his bleak view of urban change and alienation under capitalism and of the 'glimmers of light' that he found in 'the setting sun of this city.' Debord's attachment to certain urban sites within this critique of urban spectacle was often nostalgic. Yet it can also be understood as part of his concern with challenging the ways in which urban spaces were being reconstructed, and as opening up gaps or cracks for thinking about 'counter-sites' and points of political intervention.     

Education for Tomorrow: The Vision of Rabindranath Tagore

This article investigates Rabindranath Tagore’s educational vision, which underpinned the three institutions he set up in India – Santiniketan (1901), Visva-Bharati (1921) and Sriniketan (1922). It argues that this vision is still relevant for the world of today and tomorrow, and that it should be taken into account in designing any educational model for the future. Tagore rejected the modern mechanical learning that focuses merely on cultivation of the individual’s mind, in favour of learning that encourages the creativity, imagination and moral awareness of students. He believed that education should be not for mere “success” or “progress” but for “illumination of heart” and for inculcation of a spirit of sympathy, service and self-sacrifice in the individual, so that s/he could rise above egocentrism and ethnocentrism to a state of global consciousness or worldcentrism. In pursuing this argument, I refer to Tagore’s letters, lectures, interviews and essays, both in Bengali and in English, a body of his short stories, his novel The Home and the World and his allegorical poem “Two Birds”. I also explain his awareness of the educational movements of his time in the West, and draw brief parallels with selected Western luminaries in the field, such as Plato, Montaigne, Rousseau and John Dewey. My contention is that although some may dismiss Tagore’s educational principles as “rickety sentimentalism” in a world that is palpable and real, his ideas of human fellowship, unity and creativity, and kinship for nature seem irrefutable with the rise of multiculturalism and the looming ecological crisis threatening world peace.     

Edward III’s siege of Calais: A reappraisal

In September 1346, Edward III brought his victorious army to the gates of Calais to begin a siege that over 12 months developed into the largest military operation conducted by the English on French soil during the fourteenth century. It is also perhaps the least understood campaign of Edward III’s reign, because of the loss of the army pay records. We know from chronicles that the men of Calais conducted a heroic defence of their town, and we know too that the English created and maintained an enormous logistical operation first to besiege and then to capture the port. What is little understood, however, is the scale, scope and chronology of the siege. The role played by English naval forces has received little attention, yet there is a series of pay records relating to their service which can compensate for the loss of the vadia guerre accounts and which can enrich understanding of the campaign. Using this evidence, this article reappraises the whole expedition, highlights the numbers of ships and mariners involved in the siege, and draws attention to periods of intensive military activity. Edward III’s ultimate objective was to capture, hold and use the town as a safe port of disembarkation for future invasions.     

PINKER AND PROGRESS

Condorcet's classical Enlightenment statement of human progress became an essential element of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century consciousness, but by the millennium grand narratives had fallen victim to a disillusioned cultural climate. Now Steven Pinker, like Condorcet drawing on a wide range of contemporary “knowledges,” has reasserted a sweeping narrative of human progress in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Mapping a spectacular long‐term decline in person‐on‐person violence and reduction in deaths due to war, Pinker celebrates the spread of a cultural pattern of self‐restraint, sensitivity to human suffering, and recent regard for human rights, due to the modern state and gentle commerce capitalism. For Pinker the human condition has gotten steadily better, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible. Why then are so many so negative about modernity? Citing the psychology of temporal proximity to horrific events and the bad‐news predilection of the media, Pinker ignores the specifically modern and less directly brutal institutionalized forms of violence as well as the profound ambivalence of progress. He decisively demonstrates the drop in certain kinds of violence, but his account becomes strangely ideological, recapitulating key Cold‐War themes—the individual against totalitarianism, the Enlightenment against the counter‐Enlightenment, rationalism and freedom against murderous utopianism—distorting his study in the name of gentle commerce, Marxism, and anti‐Communism.     

Oswald Spengler,Technology, and Human Nature

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) is a neglected figure in the history of European philosophical thought. This article examines the philosophical anthropology developed in his later work, particularly his Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life (1931). My purpose is twofold: the first is to argue that Spengler's later thought is a response to criticisms of the “pessimism” of his earlier work, The Decline of the West (1919). Man and Technics overcomes this charge by providing a novel philosophical anthropology which identifies technology as the highest expression of human cognitive and creative capacities. The second is to suggest that in his later period Spengler presents an affirmatory account of modern technology as the final stage of human cultural evolution. I conclude that by providing a philosophical anthropology that reconciles technology with human nature, Man and Technics represents an important development of Spengler's theory of human culture.     

Imagining Britain: reconstructing history and writing national identity in Englands Heroicall Epistles

ABSTRACT

The idea that in the Tudor era the English people became proudly conscious of their national language and history, has been challenged by critical interventions that suggest how England as a nation had to be “written”: the act of writing can construct imagined boundaries, both to appropriate and exclude. In Englands Heroicall Epistles, Drayton replaces Ovid’s mythological figures in the Heroides with specific well-known English historical personas who provide, through their letters, different perspectives on English history. I will contend that Drayton’s assertion of national identity and patriotism is done verbally and semantically, while his allegiance to oppositionist politics is rendered generically and subversively by a remarkable manipulation of the genre of historical poetry in the Heroicall Epistles: this in turn reflects his deep engagement with ideas of history and the construction of national consciousness in early modern England.     

评德国新教传教士花之安的中国研究

花之安是19世纪德国新教传教士。1864—1899年,他在中国从事传教活动达35年之久。他以“文字传教”为工作重点,一方面用中文写作了若干宗教宣传品和介绍西方文化的读物;另一方面,他也有意识地研究中国,把中国的各方面情况和他自己的认识介绍到西方社会。然而花之安的研究工作主要是为传教服务的。由于宗教偏见和西方文化优越论的影响,花之安的中国观带有显著的帝国主义倾向,是西方列强征服中国的文化辅助工具。     

THE TIME OF THE SELF AND THE TIME OF THE OTHER

What is time? This essay offers an attempt to think again about this oldest of philosophical questions by engaging David Hoy's recent book, The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality, which proposes a “history of time‐consciousness” in twentieth‐century European philosophy. Hoy's book traces the turn‐of‐the‐century debate between Husserl and Bergson about the different senses of time across the various configurations of hermeneutics, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and feminist theory. For him, what is at stake in such a project is to distinguish between the scientific‐objective “time of the universe” and the phenomenology of human temporality, “the time of our lives.” Hoy's approach is to organize his book around the three tenses of time—past/present/future—and to view objective‐scientific time as derived from the more primordial forms of temporalizing lived experience that occur in our interpretation of time. In my reading of Hoy's work, I attempt to explore how “time” (lived, experiential, phenomenological) can be read not in terms of “consciousness” (Hoy's thematic), but in terms of the self's relationship with an Other. That is, my aim is less to establish a continental tradition about time‐consciousness, understood through the methods of genealogy, phenomenology, or critical theory, than it is to situate the problem of time in terms of an ethics of the Other. In simple terms, I read Hoy's project as too bound up with an egological interpretation of consciousness. By reflecting on time through the relationship to the Other rather than as a mode of the self's own “time‐consciousness,” I attempt to think through the ethical consequences for understanding temporality and its connection to justice.     

Seeing into hearts and minds: Part 2. ‘Big data’, algorithms,and computational counterinsurgency

In this second of his two‐part article, the author analyzes the rise of ‘predictive policing’ and its Pentagon connections, reviews two programmes, and poses these in the context of scientists' concerns over artificial intelligence and long‐term human survival.     

Elite migrations in modern Italy: patterns of settlement,integration and identity negotiation

Abstract

Francesco Crispi has often appeared a paradoxical figure. In the earlier part of his life he was a revolutionary republican and a friend of Mazzini. After 1860 he accepted the monarchy, but remained very much a man of the Left and in many ways a quintessential democrat. Yet he ended his career as an authoritarian Prime Minister, a vigorous opponent of the Far Left, and an imperialist, who prorogued parliament and contemplated dispensing with representative government altogether. This article contends that Crispi's career has more coherence than is commonly suggested; it focuses on an important but hitherto neglected aspect of his thinking, namely the problem of how to achieve a sense of national consciousness in Italy through ‘political education’. The article traces the development of the idea of national political education throughout Crispi's career and argues that his two terms as Prime Minister in 1887–91 and 1893–6 can only be fully understood in the context of his long‐standing concern with this problem.     

Introduction: Danto and His Critics: After the End of Art and Art History

In Bielefeld, Germany in April, 1997 an author conference was devoted to Arthur C. Danto's 1995 Mellon Lectures After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton,1997). This essay provides an introduction to seven essays given at that conference and expanded for this Theme Issue of History and Theory . Danto presented his view of the nature of art in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981). He then added in the Mellon lectures a sociological perspective on the current situation of the visual arts, and an Hegelian historiography. The history of art has ended, Danto claims, and we now live in a posthistorical era. Since in his well-known book on historiography, Analytical Philosophy of History (1965), Danto is unsympathetic to Hegel's speculative ways of thinking about history, his adaptation of this Hegelian framework is surprising. Danto's strategy in After the End of Art is best understood by grasping the way in which he transformed the purely philosophical account of The Transfiguration into a historical account. Recognizing that his philosophical analysis provided a good way of explaining the development of art in the modern period, Danto radically changed the context of his argument. In this process, he opened up discussion of some serious but as yet unanswered questions about his original thesis, and about the plausibility of Hegel's claim that the history of art has ended.
Hegel . . . did not declare that modern art had ended or would disintegrate. . . . his attitude towards future art was optimistic, not pessimistic. . . . According to his dialectic . . . art . . . has no end but will evolve forever with time.     

FROM CATASTROPHE TO HOPE

In his recent book, Amir Eshel focuses on over thirty recent German‐, Hebrew‐, and English‐language novels to develop a reading method—the “hermeneutics of futurity”—that would replace moralizing approaches to past traumas, including German guilt over the Holocaust and Israeli denial of Palestinian suffering. Futurity demonstrates how various narratives imagine a future liberated from denial, guilt, and thus traumatic repetition. In so doing Eshel emphasizes human agency to counter the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that has long dominated a great deal of literary theory, and focuses on how novelists construct human choices and their consequences. He covers two generations of German‐language novels spanning the Adenauer era to the present, and two generations of Israeli writers reflecting on 1948 and later, 1967. In order to develop fully the concept of futurity he also writes on recent American and English novels, often with implicitly political themes. The book succeeds in demonstrating the value of how various novelists read the past otherwise in order to reconstruct the present and future. At the same time, Eshel conceives human agency and “choice” so capaciously that the book often neglects the institutional constraints on agency that afflict victims of traumas in particular. His treatment of Martin Walser's controversial fictionalized memoir is exemplary of this problem in an otherwise stimulating work.