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.     

Blood,Justice, and American Citizenship: An Interpretation of Gangs of New York

An ironic exploration of Aristophanes' anticipation of many of the doctrines of postmodernism including the notions that social conventions can be deconstructed, that speech constructs reality, and that poets, or writers, are the creators of human horizons. Despite his seeming agreement with postmodernists, Aristophanes comes to quite different conclusions about how readily the "truth" of postmodern ideas should be disseminated. Aristophanes' Clouds is examined as a postmodern text.     

实用主义：一种功利主义还是人本主义思潮

本文旨在对作为一种哲学立场的“实用主义”进行正名,对实用主义学说的精神内涵进行重读和清理。实用主义把哲学的首要价值定位为研究人的问题,改善人的生活,其着眼点是讨论生活和行动的意义,从根本上说．它是一种人本主义思潮。     

The Development of Comparative Judicial Politics

Abstract

Much of the scholarly debate over the Heidegger controversy has endeavored to either connect or free his philosophy from fascism. Against both these tendencies, I argue that the central concepts of Heidegger's philosophy are politically underdetermined. Throughout both his late and early periods, Heidegger's primary ambition remained the illumination of the question of being, a project that I argue made his ontological framework inherently relativistic.     

Imagining Humane Realism: Moving from Sacred Secularism toward a Pragmatic Theory of Human Rights

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to problematize secular humanistic conceptualizations of human rights by challenging the absolutist and supposedly irreligious foundations on which they rest. In doing so, this piece will adopt the position that secular humanism is, in fact, a religion, and, as such, its dictates concerning human beings and the proper treatment thereof are logical byproducts of a very peculiar "modern" religious faith—a religion, as it were, that places humanity at the center of its worship—and, therefore, are no less arbitrary than the overtly religious dogma it rejects. By exposing the all too confident moral authority that secular faithful bestow upon themselves and the will to judgement that is so prevalent in modern humanistic ideology, this article hopes to create a space for a re-imagining of human rights that is less authoritarian and more open to self-criticism than the modern, secular movement.     

Transnational environmental obligations: locating new spaces of accountability in a post-Westphalian global order

The growth of transnational environmental harm is not only leading to new obligations between states, it is also recasting democratic accountability for the crossboundary environmental performance of public and private actors. Informed by pragmatist ideas on public discourse, I propose a conceptual schema for understanding the moral geography of these new transnational environmental obligations: they mark out non-territorial spaces of public communication delimited according to moral precepts of harm prevention, inclusiveness and impartiality. I outline how the recognition of transnational affected publics is reconstituting and rescaling environmental accountability within international regimes of harm prevention and liability. The critical geopolitical challenge in institutionalizing non-territorial domains of environmental accountability will be the mapping and empowerment of transnational affected publics.     

日本商家家训的基本特征及其历史评价

作为日本家训的重要组成部分,商家家训是日本传统文化的一个重要裁体。商家家训的内容和形式虽各有迥异,但核心功能重在家业、训诫对象超越家族、实用主义色彩浓厚和教育形式灵活多样等却是其共有的基本特征。就其历史功用而言,商家家训在家族稳定发展、规范商业经营、促进社会教育等方面发挥了积极作用,然而家训中主张墨守祖业等思想,却在一定程度上抑制了商人创新意识和开拓精神。     

论哈维对海德格尔“地方”思想的一次学术建构

大卫·哈维在收录于其《正义、自然与差异地理学》文集中的《从空间到地方,再回看》这篇文章中,对他所谓的马丁·海德格尔\"地方建构\"思想进行了批判。通过忠实地引用哈维和海德格尔的著作、分析其各自观点形成的背景并提供依据,本文详尽揭示了哈维在勾勒海德格尔思想这一学术工作中的操作细节,即他实际上大量使用了重排引文、重组素材、偷换主题、\"视而不见\"、模糊处理等做法,\"制造\"出一个需要批判的所谓海德格尔的\"地方建构\"思想,从而对自己所要提出的\"地方建构\"思想加以支持。仅就目前所掌握的文献看,海德格尔有他自己的\"地方\"和\"空间\"思想,但并未明确讨论过甚至从没有提到过哈维所关心的\"地方建构\"问题。     

Philosophy as a cultural resource and medium of reflection for Hermann Weyl

In a talk given at Zurich in the late 1940s, Hermann Weyl discussed Ferdinand Gonseth's dialectical epistemology and considered it as being restricted too strictly to aspects of historical change. His experiences with post-Kantian dialectical philosophy, in particular Johann Gottlieb Fichte's derivation of the concept of space and matter, had been a stronger dialectical background for his own 1918 studies in purely infinitesimal geometry and the early geometrically unified field theory of matter (extending the Mie-Hilbert program). Although now Weyl distantiated himself from the speculative features of his youthful philosophizing and in particular from his earlier enthusiasm for Fichte, he again had deep doubts as to the cultural foundations of modern mathematical sciences and its role in material culture of high modernity. For Weyl, philosophical «reflection» was a cultural necessity he now turned towards Karl Jaspers' and Martin Heidegger's existentialism to find deeper grounds, similar to his turn towards Fichte's philosophy after World War I. The discussion in the late 1940s can be read as a kind of post-World-War-II «Nachtrag» to Weyl's more widely known philosophical comments on mathematics and the natural sciences published in the middle of the 1920s.     

"I Didn't Do Anything Important": A Pragmatist Analysis of the Oral History Interview

In the course of gathering oral histories from women who servedin the Navy and Coast Guard during World War II, an unusualconversational pattern has emerged. The women almost invariablydiminish the importance of their wartime contributions; a commonrefrain is "I didn’t do anything important." Their individualexperiences, as revealed during the interviews, belie that assertion.In this paper, I will use the women's words to parse what ismeant by this rhetorical move. Do the women really believe theydid not do anything important? If so, why do they find it necessaryto participate in the very public process of oral history, placingtheir names and life stories within the historical record? Consideringboth the content and the context of the women's words from afeminist pragmatist philosophical base will help explain thisseemingly incongruent act. This article demonstrates that thewomen do not really mean to belittle their life experiences(and military service), but instead are using the phrase asa way to acknowledge society's expectations. The oral historyinterview, meanwhile, is used by the women to not only placetheir experience into the historical record but also to affirmthe importance of their wartime work.     

Allan Bloom's Message to the State Universities

Abstract

There is a tradition of theory—virtually as old as written literature itself—that views the artist as a maker of new worlds.¹ Reacting against philosophers like Plato, who sees literature as merely the imitation of an imitation, many theorists have ascribed to writers a dynamic and creative power to bring into being that which did not exist before. This article examines two such would-be creators: Friedrich Nietzsche and Chinua Achebe.     

论胡适与乾嘉考据学派

胡适继承了乾嘉考据学派疑古的精神、历史的眼光、考据学的方法.但是他主张用实验主义的方法去寻找证据,主张创办图书馆事业,提倡写人物传记来保存史料,提出用二重证据法来验证史实,主张方法的自觉和学术的公允,都是对乾嘉考据学派的超越.然而,他主张二元史观和历史发展的偶然论,夸大个人在社会发展中的作用,使得他的存疑主义走向了极端,这些都是他对乾嘉考据学派合理因素的抛弃.尽管如此,胡适在近代中国学术史上的地位不容忽视,他在史学领域取得的卓越成就和治学方法的独到见解也是值得我们借鉴的.