西周的"德"与孔子的"仁"——中国传统文化的泛血缘特征初探

周人克殷践奄后,创建了以周天子为天下大宗的,包括同姓和异姓诸侯在内的宗法等级秩序.这种宗法等级秩序在政治制度方面表现为宗盟政体的构建,在意识形态上则表现为泛血缘文化或曰拟血缘文化的创造,即周人以姬姓周天子的血缘为核心的对异姓贵族血缘认同的文化.这种泛血缘文化集中体现在周人所创造的"德"这一宗法伦理价值观念上.西周的"德"与孔子的"仁"二者之间具有沿革承传关系及共同的泛血缘文化特征.     

Lactantius’s Power Struggle

Abstract

During the Diocletianic Persecution and at the dawn of Constantine’s rise to power, Lactantius penned Book V of the Divine Institutes, in which he offers a striking account of Church-state relations. For Lactantius, imperial power is at odds with the Christian “course of life.” To be a people of virtue, Christians must perform justice from below, under the rule of a secular state whose gaze is fixed on its self-preservation at all costs. Lactantius makes clear that if Christians collude with the power of the state, exercising power from above, justice becomes an impracticable virtue. Not only would Christianity’s transition to the imperial seat alter the material conditions which best form Christians in virtue, it would, in Lactantius’s view, cultivate lives of vice and alienation from God. This essay contends that in Book V of the Divine Institutes, Lactantius employs Christian reasoning to demonstrate how secular politics are antithetical to Christian discipleship.     

Patience on a Monument: Prophetic Time in Shakespeare,Fuseli, and Michelangelo

ABSTRACT

This essay shows how a political–theological reading of Twelfth Night yields a literary criticism alert to the injurious biases of inveterate prejudice and unequal power while seeking within the uneven status landscapes of Shakespearean drama and Biblical narrative signs of cosmopolitan hospitality and elastic virtue practices of attention and care.     

Red Tory and Blue Labour: More Theology Needed

Abstract

Phillip Blond's Red Tory project has been widely credited with influencing the policies of the Conservative Party under David Cameron, and especially Cameron's "Big Society" thinking. Maurice Glasman has, meanwhile, been a key voice in rethinking Labour Party policy in the post-Blair/Brown years—the so-called Blue Labour programme. Both make space for religion, and Christianity in particular, within the core narratives of their projects and both have sought to build alliances with church bodies. The two projects are united in their critique of liberal assumptions, and this leads to significant congruences between them. Yet the place of Christianity and religion in their thinking is surprisingly different, reflecting the political genealogy of their projects in Burkean Toryism on Blond's part and Alinskian Community Organizing on Glasman's. Nevertheless, the attacks which both have suffered at the hands of social and economic liberals suggest that their ideas have traction. Both, however, are deficient in that their focus on communities as sources of virtue refuses to acknowledge that Enlightenment liberalism has any virtues to its credit. This is fundamentally a theological, rather than just a political, error, since it fails to capture the essential both/and embedded in Christian orthodoxy and the importance of corrective perspectives in Christian practice this side of the eschaton.     

PERFORMING HISTORY: HOW HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP IS SHAPED BY EPISTEMIC VIRTUES

Philosophers of history in the past few decades have been predominantly interested in issues of explanation and narrative discourse. Consequently, they have focused consistently and almost exclusively on the historian's (published) output, thereby ignoring that historical scholarship is a practice of reading, thinking, discussing, and writing, in which successful performance requires active cultivation of certain skills, attitudes, and virtues. This paper, then, suggests a new agenda for philosophy of history. Inspired by a “performative turn” in the history and philosophy of science, it focuses on the historian's “doings” and proposes to analyze these performances in terms of epistemic virtue. It argues that historical scholarship is embedded in “practices” or “epistemic cultures,” in which knowledge is created and warranted by means of such virtues as honesty, carefulness, accuracy, and balance. These epistemic virtues, however, are not etched in stone: historians may highlight some of them, exchange one for another, or reinterpret their meaning. On the one hand, this suggests a rich area of research for historians of historiography. To what extent can consensus, conflict, continuity, and change in historical scholarship be explained in terms of epistemic virtue? On the other hand, the proposal outlined in this article raises a couple of philosophical questions. For example, on what grounds can historians choose among epistemic virtues? And what concept of the self comes with the notion of virtue? In addressing these questions, philosophy of history may expand its current scope so as to encompass not only “writings” but also “doings,” that is, the virtuous performances historians recognize as professional conduct.     

Accounting for Carbon: The Role of Accounting Professional Organisations in Governing Climate Change

Abstract: Since the turn of the century accounting professional organisations have been involved in a number of debates about climate change, catalysed initially by technical discussions about the treatment of European carbon credits in financial accounts. These bodies are positioning themselves as leading on climate change, for example, through launching professional training courses, funding research, and initiating corporate workshops and seminars. The paper examines the role of the accountancy profession in governing the new carbon economy. We review climate change related activities undertaken by accountancy professional bodies through drawing on primary empirical material, including interviews with accountants, accountancy standard setters and professional bodies. A mix of theories about the role of calculation, measurement and expertise in governance are used to help explain and understand the situation, including ideas about accountancy and society, epistemic communities, and governmentality.     

Hubert Humphrey and Political Science

Abstract

This study argues that Aquinas’ account of tyranny grants citizens a surprisingly wide ambit for resistance to tyrants but that such actions demand a tall order for even the most virtuous citizens: knowledge of the hierarchy of ends in politics and the prudence to apply it under the pressure of a tyrannical government. We consider sections of the Summa Theologiae and De Regno, Aquinas’ most sustained discussion of tyranny, to demonstrate the theoretical illumination that the former provides of the latter. De Regno, we argue, presents a negative teaching of the best regime and citizen, one in which citizens are shown the need for their own virtue in discerning the roots of tyranny and their remedy. With the Summa, we show how such prudential decisions fit within the orders of charity and piety: the citizen must come to see love of country as intrinsically ordered to love of family and God. Ultimately, Aquinas’ resistance theory rests on a hierarchy of ends for civil government that orders both ruler and citizen to God.     

A Review of “Never Enough”

Abstract

Three of Alasdair MacIntyre's published essays help to illuminate his critique of modern liberal individualism Liberalism, in the name of freedom, inculcates indifference to the developmental social needs of human agents, denies the ties that bind members of society to the common good, and prevents political communities from pursuing common goods effectively. Rather than freeing individuals for self-government, liberalism leaves the government of the community's goods to unacknowledged elites. Liberation demands self-government and self-government requires the virtues, which are formed, in part, through the community's shared pursuit of common goods.     

Response

Cervantes's deathbed novel, The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Northern Story, uses the pilgrimage of the two eponymous protagonists to show them as exemplars of the virtues not only necessary for ordinary life, but also those qualities essential to true leadership. The novel constitutes Cervantes's final written words, barely completed in partial rough draft before he expired, and accordingly might be considered his last words on the ideas and traits most important for human flourishing.     

The French romantics

Berkeley's Theory of Vision, or Visual Language Showing The Immediate Presence and Providence of A Deity, Vindicated And Explained was published in 1733, occasioned by an anonymous letter of the previous year to the London Daily Post Boy. The letter criticized Berkeley's New Theory of Vision, which had been published in 1709, but which had been appended to Berekely's Alciphron, published in 1732. No one has ever identified the author whose criticisms led Berkeley to his Theory of Vision Vindicated. Circumstantial evidence presented here suggests that the author was Catherine Trotter Cockburn. Part of the evidence is the brilliance of her interpretation of Locke, whose position is defended in the letter against Berkeley.