Vico and the disgregation of historia salutis

This study aims to analyse the problem of Vico’s religiosity, still a subject for debate, in the European tradition of universal historiography. Vico’s historical reconstruction has traditionally been considered as orthodox and apologetic. The Neapolitan philosopher, in his major work, New Science, tried to defend not only the historical veracity and authority of biblical narratives as the only source to reconstruct the initial phases of history, but also the temporal and spatial frame of historia salutis, confuting the thesis of a greater antiquity of pagan nations. Nonetheless, it is difficult to conclude that Vico’s historical reconstruction followed the same route of the apologists of his time. Vico demolished not the temporal and spatial sphere, but the unitary frame of historia salutis. In Vico’s setting, all nations formed their civilizations in an autochthonous way and developed them autonomously with diverse timetables. Vico introduced the concept of the plurality of history. In this way, the Neapolitan philosopher contributed to the process of secularization of universal history in a completely different way from his contemporaries.     

Affection and Assimilation: Concubinage and the Ideal of Conjugal Love in Colonial Korea, 1922–38

This article explores how selective application of Japanese divorce laws between 1922 and 1938, which obstructed Korean women from obtaining divorce on the grounds of concubinage, affected the meaning of conjugal relationships in colonial Korea. I argue that in this period affection and companionship emerged as critical components of a legitimate conjugal relationship among Koreans. This legal process, which I call the affectivisation of the female‐spouse, coincided with a popular penchant for romantic love shown in public media and popular novels. Challenging previous scholarship that treated the phenomenon of romantic love as contained in literary discourses, this article shows how literary and legal discourses mutually influenced one another. I further argue that this new ideal of conjugal love had an intricate relationship with overall colonial legal policy: it worked in conjunction (not antithetical) to the family state ideology of the Japanese empire and the family system that the colonial state was trying to implement in Korea. The qualitative transformation of the conjugal relationship contributed to firmer implementation of the family system in Korea and prepared Korean society for the full assimilation of the Korean civil laws in 1940.     

What You See Is (Not) What You Get? The Taiwan Question,Geo‐economic Realities,and the “China Threat” Imaginary

Abstract: Despite emergent trends of geo‐economic integration between nation‐states, the role of realist‐driven geopolitical calculation appears highly enduring. This paper explores the potential contradictions between state‐centric geopolitical concerns and transnational geo‐economic formation through an exploration of China–US tensions over Taiwan, a territory of indeterminate geo‐legal status and which China regards as its own province. I consider how the Taiwan Relations Act, a domestic public law of the US that frames US–Taiwan relations and has a major influence on East Asian geopolitics, could contradict emergent “China region”, and possibly even China–US, geo‐economic integration. This is because the US‐sustained arms sales to Taiwan rest on imagining and containing China as a “threat”, while geo‐economic integration entails enrolling China as a strategic partner, if not an ally. Consequently, the Taiwan issue could stifle the enhancement of Sino‐American relations at a historical juncture when the Chinese and American economies are more intertwined than ever.     

Topographical evolution and C age dating of the construction of the Eurimji reservoir (Jecheon,Korea)

The Eurimji site in Jecheon City, Chungcheong Province holds major importance for Korean cultural heritage because it is assumed to be the oldest man-made reservoir for rice field irrigation in Korea. A multiproxy study provides the first scientific dating of the levee construction. The authors retrieved two sediment cores from the levee (core ER-1, 18.00 m long) and the reservoir bottom (core ER-3-1, 6.98 m long). Several plant fragment layers were observed between layers of dark gray clay–silt sediment in unit 2 of both cores. The spacing and thickness of these plant layers was relatively uniform (from 50 to 90 cm, and 5 to 6 cm, respectively). These features are interpreted to represent part of a man-made sedimentary sequence created using the consolidation-settlement drain method (tamped-earth or rammed-earth method) commonly used for dam or fortress construction in ancient times, as the features are not characteristic of natural river sedimentary processes. In this alternating sequence, bulk carbon from the sediment yielded AMS ¹⁴C dates of 2000–1400 ¹⁴C yr BP, and the plant materials yielded dates of 1300–1200 ¹⁴C yr BP. If workers at that time used two different materials such as available plant materials and clays for levee construction, the plant material is preferred for ¹⁴C age dating. This is because the origin of the carbon in the sediments is ambiguous, but the source of the plant materials has been confidently determined to be equivalent to the time of the levee construction. Therefore, the levee was constructed between 1200 and 1100 ¹⁴C yr BP (AD 800–900), which is later than previously thought (i.e., AD 300 or AD 550). The results of our study also indicate that wetlands existed in the area before the construction of the Eurimji levee.     

Dispersion of Nodes Added to a Network

For location problems in which optimal locations can be at nodes or along arcs but no finite dominating set has been identified, researchers may desire a method for dispersing p additional discrete candidate sites along the m arcs of a network. This article develops and tests minimax and maximin models for solving this continuous network location problem, which we call the added-node dispersion problem (ANDP). Adding nodes to an arc subdivides it into subarcs. The minimax model minimizes the maximum subarc length, while the maximin model maximizes the minimum subarc length. Like most worst-case objectives, the minimax and maximin objectives are plagued by poorly behaved alternate optima. Therefore, a secondary MinSumMax objective is used to select the best-dispersed alternate optima. We prove that equal spacing of added nodes along arcs is optimal to the MinSumMax objective. Using this fact we develop greedy heuristic algorithms that are simple, optimal, and efficient (O( mp )). Empirical results show how the maximum subarc, minimum subarc, and sum of longest subarcs change as the number of added nodes increases. Further empirical results show how using the ANDP to locate additional nodes can improve the solutions of another location problem. Using the p-dispersion problem as a case study, we show how much adding ANDP sites to the network vertices improves the p-dispersion objective function compared with (a) network vertices only and (b) vertices plus randomly added nodes. The ANDP can also be used by itself to disperse facilities such as stores, refueling stations, cell phone towers, or relay facilities along the arcs of a network, assuming that such facilities already exist at all nodes of the network.