Forum: Cultural Geography and Cultural Studies

This forum discusses linkages between cultural geography and allied ‘cultural’ disciplines. A symposium on this topic – held at the 2005 conference of the Institute of Australian Geographers in Armidale – was triggered by the targeted inclusion of geography in a cross‐disciplinary network funded by the Australian Research Council. Although non‐geographers in the network have articulated strong interest in and an enthusiasm for geography, their knowledge of, and everyday participation in its disciplinary travails have been limited. Given this, the papers in the forum review geography's long and dynamic consideration of the relations between place and culture, and raise a set of key issues for geographers to consider: how we might interact with other disciplinary debates about the ‘cultural’, retain distinctiveness as the home of intellectual inquiry around issues of space and place, and leverage opportunities to forge more permanent connections to geographers working not in our traditional institutional settings, but in a range of research centres, schools and disciplinary homes.     

从九种《皇朝经世文编》看晚清自然科学认知的变迁

本文以九种<皇朝经世文编>为史料依据,考察近代科学知识从西方输入时,晚清社会大众如何进行文化和知识架构的调整,以试图认识近代科学的本质,形成自己对近代科学的认知体系的过程.     

关于玉学的理论框架及其观点的探讨

玉学是一门新兴的学科,是古代玉文化、玉器的功能与形式的演变规律的科学提炼和理论升华,是研究我国玉文化、玉器史的一条总纲.目前进行的玉学理论课题主要是探讨和研究其理论框架及基本观点,主要包括其哲学、功利与伦理的三个方面.     

DEFENDING SPIRIT,SPIRITUALIZING MATTER: NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE MEDICAL SCIENCES

This review essay discusses Larry Sommer McGrath's Making Spirit Matter: Neurology, Psychology, and Selfhood in Modern France (2020), a history of the philosophical current known as “spiritualism.” The book covers the long nineteenth century, focusing especially on the first part of the Third Republic (1870–1914), and studies how French academic philosophers confronted the discourses about human cognition and behavior that were produced by physicians—namely, physiologists and pathologists, phrenologists, neurologists, alienists, and psychiatrists. It describes how, while engaged in this confrontation, French philosophy took a peculiar shape, eventually influencing the development of some sciences—namely, psychology, which emerged progressively as a discipline at the crossroads of medicine and philosophy. In the second part of the essay, starting from a terminological analysis of a series of terms dealing with “spirit,” I consider the formation of spiritualism by adopting an approach that diverges slightly from the ones proper to history of philosophy and intellectual history. I inscribe the philosophical discourses in their contexts of emergence, paying particular attention to institutional macrostructures and their inertia. This provides another perspective on “spiritualism,” which may no longer be conceived as a current or a school; rather, it should be conceived as the effect of the conditions of possibility of academic philosophy in France. It seems to me that, starting from the beginning of the nineteenth century, because of the organization of the educational institutions, the French philosophers’ agenda consisted mainly in opposing all forms of materialism, mechanism, and determinism and in defending the legitimacy of their discipline.     

论宋代民间诉讼的保障与局限

宋代是诉讼制度大发展的时代,其突出表现是越诉和直诉制度的完备。这些制度无疑为民间诉讼的发展提供了制度保证,但由于官僚政治内在的弱点以及贱讼思想的一贯存在,越诉和直诉制度在执行中尚存在种种弊端。另一方面,由于宋代家法的复苏并呈现出新的聚居特点,家法对诉讼的消弭作用也在不断增强。尽管宋代民间诉讼虽出现了以江西为核心的南方地区多讼和讼学不断发展的现象,但在国法和家法的双重压力下,其发展受到重重限制。     

大遗址考古发掘与保护的敏感问题

大遗址作为我国文化遗产的重要组成部分,其保护工作已经纳入国家文物保护的重点工作。随着国民经济和城市化进程的飞速发展,大遗址受到了巨大冲击。要保护好大遗址,必须首先确立抢救第一的思想,在考古发掘过程中依靠多学科专家的有效合作;还要认真执行国家有关法令,坚持遗址与周边环境的协调发展,确立可持续的科学保护方式。     

An Epistemology of Scientific Practice: Positioning Hans-Jörg Rheinberger in Twentieth-Century History and Philosophy of Biology**

In this article, I first outline the professionalization of the history and philosophy of biology from the 1960s onward. Then, I attempt to situate the work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger with respect to this field. On the one hand, Rheinberger was marginal with respect to Anglo-American philosophical tradition; on the other, he was very influential in building up an integrated history and philosophy of the life sciences community at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and beyond. This marginality results, I suggest, from three main sources: his use of concepts coming from continental traditions in the study of the life sciences, which are foreign to Anglo-American philosophers of science; his focus on practices instead of theories; and his research trajectory as a molecular biologist, which led him to be critical of disciplinary boundaries. As a first step in situating and historicizing Rheinberger's trajectory, this article invites comparative studies and calls for a history of “continental philosophy of biology” in the twentieth century.     

The Mythos,Ethos, and Pathos of the Humanities

Summary

Justifications of the humanities often employ a mythos that exceeds their historical dispositions and reach. This applies to justifications that appeal to an ‘idea’ of the humanities grounded in the cultivation of reason for its own sake. But the same problem affects more recent accounts that seek to shatter this idea by admitting an ‘event’ capable of dissolving and refounding the humanities in ‘being’. In offering a sketch of the emergence of the modern humanities from early modern humanism, the paper argues that these twin philosophical justifications fail to capture both the array of intellectual arts that have informed the humanities disciplines and the variety of uses to which these arts have been put. Nonetheless, the two philosophical constructions have had a concrete impact on the disposition of the modern humanities, seen in the respective structuralist and poststructuralist reconfigurations of the disciplines that began to take place under the banner of ‘theory’ during the 1960s. In discussing the effects of theory on the humanities in Australia, the paper focuses on the unforeseeable consequences of attempts to provide arts-based disciplines with a foundation either in cognitive structures or in an ‘event’ that shatters them.     

Academic Freedom,Intellectual Diversity,and the Place of Politics in Geography

Abstract: This paper examines the conservative critique of higher education in the USA. I argue, first, that the right's call for greater “intellectual diversity” in American higher education should be understood as an attack on the professional self‐regulation and disciplinary autonomy that are central to academic freedom in this country. Second, I suggest that the right's politicization of politics in the academy brings to light the importance of our developing a vision of the university that accounts for rather than disavows the political nature of the work we do.