关于中国古代海军史几个问题的再思考

哀公十年(前485年)，吴徐承帅舟师沿海北上攻齐进行海战事，似难确认。襄公二十四年(前549)，楚以舟师伐吴，是为史籍明确记载的第一次动用舟师的征战，但恐难排除此前已发生过动用舟师征战的事实，是故中国古代海军的产生(形成)时间，尚需进一步科学、准确论证。“海军”是个历史范畴，在不同的历史时期具有不同的形态，称谓也有所变化。中国古代海军的主要称谓有舟师、楼船军、水军、水师等。     

HUME,HISTORY, AND THE USES OF SYMPATHY

This article focuses on the role of sympathy and antipathy in David Hume's History of England (1754–1762) in relation to the broader place of sympathy in Hume's moral philosophy. Hume, in his earlier philosophical work, argues that sympathy is a naturally occurring responsiveness to others’ feelings, similar to the resonance between musical strings. In his History, however, he carefully curates his readers’ emotional responses, inviting sympathy with figures of suffering—such as King Charles I and Mary Queen of Scots—while also, often almost simultaneously, stirring intense antipathy for those whose religious extremism he regards as socially dangerous and beyond comprehension. After first situating the emergence of Hume's theory of sympathy in its early eighteenth-century context, this article explores in detail the techniques of sentimental management that appear across the six volumes of the History of England. The elaborate deployment of emotions in Hume's historiography is shown to be in tension both with some aspects of his philosophy of natural human sympathy and with his brief reflections on the writing of history. Hume channeled his readers’ sympathies toward particular targets and against others. A careful analysis of this usefully sheds light on the management of sympathy in modern historiography, on which Hume has had an enduring influence.     

TEXTS AND TRADITIONS IN CHINESE AND COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

This article considers Quentin Skinner's critique and methodology in his seminal essay “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” vis-à-vis the current methodological debates in Chinese and comparative philosophy. It surveys the different ways in which philosophers who work with ancient Chinese texts in those related fields deal with the tension between textual contexts and autonomy and how some of the errors criticized by Skinner under the mythology of coherence, mythology of doctrines, mythology of parochialism, and mythology of prolepsis might apply to those fields. It argues that Skinner's insistence that understanding a text requires recovering its author's intended meaning by studying its linguistic context has limited application to Chinese and comparative philosophy because those fields’ most important texts are not best understood as means of communication by specific historical authors with intended messages to convey to readers. These texts are instead the means by which Chinese traditions perpetuate their respective beliefs and practices. Instead of being circumscribed by authorial intent, the meanings of traditional texts are dynamic and co-created in the process of producing, reproducing, and consuming texts as well as in the evolution of practices that also constitute each tradition. The meanings received by the audience are never exactly what authors or transmitters intended but have been transformed by each audience's own concerns and interests, even if the audience attempts to grasp what the former intended. Using the Five Classics and the Analects as examples, this article illustrates how such texts’ purposes to teach and perpetuate the practices that constitute a way of life determine their meanings. Understanding is not merely cognitive but practical as well. The meanings of such texts are not static but dynamic as traditions evolve. The debates about methods of reading and interpreting ancient Chinese texts are also debates about the nature of Chinese traditions and struggles over their futures.     

Improvised Hybridity in the “Fixing” of Chinese Infrastructure Capital: The Case of Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway

The article explores the role of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the globalisation of China's infrastructure capital. Examining how accumulation strategies of Chinese SOEs are driven by a complex set of political and economic, state and private, interests, it foregrounds the inherently hybrid nature of China's state capitalism. We use Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) as a case study to analyse how state infrastructure capital traverses borders, and the specific ways that contradictions of accumulation in China are relocated through the improvised hybridity of SOEs. In Kenya, China Road and Bridge Corporation, the main SGR contractor, shifted and adapted its strategies as the pursuit of economic productivity gave way to political priorities in China, simultaneously responding to changing socio-political circumstances in Kenya and across East Africa. Analysing these dynamics, we highlight the contingencies of, and limitations to, structural reorganisation of actually existing forms of state capitalism in China and beyond.     

史前漆膜的分析鉴定技术研究

研究了漆膜分析的三种主要方法：裂解质谱,红外光谱,裂解色谱。通过大量实验比较了各种方法的适应性和可靠性,建立了以裂解色谱／富里叶红外光谱联用技术来鉴定漆膜,并对影响裂解反应的因素及色借条件进行了深入的研究,获得了可以重复,具有特征性的漆膜高分辨裂解色谱图,同时对裂解色谱图中主要组分作了定性鉴定,提高了裂解色谱法分析漆膜的可靠性。该方法具有灵敏度高,样品用量小,共存杂质影响小,操作简便等优点。应用核分析技术对河姆渡,良诸庙前遗址出土的二件红色涂料样品进行了鉴定。分析结果证实了河姆渡出土的红色涂料木碗上的涂料是我国至今发现的最早的生漆漆膜。     

汉代漆器的剖析

通过制备并分析一系列模拟漆膜样品。建立了有助于鉴定汉代漆器成分的剖析方法。经裂解气相色谱、差热分析、色谱一红外联用等现代分析技术对出土的汉代漆器残片样品的综合分析,证实在西汉漆器制造中已使用桐油或其它的添加剂,并依据剖析的结果,对某些汉代漆器的原材料差异作了初步探讨。     

3. NATURE,RELIGION, AND IMAGINATION: COMMENTS ON IMAGES OF HISTORY

After sharing some reflections, I raise three questions. The first asks about the role of nature and reason according to Kant's teleological history, and the extent to which Kant's essays written before the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) are “dogmatic,” as his phrase “aim of nature” might suggest. The second asks about Kant's “impure” ethics and the role of religion. What would Kantian religion look like today? The last question concerns the relation between images and ideas—a thornier issue than Kant's initial definitions of imagination and reason would seem to suggest.     

Religion and the cultural public sphere: the case of the Finnish liberal intelligentsia during the turmoil of the early twentieth century

The political public sphere is at one and the same time both public, and private and religion operates in both the public and the private spheres in the modern way of life. This article approaches the dynamics between the cultural and the political public sphere from the point of view of religion; how the cultural intelligentsia developed its worldview fuelled with attitudes towards religion in times of political turmoil. The case study, based on the empirical analysis of cultural periodicals and societies around them, concerns the Finnish liberal intelligentsia in the early twentieth century. The first decade of the 1900s was a particularly important period of formation for the Finnish public sphere; the societal turmoil highlighted the importance of cultural periodicals in defining what was important for the national public sphere. The case of religion is an illustrative example of it, particularly from the point of view of the liberal intelligentsia of the era.     

Rethinking the Politics–Religion Distinction

William T. Cavanaugh argues that the politics–religion distinction presupposes covert commitments that inappropriately support a “migration of the holy” from the church to the state. Despite his strong critical instincts, several of his genealogical propensities appear to stand in tension with his commitments to constitutional democracy and the universality of grace. By contrast with Cavanaugh, John Rawls’ post-metaphysical reformulation of the politics–religion aims to identify a public criterion compatible with a plurality of comprehensive doctrines. Although I commend Rawls for retaining some form of this distinction, I question the possibility of a post-metaphysical standpoint and its compatibility with his commitment to what he calls the “fact of pluralism.” Drawing on Bernard Lonergan’s transpositions of human nature and grace in this paper’s final section, I develop an alternative account of the relationship between politics and religion that aims to harmonize some of the strongest insights from the work of Cavanaugh and Rawls.     

‘Stepbrothers from the Middle East’: negotiations of racial identity among Jewish-Israeli immigrants in Toronto

This paper explores the complex negotiations of racial identity experienced on migration. Working from a series of 48 interviews with racially diverse Israeli immigrants to Toronto, and drawing on literature on the assimilated Canadian-born Jewish population, I contrast the racial histories of Canadian and Israeli Jews – groups whose identities have historically crossed intersections of race, ethnicity and religion. By exploring the participants’ accounts of being differently whitened and blackened in Israel and Toronto, and their own interpretations of and responses to these processes, I expose the spatial contingencies of racial hierarchies, meanings and identifications. I also introduce the under-studied Mizrahi/Sephardi Jewish community – who are demographically prevalent in Israel yet largely unknown in North America, and are subject to complex racial and ethno-cultural tensions in both spaces – into discussions of Canadian Jewishness.