In his 2012 book On Global Justice, Mathias Risse makes an invaluable contribution to the literature on theories of global justice. In this paper, I offer a critique of the fourth and final part of the book, entitled “Global Justice and Institutions,” which deals with the standing of the state within the pluralist internationalism defended by the author. My focus here is on the justification of the state system and the discussion on utopian ideals. I agree with Risse (...) that the state remains the inescapable political structure that any serious theory of global justice must internalize within its conceptual framework. However, I differ from Risse’s approach in that I place greater emphasis on the historical contingency of the state system, including how prescriptions of global justice reflect historical contingencies stemming from globalization. From this point of view, pluralist internationalism should then be understood as a conceptual paradigm that mirrors its own historical contingency as embedded in our current world order. This recognition of the historical contingency of the state system serves two important purposes. One, it is a bulwark against any tendency to discredit too quickly the philosophical and practical relevance of ideal theory. Two, it buttresses the stance that we might still have the moral duty to pursue the goal of global justice beyond pluralist internationalism. (shrink)

By coincidence, it seems, the critical vocabulary and concerns that came to be known as postcolonial theory and methodology rose to be a dominant school of inquiry in the Anglo-American academy in the same years that the Soviet Union collapsed (notwithstanding that key theoretical texts by Frantz Fanon and others predated this moment by decades). Yet, oddly, postcolonialist terms were seldom applied to postsocialist and post-Soviet cases until the 2000s, and they have become more broadly utilized in these territories only (...) in the past decade. Further, it must be admitted that few results of these applications of postcolonial tools to postsocialist cases have made much of a mark among broader circles of postcolonial scholars and thinkers. Djagalov's book may help to correct this situation. Rather than work in the mode of “application”—applying a postcolonial framework to yet one more case—Djagalov reconstructs the history of a century of socialist anti-imperialism, as it was expressed in global cultural institutions and networks, and in so doing discovers the ignored or forgotten genealogy that links contemporary postcolonial thought to writers, activists, and theoreticians of the socialist world.Djagalov's book toggles between, on the one hand, chapters of institutional history that chronicle the global cultural institutions (such as the Afro-Asian Writers Association, the Tashkent Film Festival, and the Lotus Prize) that connected the Soviet Union with decolonizing countries and, on the other hand, chapters of synthetic cultural criticism that articulate typological analyses of common narrative forms that circulated in the fiction and film of the socialist world—recurring varieties of “solidarity narratives,” as Djagalov calls them. His work reveals how central the state-socialist political imaginary was for writers and filmmakers ranging from Nâzım Hikmet to Ngūgī wa Thiong'o, and how prominent their itineraries through Soviet institutions and networks were in their biographies. Ngūgī, for instance, finished his 1977 novel Petals of Blood during a residency in the Soviet Writers House in Yalta.In recovering the lost continent of anti-imperial socialist globality that bridged the “second” and “third worlds,” Djagalov has demonstrated not how postcolonial terms can be applied to postsocialist cases but how postcolonial theory and method are themselves postsocialist phenomena. Djagalov does not attempt to rectify the state-socialist prehistory of postcolonial thought with a critique of Soviet imperial habits or of the postcolonial contexts of contemporary Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. At least, though, the challenges of thinking “postcolonial” and “postsocialist” together have now become clearer. From Internationalism to Postcolonialism leaves us with new research problems: what, for example, does it mean to be a postcolony of an anti-imperial empire? (shrink)

Modern universities have largely been portrayed in the literature as an extension of nation building projects, focusing on the state as primary actor. This article challenges such presuppositions by separating ‘nation’ and ‘state’ and with a critical appropriation of diasporic subjectivity and institutions from a comparative historical perspective. The article has four themes: ‘diaspora’, ‘ethnic internationalism’, ‘stateless nations’ and ‘internationalisation’ in higher education (IHE). It illustrates these themes and their interrelationships by considering Koreans in the Japanese colonial period (...) (1910–1945) and Jews during the British Mandate for Palestine (1920–1948) and construing them as stateless nations. These two historical cases illustrate how higher education was linked to ethnonational diasporas and internationalisation in the absence of a supportive state apparatus. The paradox is that ethnic nationalism was not only compatible but often overlapped with ethnic internationalism in higher education. The conclusion of this comparative study suggests the implications for the twenty-first century and the important role of diaspora in processes of IHE then and now. (shrink)

J.M. Coetzee has unquestionably achieved the status of ‘international author’ within dominant conceptions of world literature: his works circulate widely in both English and translation and have been legitimated by the principal arbitrators of the global cultural industry. He has, however, recently positioned himself as ‘an international author, but in a different sense’; that is, as a writer whose internationalism is achieved through his location in ‘the South’. This article considers how Coetzee’s narratives thematize being ‘international’ in this (...) ‘different sense’. It focuses on the pivotal works of Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life (2002) and the opening chapters of Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003) while tracking an orientation southward across his oeuvre in allusions to Joseph Conrad, Jorge Luis Borges and, in particular, Pablo Neruda as well as in Coetzee’s repeated turn to littoral settings. These settings open to what the article describes as the ‘blue southern hemisphere’, implicating narrative world-making in the geophysical properties and ‘troubled histories’ that constitute the South and recasting the act of writing from ‘the far edges’ into a planetary perspective that contends with the uncanny nature of settler societies in the southern temperate zone. (shrink)

Philosophies sometimes claim international authority by claiming to be the expression of rationality that is universal in character or validity. This paper attacks Hegel’s internationalism of universal spirit and world history for unjustly excluding the philosophical value of non‐European cultures and races: Africans, Asians, Arabs, Jews, and Native Americans. Hegel’s Eurocentric internationalism also displays a particularly strong nationalist pride in German philosophical superiority. One cannot simply excuse the prejudices of Hegel’s historical context for his exclusionary attitudes. For Hegel’s (...) contemporary Goethe displayed a more truly international spirit in his inclusionary concept of world literature. (shrink)

Under conditions of high capital mobility, states are pressurised into various forms of tax competition to attract or retain capital and investors. When this occurs, the capacity of domestic institutions autonomously to generate fiscal policies is constrained. What exactly, if anything, is unjust about this phenomenon? This paper argues that tax competition puts particular pressure on internationalists, who must acknowledge that its occurrence makes our obligations of global justice more demanding, and that such obligations require supranational institutions in order to (...) be discharged. However, to the extent that tax competition is unjust from an internationalist point of view, this is due to the specific harm it does to states. Thus, the paper makes three contributions to the literature: it shows that tax competition has an impact on the demandingness of internationalist obligations of justice; discharging such obligations commits internationalists to accept a higher level of supranational institutionalization than is currently acknowledged; yet both the specific content of such obligations, and the kind of supranational regulation that is needed to discharge them, differ from those which cosmopolitans support. In sum, there are some cosmopolitan bullets which internationalists must bite, and others which they should continue to resist. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 133-134 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State, 1660-1990 Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State, 1660-1990. By Charles B.Jones. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. 233 pp. Charles Jones spent over three years living in Taiwan pursuing the research for this book and for journal articles about religion on the island. He is currently on the faculty of (...) the Department of Religion at the Catholic University of America. Jones primarily focuses on the history of Chinese Buddhism as an organized religion in Taiwan from the mid-1600s to the late 1980s. This is a much needed study as most literature on Chinese Buddhism is based on Mainland Chinese Buddhism. Only in the last decade has there been a shift to focus on Taiwan Buddhism as a separate entity rather than seeing it only as an extension of Mainland Chinese Buddhism.The book is nicely organized into three major historical eras. Part 1 is titled "The Ming and Qing Dynasty (1660-1895)." This section, only one chapter, mainly focuses on the arrival and early development of Buddhism in Taiwan. Part 2 is titled "The Japanese Colonial Period (1895-1945)." This section, two chapters, of course focuses on the advent of Japanese Buddhism on the island along with its impact on Taiwan's Buddhism. Part 3 is titled "From Retrocession to the Modern Period (1945-1990)." This is the largest section of the book, with four chapters. I found this section to be more detailed and interesting than the previous two sections. I will spend the remainder of this book review commenting on this last section.In part 3 of his book, Jones begins with a chapter on the retrocession (the period at the end of World War II when Japan was forced out of Taiwan) and the arrival of the Mainland Buddhist monks to Taiwan. This chapter shows the emergence of an organized Buddhism that started to develop under the oversight of the Buddhist Association of the Republic of China (BAROC), which had begun previous to World War II in Mainland China but relocated to Taiwan with the national government in 1949. Also of interest in this chapter is the discussion of the power struggles within Buddhism between a traditionalist faction led byYuanying, and a reformist faction led by Taixu. In the end, the struggle was resolved in favor of the traditionalists; this has led to Taiwan Buddhism tending to incline toward conservatism.Chapter five focuses entirely on the Buddhist Association of the Republic of China (BAROC). It is neatly organized into two major sections, "The early period, 1949-1960," and "The middle period, 1960-1986." In the early period section, Jones does a good job explaining the BAROC's organization, mission, and activities. Included as well is a small but fascinating discussion on "The vitality of the nun's order after 1952," in which Jones tries to answer the question of why nuns have increasingly come to predominate numerically over monks, a situation that exists only in Taiwan and Hong Kong.The second half of the chapter, "The middle period, 1960-1986," focuses on the leadership of the BAROC under Baisheng. From 1960, when Baisheng became president of BAROC, until his death in 1986, Baisheng remained a controlling presence in BAROC affairs, despite the fact that he did not hold the presidency continuously [End Page 133] during this period. Also in this section, Jones highlights the internationalism ofTaiwan Buddhism under the leadership of Baisheng, which was seen in the ordinations of foreign monks and in the involvement of BAROC in international Buddhism organizations. This chapter also covers the continual struggle to regain possession of Japanese-era temples.Chapter five ends with a section called "Criticisms of the BAROC." The largest criticism leveled against the BAROC was that it failed to become the unifying force for Taiwan Buddhism that it might have been, a problem related to its elitist attitude at the national level, where only a very small closed group of people had the actual decision... (shrink)

School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, Faculty of Arts, Australia This article analyses the role of early radical and socialist texts in forming the understanding of the Paris Commune in Britain and the United States. The Commune, while a French event, came to be associated with socialists, radicals, and as a symbol of internationalism. Marx’s The Civil War in France established the interpretation of the Commune that would see it become a radical shibboleth. This article analyses articles by Edward (...) Beesly, Lissagaray’s History of the Commune of 1871, E.B Bax’s Short History of the Commune, and Lenin’s State and Revolution to trace the influences of Marx’s interpretation. This analysis includes examination of the radical publishers in both Britain and the United States to explore how these texts were edited and changed, and how they were circulated to reach the intended working-class audience. The article’s core questions are where did this interpretation come from, how was it constructed, and how did it come to dominate the interpretation of the Commune. This is significant due to the Commune’s pre-eminence within socialist history and how it became an example of the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ for many future revolutionaries. (shrink)

Although he won the 1960 Nobel Prize and maintained a measure of global acclaim past this award, the poetry of Saint-John Perse has fallen into general obscurity and critical disregard outside the poet's linguistic patrimony, where he belongs primarily to a national, scholastic poetic tradition.1 Perse's appurtenance to a French national canon—and his near anonymity outside of it—both raise a variety of questions specific to Perse, though I hope that they may also have some more generic theoretical value. This essay (...) may thus be read as a case study in what is being called world literature. I map the vicissitudes…. (shrink)

Differences in Common engages in the ongoing debate on ‘community’ focusing on its philosophical and political aspects through a gendered perspective. It explores the subversive and enriching potential of the concept of community, as seen from the perspective of heterogeneity and distance, and not from homogeneity and fused adhesions. This theoretical reflection is, in most of the essays included here, based on the analysis of literary and filmic texts, which, due to their irreducible singularity, teach us to think without being (...) tied, or needing to resort, to commonplaces. Philosophers such as Arendt, Blanchot, Foucault, Agamben or Derrida have made seminal reflections on community, often inspired by contemporary historical events and sometimes questioning the term itself. More recently, thinkers like Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak or Rada Ivekovic—included in this volume are essays by all three—have emphasized the gender bias in the debate, also problematizing the notion of community. Most of the essays gathered in Differences in Common conceive community not as the affirmation of several properties which would unite us to other similar individuals, but as the “expropriation” of ourselves (Esposito), in an intimate diaspora. Community does not fill the gap between subjects but places itself in this gap or void. This conception stresses the subject’s vulnerability, a topic which is also central to this volume. The body of community is thus opened by a “wound” (Cixous) which exposes us to the contagion of otherness. The essays collected here reflect on different topics related to these issues, such as: gender and nation; nationalism, internationalism, transnationalism; nationalism’s naturalization of citizenship and the exclusion of women from citizenship; the violent consequences of a gendered nation on women’s bodies; gendering community; preservation of difference(s) within the community; bodily vulnerability and new politics; community and mourning; community and the politics of memory; fiction, historical truth and (fake) documentary; love, relationality and community; interpretive communities and virtual communities on the Web, among others. Joana Sabadell-Nieto is Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature (Gender and Feminist Studies) at Hamilton College (USA) and Researcher at the Center for Women and Literature at the University of Barcelona. Marta Segarra is Professor of French and Francophone literature and Gender Studies at the University of Barcelona (Spain), Director of the UNESCO Chair Women, Development and Cultures and co-founder and director of the Center for Women and Literature (2003-2012). (shrink)

Tianxia--conventionally translated as "all-under-Heaven"--in everyday Chinese parlance simply means "the world." But tianxia is also a geopolitical term found in canonical writings that has a deeper historical and philosophical significance. Although there are many understandings of tianxia in this literature, interpretations within the Chinese process cosmology generally begin with an ecological understanding of intra-national relations that acknowledge the mutuality and interdependence of all economic and political activity. This volume contextualizes the tianxia vision of geopolitical order within a variety of (...) strategies drawn from a broad spectrum of cultures and peoples: Buddhist, Islamic, Indian, African, Confucian, European. The conversation among the contributors is guided by several central questions: Is tianxia the only model of cosmopolitanism? Are there ideas and ideals comparable to tianxia that exist in other cultures? What alternative perspectives of global justice have inspired Western, Indian, Islamic, Buddhist, and African cultural traditions? The fundamental premise here is that in order for a planetary tianxia system to be relevant and significant for the present time and for our vision of the future, it must acknowledge the plurality of moral ideals defining the world's cultures while at the same time seek practical ways to formulate a minimalist morality that can provide the solidarity needed to bring the world's people together. (shrink)

This far-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink postcolonial theory's discussion of the nation and nationalism brings the problems of the postcolonial condition to bear on the philosophy of freedom. Closely identified with totalitarianism and fundamentalism, the nation-state has a tainted history of coercion, ethnic violence, and even, as in ultranationalist Nazi Germany, genocide. Most contemporary theorists are therefore skeptical, if not altogether dismissive, of the idea of the nation and the related metaphor of the political body as an organism. Going (...) against orthodoxy, Pheng Cheah retraces the universal-rationalist foundations and progressive origins of political organicism in the work of Kant and its development in philosophers in the German tradition such as Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. Cheah argues that the widespread association of freedom with the self-generating dynamism of life and culture's power of transcendence is the most important legacy of this tradition. Addressing this legacy's manifestations in Fanon and Cabral's theories of anticolonial struggle and contemporary anticolonial literature, including the Buru Quartet by Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's nationalist novels, Cheah suggests that the profound difficulties of achieving freedom in the postcolonial world indicate the need to reconceptualize freedom in terms of the figure of the specter rather than the living organism. (shrink)

The American philosopher John Dewey is probably best known for his contributions to educational philosophy, though his writings on logic, metaphysics, epistemology and value theory are for the most part equally impressive. Before and after his death in 1952, he was lauded as “America’s philosopher” and a “public intellectual for the twentieth century.” During the early 1920s, to call Dewey an internationalist would be to state the obvious. He had travelled to Japan, Russia, Mexico, Turkey and China. Of all these (...) places, he stayed in China the longest—two years and two months (May 1919 to July 1921)—and wrote the most about his experiences there. Unfortunately, too much of the extent literature speaks to how Dewey influenced China. In this brief paper the author focuses on the question of how China changed Dewey. Before attempting this project it helps to explicate how Dewey conceived experience—to paint a picture of his so-called “metaphysics of experience”—in order to then appreciate how he conceived his own China experience. (shrink)

Higher education (HE) mobility programmes around the globe have been key initiatives over the past thirty years, driven by combinations of supranational and national state-led knowledge economy policies, university strategies, and decisions made by individuals regarding employability, credentials, or academic tourism. In this paper we argue that mobility too often is understood through the prism of internationalism, itself umbilically tied to and nourished by Enlightenment liberal thinking, such as Kantian cosmopolitanism, and the romantic figure of the wandering scholar. This (...) has the effect of reducing our understanding of transnational mobility to individual actors, their desires, and experiences. In this paper we ask: to what extent and in what ways can HE transnational mobility projects be understood as forms of imperialism? In this regard we examine the literature on imperialism and argue for a more capacious use of the term; as taking economic, political and cultural forms. We use these to examine the links between the expansion and securing of empires historically, the state’s spatial projects and global market making. We do this through the prism of two nations, the UK and China, comparing their state’s transnational HE strategies, selectivities and outcomes. (shrink)

During the 20th-century Chinese revolution, L’Internationale was one of the most important political symbols. After the failure of the Paris Commune in 1871, Eugène Pottier wrote the poem titled “L’Internationale” which was published for the first time until 1887. It was set to music by Pierre Degeyter in 1888 and introduced into China from both France and the Soviet Union. Qu Qiubai and Xiao San made great contribution to the work of translation that influenced the official version in 1962. From (...) a hymn for the International Workingmen’s Association to the revolutionary song of all the proletariats, L’Internationale was the historical witness of the National Revolution, the Chinese Communist Revolution and the Continuous Revolution, whose symbolic meanings were connected closely to the tensions between nationalism and internationalism. (shrink)

Chapter 14. Andrea Timár engages with literary representations of the experience of perpetrators of dehumanization. Her chapter focuses on perpetrators of dehumanization who do not violate laws of their society (i.e., they are not criminals) but exemplify what Simona Forti, inspired by Hannah Arendt, calls “the normality of evil.” Through the parallel examples of Dezső Kosztolányi’s Anna Édes (1926) and Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing (1950), Timár first explores a possible clash between criminals and perpetrators of dehumanization, showing (...) class='Hi'>literature’s exceptional ability to reveal the gap between ethics and law. Second, she examines novels focalized through perpetrators and the difficult narrative empathy they provoke, arguing that only the critical reading of these novels can make one engage with the potential perpetrator in oneself. As case studies, Timár examines Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which may potentially turn its reader into an accomplice in the process of dehumanization, and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), which puts on critical display the dehumanizing potentials of both aesthetic representation and sympathy as imaginative violence. Third, she reads Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones [Les Bienveillantes, 2006], which can make the reader question, through the polyphony of the voice of its protagonist, the notions of narrative voice and readerly empathy, only to reveal that the difficulty involved in empathizing with perpetrator characters lies not so much in the characters’ being perpetrators, but rather in their being literary characters. Eventually, Timár briefly touches upon the problem of the aesthetic and the comic via Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) to ask whether one can avoid some necessarily dehumanizing aspects of humor. (shrink)

Philosophy in Minutes distils 200 of the most important philosophical ideas into easily digestible, bite-sized sections. The core information for every topic - including debates such as the role of philosophy in science and religion, key thinkers from Aristotle to Marx, and introductions to morality and ethics - is explained in straightforward language, using illustrations to make the concepts easy to understand and remember. Whether you are perplexed by existentialism or pondering the notion of free will, this accessible small-format book (...) will help any reader to quickly grasp the basics of this highly nuanced subject. Chapters include: Truth and logic, Marxism, Communism and Socialism, Ontology, Philosophy and literature, Existence of God, Feminist theory, Consciousness, The future of philosophy. (shrink)

Richly illustrated study drawing on art, literature and science to explore Victorian attitudes towards sight.

Studies on Chinese nationalism in Western academia have been influenced by a popular theory called ‘the culturalism-to-nationalism thesis’, a loosely formulated interpretive paradigm which emerged in late 1960s. The literature on this topic, however, reveals an inadequate understanding of traditional Chinese thinking and its influence on Chinese thought in modern history. An examination of the work of Li Dazhao (1889–1927) and his philosophical heritage not only will open up a valuable source for us to rethink about this thesis and (...) its defects, but also will shed light on the complicated background and perspective that give rise to modern Chinese nationalism. Given the interest in Chinese nationalism in contemporary world, an understanding of its historical roots is particularly timely, since in order to understand China’s current and future actions one must understand the origins of Chinese nationalist thinking and its transformations in time. This paper makes a contribution to that historical understanding. I argue that traditional Chinese philosophy, especially the Daoist world view and Confucian ethics played a significant role in shaping Li’s patriotic and nationalist stance. It also predisposed him intellectually to accept the internationalist characteristic of Marxism. (shrink)

This volume contains a selection of nine essays with an interdisciplinary perspective. They were originally presented at the Sixth International Conference on Word and Music Studies, which was held at Edinburgh University in June 2007 and was organized by the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA). The contributions to this volume focus on self-reference in various systematic, historical and intermedial ways. Self-reference - including, as a special case, metareference (the self-conscious reflection on music, literature and other medial (...) concerns) - is explored, among others, in instrumental music by Mozart, Mahler and Satie, in the structure and performance of (meta-)operas, in operatic adaptations of drama and filmic adaptations of opera, as well as in intermedial novelistic references to music. The essays cover a historical range from the 18th century to the present and are of interest to literary and opera scholars and students, musicologists as well as all readers generally interested in medial self-reference and intermediality studies. (shrink)

Looking at representations of the Irish landscape in contemporary literature and the arts,this volume discusses the economic, political and environmental issues associated with it, questioning the myths behind Ireland's landscape, from the first Greek descriptions to present day post Celtic-Tiger architecture.

This article examines the ‘Oath of Allegiance’ of an international semisecret society, Young Europe. The society’s programme defined the struggle to create democratic republics throughout Europe in the first half of the 19th century. Its founding documents and charter in 1834 represented radical shifts in both the ideas and practice of European republicans on the principles of liberty and equality, and in the conceptualization of a trinity that linked republican patriotism to both nationalism and internationalism. The society also offered (...) new understandings of both fraternity and humanity. The doctrine combined the working of international and national organizations as the blueprint with which to construct republics. The emergence of Young Europe signified a change in both the ideological language and in the core values of republicans. It also represented a break in its organizational principles; in its conception of the nation and the nation’s role within the republic; and in the appreciation of the international role of republicans. (shrink)

M'illumino/d'immenso - I'm lit/with immensity is Geoffrey Brock's translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti's poem Mattina. In the poem's minimalism, Ungaretti points to the maximal: the richness of poetry's expressive possibilities and the power of thinking in literature. This book addresses the fascination of readers to transcend the boundaries of their own in fiction, and literature's capacity, according to Kant, even to evoke, with the help of the development of aesthetic ideas, representations that exceed what is empirically and conceptually graspable (...) - in case studies about myths of creativity, images of death and the beyond after the 'death of God', of the soul, of melancholy as the dark ground of genius, of metamorphoses of both evil and good, of ecstasy, of the economy of self-sacrifice, of the art of resistance, and, among others, about figurations of biography and the portrait as approaches to singularity, what is particular and cannot be fully subsumed to any universality. (shrink)

This book reconstructs in detail some of the formative episodes of the field's early development and arrives at the conclusion that, in actuality, the early ...

Abstract.In the wake of the Franco-Prussian war, scientific nationalism became a subject of scientific controversy in Germany. This paper explores the controversy between the cosmopolitan physiologists Hermann von Helmholtz and Emil du Bois-Reymond on the one hand, and the nationalistic economist-philosopher Eugen Dühring and the astrophysicist Johann Carl Friedrich Zöllner on the other. It argues that Helmholtz’ frequent visits to Britain helped him keep abreast of scientific developments there and shaped his ideas of science and society. They also changed his (...) conception of the conservation of energy. German nationalists objected to his British contacts with offensive accusations. They alleged that he had plagiarized his fellow-German Julius Robert Mayer and tried to imitate British physicists. Thus Dühring and Zöllner defended and constructed enduring national stereotypes of German and British science. Whereas Helmholtz put scientific cosmopolitanism into practice, Du Bois-Reymond defended it as an ideology. In contrast to the received view of Du Bois-Reymond as a fervent nationalist, it is argued that he was actually an untimely scientific cosmopolitan. He placed himself in the tradition of Goethe and Schiller's Weimar cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

In this article aesthetics is treated purely as a branch of philosophy, and the points made are intended to apply both to philosophy more generally and aesthetics more specifically. The manner in which internationalism obviously has to do with the organization of the disciplines is discussed. Does it have any bearing on their content or substance? The distinction between organization and content is probed and seen to be much less obvious than at first sight apparent and is doubtfully tenable. (...) Nations are foreign to philosophy in two respects. First we would remain philosophically impoverished if we attended only to the philosophy produced in our own nation. Secondly, and more interestingly, nations cannot be the subject of philosophy since they are individuals. Individuals can only be of philosophical interest in so far as they can be identified under general categories; then what matters is the category, not the individual. Philosophy, including philosophy of art, can only be interested in individuals as first‐order examples or illustrations of more general second‐order claims or theses. So nations must be excluded from the domain of philosophy. It does not follow that such exclusion amounts to internationalism. Indeed though internationalism itself might be a philosophical idea the dismissal of nations as philosophically irrelevant more obviously represents a commitment to universalism than to internationalism. Internationalism and universalism should not be confused though they overlap. Universalism is the ideal of the so‐called enlightenment project which is defended in this paper against post‐modernist criticism and also against the charge that it constitutes a view from nowhere. The view from nowhere is in the strictest sense utopian and for that reason is to be championed as a means for criticising our current assumptions and beliefs and not dismissed. Overt bias including national bias is not a problem, though the writer of philosophy must strive against it on pain of failing to write philosophy. A writer, however, can only guard against overt prejudice and bias. But a text, whether or not philosophical, is also silently exclusionary, that is, there are groups it silently excludes. At a later date the reader can often detect examples of silent exclusion. Since these silences are indefinitely many, it is always possible for a group to feel excluded. The important philosophical point is to concede the possibility of linguistic and indeed conceptual exclusion, to study its mechanisms and to consider on what principles, if any, a moral charge of exclusion is justified and when not. (shrink)

Is it possible for postmodernism to offer viable, coherent accounts of ethics? Or are our social and intellectual worlds too fragmented for any broad consensus about the moral life? These issues have emerged as some of the most contentious in literary and philosophical studies. In Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory a distinguished international gathering of philosophers and literary scholars address the reconceptualisations involved in this 'turn towards ethics'. An important feature of this has been a renewed interest (...) in the literary text as a focus for the exploration of ethical issues. Exponents of this trend include Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams, Iris Murdoch, Cora Diamond, Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, the latter a contributor and a key figure in this volume. This book assesses the significance of this development for ethical and literary theory and attempts to articulate an alternative postmodern account of ethics which does not rely on earlier appeals to universal truths. (shrink)

In recent years a debate has raged in American political science and philosophy about the validity of the hypothesis that the growth in the number of states with liberal-democratic polities will lead to a more stable and harmonious international order. This article travels down the path of democratic peace not with the present preoccupations in mind but rather with the intention of deciding what the argument looks like from Kant's and a Kantian perspective. In the literature on democratic peace (...) Kant has been much referred to: it is true to say that he has become an emblem of the thesis. This is so to such an extent that authors need only cite Kant to show that they are engaging with the debate. The treatment of Kant in such articles tends to be quite cursory. Here I want to alter this emphasis by attempting to measure the democratic peace thesis by Kant's standards. There are intriguing differences of emphasis between current international liberal peace theorists and Kant's original argument which tell us a lot about the priorities of liberal internationalism now, and Kant's contrasting objectives for practical philosophy and humanity ingeneral. (shrink)

Relationalität und Selbstdiskursivierung in den lebens -- und Sozialwissenschaften -- Selbstreflexion und Relationalität in der literatur.

Attached for a long time to the illusion of its national “singularity”, French philosophy has remained, for a good part of this century, closed to any foreign influence (with the exception of German phenomenology and existentialism). This situation started to change, however, in the early 1980’s. From that moment on, the tendency to translate foreign philosophy has strongly increased among French publishers, allowing France to take a more active part in the international philosophical conversation. The French‐American dialogue, in particular, is (...) currently experiencing an expanding phase –but this recent trend must continue to be encouraged from both sides of the Atlantic. (shrink)

Jenefer Robinson takes the insights of modern scientific research on the emotions and uses them to illuminate questions about our emotional involvement with the arts. Laying out a theory of emotion supported by the best evidence from current empirical work, she examines some of the ways in which the emotions function in the arts. Written in a clear and engaging style, her book will make fascinating reading for anyone interested in the emotions and how they work, as well as anyone (...) engaged with the arts and aesthetics. (shrink)

Numinous spaces in British literature from William Wordsworth to Samuel Beckett -- Jesus figures in American literature from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Edward Albee -- Using Bakhtin's definitions to discover ethical voices in Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy -- René Girard's categories of scapegoats in literature of the American South -- Hopkins's metaphysics of nature as sacred disclosure -- The book of job as mirrored in Hopkins's metaphysics -- Beckett's mythos of the absence of God.

This paper responds to a piece of dialogue from Flora Nwapa’s novel Women are Different, in which Comfort mockingly says, “They took up the job voluntarily. Now you will soon tell us that they are celibate because of us.” There are two different interpretations of the use of “because,” and the claim is obviously false on only one of these.