The Bacchanalian revel: Hegel and deconstruction

This text argues that Hegel's Concept, insofar as it has already deconstructed all opposed and fixed standpoints, supersedes deconstruction. Reducing the Logic and Phenomenology to the same kind of schematic formalism for which Hegel criticized his predecessors (Fichte and Schelling), Derrida misses the ways in which Absolute Spirit shows itself as the bacchanalian revel wherein no member is not drunk. Thus, this article defends Hegel against Derrida on Derrida's terms.     

利他主义:从社会生物学到社会科学

对自然界和人类社会中广泛存在的利他行为,社会生物学在动物行为研究的基础上提出几种假说,并把它推进到人类行为领域,由此引发与其他学科,尤其是社会科学众多解释模式之间的争论。造成分歧的主要原因不仅是利他行为本身的复杂性和多样性,更主要的是不同学科范式之间,以及这些范式所秉承的研究传统和学科目标之间的差异。对利他行为合理的科学解释必须放弃由于学科分割而造成的门户之见,把客观现象的人为分裂重新整合起来。这种学科间的整合不同于以往意义上研究方法的交叉与互补,而是要在“生物——社会”层面建立一个关于人类行为的全新的理论架构。     

Hegel,modal logic,and the social nature of mind

ABSTRACT

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit provides a fascinating picture of individual minds caught up in “recognitive” relations so as to constitute a realm—“spirit”—which, while necessarily embedded in nature, is not reducible to it. In this essay I suggest a contemporary path for developing Hegel's suggestive ideas in a way that broadly conforms to the demands of his own system, such that one moves from logic to a philosophy of mind. Hence I draw on Hegel's “subjective logic”, understood in the light of modern modal logic, in an attempt to model the way minds might be thought as connected by way of shared intentional contents. Here, we should not be surprised at some of the parallels that emerge between the approaches of Hegel and the modal logician Arthur Prior, as Prior had testified to the influence of his teacher, John N. Findlay, who himself had strong Hegelian leanings. In the final section, Robert Stalnaker's version of possible-world semantics is suggested as a framework within which Hegel's recognitive account of the mind might be understood.     

学术不端：从自然科学想到社会科学

今年,世界自然科学界出了一件大案子,就是韩国汉城大学黄禹锡发表在美国权威的《科学》杂志上的一篇论文被揭露出来实验材料和数据有假。此案已经尘埃落地。论文已由杂志宣布撤销,黄禹锡已被汉城大学宣布撤职,黄自己也已公开向公众道歉。一度被认为是一项重大的科学发观、科学创造,结果被查出来是一场骗局!这骗局,属于邹承鲁院士提出第一类学术不端行为:“伪造或篡改原始实验数据”。这是最严重的、危害最大的学术不     

Scientism, deconstruction, and nihilism

I show how scientism leads to deconstruction and both, in turn, lead to nihilism. Nihilism constitutes a denial both of the existence of fallacious moral reasoning and the existence of a moral dimension to fallacious reasoning. I argue against all of these positions by maintaining that (1) there is a pre-theoretical framework of norms within which technical thinking function, (2) the pre-theoretical framework cannot itself be technically conceptualized, and (3) the explication of this framework permits us to identify both fallacies of moral reasoning and the immorality of fallacious reasoning.     

Immigration and the popularization of social science, 1920 to 1930

This article examines how social scientists presented their views on immigration to readers of popular magazines from 1920 to 1930, a period of public debate on the merits of immigration restriction. By comparing the content of these magazine articles with professional journal articles on immigration, the representativeness of the social scientific material presented to the public can be assessed. While similar issues were discussed in popular and professional articles, social scientists writing popular articles were more likely to support an outmoded racial interpretation of immigration. Their resulting support of immigration restriction was not representative of the dominant cultural perspective held by most social scientists. Thus, readers looking to social scientists for an “informed opinion” were not given an accurate impression of social scientific thought on immigration.     

The construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction of memory in the light of social cognition.

Psychic trauma results when the ego is overwhelmed by intolerable affect. Some childhood experiences are directly traumatic, requiring no intervening interpretive process to render them traumatic. Troublesome affect that falls short of being truly traumatic, in the strict sense of the term, may nevertheless exert a psychopathogenic effect on the child's psychic development. Whether a child is troubled by an experience depends on what that experience meant to the child. Accordingly, the psychopathogenic effects of childhood experience are a function of the child's general level of cognitive sophistication and specific ability to appreciate the subtle nuances of social interactions. If a child's cognitive capabilities are not up to the task of providing the necessary explanations for a given social interaction, the child is left to fall back on fantasy to fill in the gaps. The field of "social cognition" proves particularly helpful in understanding what a child is capable of gleaning from an experience. Research in this area helps psychoanalysts understand how experience becomes constructed and reconstructed in the form of memories. Social cognition also helps psychoanalysts understand when and how a lived experience ends up being psychopathogenic or, alternatively, ceases any longer to exert an ongoing psychopathogenic effect on an individual's psyche. A review of social cognition research leads to a reconsideration of such psychoanalytic concepts as repression, dissociation, reconstruction, and resistance. It also directs attention to the concept of developmental (as opposed to psychoanalytic) reconstruction and deconstruction.     

Return to Hegel

This article argues that Hegel read Lacan. Put less paradoxically, it claims that situating Hegel within a Lacanian paradigm results in an understanding of the future as still open and of history as not ended. Absolute knowing, on this model, is the recognition of the way in which history has developed, not a claim that it can advance no further. The article aims to persuade those who might otherwise dismiss Hegel – for example, persons au courant with poststructuralism – that he still can make a decisive contribution to current debates.     

Adorno,Hegel, and Dialectic

This article explores critical theory's relations to German idealism by clarifying how Adorno's thought relates to Hegel's. Adorno's apparently mixed responses to Hegel centre on the dialectic and actually form a coherent whole. In his Logic, Hegel outlines the dialectical process by which categories – fundamental forms of thought and reality – necessarily follow one another in three stages: abstraction, dialectic proper, and the speculative (famously simplified as ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis’). Adorno's allegiance to Hegel's dialectic emerges when he traces the dialectical process whereby enlightenment reverts to myth and human domination over nature reverts into our domination by nature. However, Adorno criticizes Hegel's dialectic as the ultimate form of ‘identity thinking’, subsuming unique, material objects under universal concepts by using dialectical reason to expand those concepts to cover objects utterly. These two responses cohere because Adorno shares Hegel's view that dialectical contradictions require reconciliation, but differs from Hegel on the nature of reconciliation. For Hegel, reconciliation unites differences into a whole; for Adorno, reconciled differences co-exist as differences. Finally, against Habermas who holds that Adorno cannot consistently criticize the enlightenment practice of critique, I show that Adorno can do so consistently because of how he reshapes Hegelian dialectic.     

Brandom,Hegel and Inferentialism

In the course of developing a semantics with epistemological intent, Brandom claims that his inferentialism is Hegelian. This paper argues that, even on a charitable reading, Brandom is an anti-Hegelian.     

Beauvoir,Hegel, War

The importance of Hegel to the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, both to her early philosophical texts and to The Second Sex, is usually discussed in terms of the master‐slave dialectic and a Koj$eGve‐influenced reading, which some see her as sharing with Sartre, others persuasively describe as divergent from and corrective to Sartre's. Altman shows that Hegel's influence on Beauvoir's work is also wider, both in terms of what she takes on board and what she works through and rejects, and that her reading of Hegel is crucially inflected by two additional circumstances that Sartre did not entirely share: the experience of her first serious study of Hegel as a noncombatant in Paris during the German occupation and her earlier direct exposure to an eccentric, idealist reading of Hegel as developed by the group Philosophies in connection with surrealism and the artistic avant‐garde. Altman also explores the afterlife of Hegel's influence on Beauvoir on second‐wave feminism in the United States and Europe, and suggests continuing relevance to feminist theory today.