Public Space

“Public space” is the space where individuals see and are seen by others as they engage in public affairs. Hannah Arendt links this space with “public freedom.” The being of such freedom, she asserts, depends on its appearing. It consists of “deeds and words which are meant to appear, whose very existence hinges on appearance.” Such appearance, however, requires the public space. Reflecting on Arendt’s remarks, a number of questions arise: What does the dependence of freedom on public space tell us about the nature of freedom? How does public freedom relate to the freedom of a private individual? Does the latter also depend on its appearing? Which is generatively prior: freedom or public space, i.e., the actions that publicly manifest freedom or the space required for their appearance? How does public power shape this space? In this article, I approach these questions through a phenomenological study of public space.     

社会公平:构建社会主义和谐社会的伦理基础

社会公平是社会主义最核心的价值追求,是构建社会主义和谐社会的伦理基础。社会公平是当代社会经济发展的基本理念,也是一个由机会平等、按贡献分配以及社会调节等原则组成的基本规则体系,具体表现为权利公平、机会公平、规则公平和分配结果的相对公平。在社会转型时期,必须坚持社会公平原则,对社会的有限资源和权利义务进行有效而合理的配置和安排,才能建立公正合理的社会经济生活秩序,建设一个经济繁荣、政治文明、社会秩序稳定、人民安居乐业的和谐社会。     

Parents' estimations of their own intelligence and that of their children: a comparison between English and Icelandic parents

In this study, 158 parents (79 fathers and 79 mothers) with a mean age of 38.3 yrs (SD = 8.2), estimated their own, and their children's, overall intelligence as well as their children's score on the 12 intelligence scales from the Wechsler's Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-III). The sample included English (n = 122) and Icelandic parents (n = 36), and a comparison between them showed few differences except that Icelandic parents' estimates were lower than English parents' estimates. The results showed fathers estimated their own overall intelligence higher than mothers estimated theirs and sons were estimated higher than daughters on overall intelligence. Two factors (verbal, performance) of intelligence were identified through factor analysis of the ratings of the 12 WISC subscale score estimates. A hierarchical regression showed that these two factors explained most of the variance in the estimation of the child's overall intelligence; however, gender of child and parents' self-estimated own overall intelligence added incremental variance.     

Empty signifiers,education and politics

The paper assumes that education is part of the process of discursive construction of society. The theoretical framework on which this argument is based includes Ernesto Laclau’s theory of the “ontological impossibility and political necessity of society”, and the role discourse and empty signifiers play in the establishment of political identities. Laclau’s theory is supplemented here by ideas of Derrida, Lacan, Žižek and Marx, and by other traits in contemporary semiotics that relate to the notion of “the void” in semantic systems. My claim is that empty signifiers, crucial to the production of the totality of society, are discursively produced, among others, in pedagogical debates. This is illustrated by one historical example (Rouuseau), which gives ground for more contemporary analyses, and on the basis of the present economic discourse of educating and the idea of “knowledge society”. The main conclusion is that education, in contemporary discourse of learning, becomes a neurotic symptom of the lack of overt domination in social relations.

Ambiguity in Our Technical Society

The spiritual situation at the turn of the millennium can be interpreted through Paul Tillich's appropriation of modernity, by analysis of the determinative structures and decisive trends of our age. The methods and organization of industry determine modern society. Spiritually, this situation results in the proliferation of means without ends, the objectification of natural structures, and the reduction of persons to things. Extrapolating from Tillich's analysis, the spiritual situation at the turn of the millennium can be understood as a quasi-religious struggle between the movements of liberal individualism and multiculturalism, both of which lose the sense of ambiguity. The communitarian movement and related interpretations remain the minority voice offering a mediating position.     

社会生物学伦理观评介

威尔逊通过社会生物学的研究,指出动物的社会行为有其生物学的基础。他认为人类的利他主义伦理也同样有着生物学基础,从而提出了以生物行为科学解释伦理本质的伦理观。社会生物学伦理观,是一座联接伦理学与自然科学的桥梁。当今时代,进一步深入研究社会生物学伦理观,对于完善伦理学的科学基础,对于如何恰当地开展社会伦理教育都具有重要的意义。     

环境公正:和谐社会的基本前提

人与人的和谐是和谐社会的“底线要求”,人与社会的和谐是和谐社会的核心所在,而人与自然的和谐是和谐社会的基本前提。人与自然和谐集中体现为环境公正。它首先是指人与自然物种之间的种际公正,具体体现为两个维度的公正：在空间维度上,要促进国际公正、族际公正、域际公正、群际公正;在时间维度上具有代际公正意识。     

EAST AND WEST IN THE FACE OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE

Abstract. Technological changes affect Western culture in three ways: the ratio between the lifetimes of technologies and the human lifetime is inverted; the three principal realms of human life (the home, the workplace, and leisure activity), as well as political systems, are affected; and the cohesion of the social body is threatened. The impact on Eastern culture is softened by a clearer role assigned to school, the resulting level of education, and the influence of Confucian ethics. However, acculturation will vary among countries, depending on the communication ability in the respective societies and the degree of development of social cellular structures, which are the most able to manage complexity.     

Critical thinking in North America: A new theory of knowledge,learning, and literacy

The pace of change in the world is accelerating, yet educational institutions have not kept pace. Indeed, schools have historically been the most static of social institutions, uncritically passing down from generation to generation outmoded didactic, lecture-and-drill-based, models of instruction. Predictable results follow. Students, on the whole, do not learn how to work by, or think for, themselves. They do not learn how to gather, analyze, synthesize and assess information. They do not learn how to analyze the diverse logic of the questions and problems they face and hence how to adjust their thinking to those problems. They do not learn how to enter sympathetically into the thinking of others, nor how to deal rationally with conflicting points of view. They do not learn to become critical readers, writers, speakers and listeners. They do not learn how to use their native languages clearly, precisely, or persuasively. They do not, therefore, become literate, in the proper sense of the word. Neither do they gain much in the way of genuine knowledge since, for the most part, they could not explain the basis for what they believe. They would be hard pressed to explain, for example, which of their beliefs were based on rational assent and which on simple conformity to what they have been told. They have little sense as to how they might critically analyze their own experience, or identify national or group bias in their own thinking. They are much more apt to learn on the basis of irrational than rational modes of thought. They lack the traits of mind of a genuinely educated person: intellectual humility, courage, integrity, perseverance, and faith in reason.Happily, there is a movement in education today striving to address these problems in a global way, with strategies and materials for the modification of instruction at all levels of education. At its foundation is an emerging new theory of knowledge, learning, and literacy, one which recognizes the centrality of independent critical thinking to all substantial learning, one which recognizes that higher-order, multilogical thinking is as important to childhood as to adult learning, and as important to foundational learning in monological as in multilogical disciplines. This educational reform movement is not proposing an educational miracle cure, for its leading proponents recognize that many social and historical forces must come together before the ideals of the critical thinking movement will become a full academic reality. Schools do not exist in a social vacuum. To the extent that the broader society is uncritical so, on the whole, will be society's schools. Nevertheless, the social conditions necessary for fundamental changes in schooling are increasingly apparent. The pressure for fundamental change is growing. Whether and to what extent these needed basic changes will be delayed or side-tracked, thus requiring new periodic resurgences of this movement, with new, more elaborate articulations of its ideals, goals, and methods — only time will tell.     

Des raisons d'être d'une argumentation rhétorique selon Aristote

The main purpose of this paper is to explore the reasons Aristotle gives for being able to use rhetorical argumentation, which is obviously not a scientific mode of expression. This faculty which was condemned by Plato as lacking morality, is paradoxically regarded by Aristotle as necessary on moral grounds. For, according to him, it would be blameworthy to keep silent when being verbally assailed. The necessity of rhetoric is, however, more deeply founded. First, because justice has to be saved from its enemies in the City's courts of law. Secondly, because everyone has to be convicted to follow in practice the rules of the City's laws and such a conviction, in the case of the multitude, cannot be obtained by the means of scientific arguments. Thirdly and above all, because, in forensic disputes, characteristics of free political societies, the demagogic power, which regularly leads to tyrannical regimes, can only be avoided by the weapons of rhetoric. From these explanations, one does see that rhetoric, for Aristotle, seems to be the necessary substitute for ancient and traditional instruments securing obedience to legal justice, i.e. myths and pure constraint or coercion. In civilized and free political communities, rhetoric is required for civilization and freedom.

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Des raisons d'être d'une argumentation rhétorique selon Aristote