试论中国传统的母教观

中国先民非常重视母亲在家庭教育中的作用,尽管历代母教的具体内容会随时代发展有变,但＂母德在教,教女为切要＂的基本观念始终未变。母氏管教既是母系氏族社会遗存,也与中国传统＂男主外,女主内＂的社会分工有关;先民之所以认为教女远比教子切要,其原因有二：一,有贤女方有贤母,今日之贤女即日后之贤母;二,女子受教育的机会和时间比男子少,若要其日后成为人母能够承担起教育子女的任务,必须加强女子的教育。     

论伊斯兰文化中和谐思想的潜体系构成

在伊斯兰文化中蕴含着丰富的和谐思想,归纳和整理其中的和谐思想,使之形成一个完整的体系,是伊斯兰教"解经"工作进一步深入开展的必然需要,也为伊斯兰教适应社会主义社会提供了更多的理论支持。本文从伊斯兰文化中和谐思想的核心、指导思想、精神实质及其基本的道德主张等方面,归纳出了伊斯兰文化中和谐思想框架体系。     

Roman Catholic Approaches to the Qur'an since Vatican II

Vatican II opposes polemical attitudes to Islam but gives no specific guidance on the Qur'an. Modern Roman Catholic writing on the Qur'an includes a considerable variety of approaches. At the positive end of the spectrum: for Christian members of GRIC (Groupe de Recherche Islamo-Chrétien) the Qur'an is “an authentic Word of God, but one in part essentially different from the one in Jesus Christ”; George Dardess affirms that the Qur'an and the Eucharist are both means through which “God shares with us God's self through the word”; for Giulio Basetti-Sani the Qur'an is divine revelation but it does not contradict Christian doctrine; Jacques Dupuis sees the Qur'an as a real but imperfect revelation. More cautious approaches are found in the writings of Jacques Jomier and Christian Troll, for whom the biblical testimony to Christ is the decisive word of God, and not just one divine revelation alongside another in the Qur'an.     

The Quest for ‘Disenchantment’ and the Modernization of Magic

The initial premise of this article is that the lasting influence of nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism on the modern conceptualization of religion has confined our understanding of a variety of traditions to a narrow evolutionary scope in which purer religious forms in line with scientific rationalism are seen as arising out of earlier impure systems akin to magic. The article presents the instrumentality of the Qur'an as an alternative lens through which to acknowledge what has often been labelled as “magic” in Islam. Recognizing that this modern conceptualization of religion has been appropriated as an ideal by Muslim modernist reformists, the article particularly intends to show that, through the use of this alternative analytical instrument, the modernist project of emancipatory “disenchantment” can be viewed as an instance of the modernization of magic just as easily as it can be seen as religious purification, the intention of this exercise being to further problematize our current distinction between religion and magic.     

Theodor Bibliander's Machumetis saracenorum principis eiusque successorum vitae,doctrina ac ipse alcoran (1543) as the Sixteenth-century “Encyclopedia” of Islam

The Machumetis saracenorum principis (1543, second edition 1550), compiled by the Zurich theologian Theodor Bibliander, has long been recognized as one of the most significant texts on Islam published in the Latin West in the Early Modern era. The Qur'an translation it contained (the first ever to be printed) was not superseded for over 100 years. This article explores how the work functions as a whole text in the context of Bibliander's life and theology, with particular attention paid to its paratexts (that is, its framing devices) and organization. Bibliander's compilation is discovered to be a self-contradictory, problematic text. In the sixteenth century, new information on the Turks and their religion did not replace, but rather was placed simply alongside other materials, sometimes substantiating older materials, sometimes directly contradicting them. This ambiguity opened up space for new and different readings while supporting, simultaneously, the received tradition. All of this points to the important transitional nature of the sixteenth century in Christian–Islamic engagement.     

Quantitative research without measurement. Reinterpreting the better-than-average-effect

Established measurement practices have been criticized from various theoretical perspectives. The purpose of this article is to argue that quantitative research could be more defensible if contested assumptions about measurement were abandoned, and to illustrate this thesis with the example of the better-than-average-effect (BTAE). If research on the BTAE is conceptualized as an interpretive endeavor, one can provide arguments that do not rely on psychological measurement for the claim that the BTAE is evidence for self-delusion in people. I outline these arguments and elaborate them by discussing a typical study on the BTAE. Furthermore, I show how a measurement-free characterization of the BTAE reveals an important research gap and points to the specific scientific value of research on the BTAE. Finally, I offer three general suggestions for conducting future interpretive quantitative research: justifying why a quantitative method is suitable for investigating a certain phenomenon, providing a comprehensive interpretation of the numerical results, and exploring participants’ understanding of the study material.     

Using Neuroimaging to Measure Mental Representations: Finding Color-OpponentNeurons in Visual Cortex

To date, most neuroimaging studies have tried to localize large regions in the brain that are responsible for specific behaviors or mental operations. Psychological theory, however, is more concerned with the nature of mental functions than with the locations of their neural substrates. This article reviews work that moves beyond functional anatomy to measure how color is represented by neurons in visual cortex. The general approach has three basic steps: First, the areas under investigation are localized in the brain. Second, responses of these areas are measured to sets of systematically varying stimuli, designed to uncover the nature of cortical representations. Third, the neuroimaging data are compared with behavioral data measured with the same stimuli. Results obtained using this approach support the hypothesis that primary visual cortex contains color-opponent neurons that support perception.