Editorial: Newman and Ecclesiology

Jerusalem is at the centre of Christian culture – the place of the Lord's Passion and Resurrection and the place of Pentecost – and the image of Jerusalem is fundamental to any Christian vision of the Church and the Kingdom. There was an earthly city and one in heaven; and since the temple was inseparable from the city, temple imagery – the Garden of Eden, the Holy Wisdom, the Messiah – appears in Christian hymns about Jerusalem. In the centuries preceding the advent of Christianity, both city and temple had become corrupt, so when Jesus cleansed the temple and prophesied the destruction of the city, many people would have applauded him. The harlot city that burned in the Book of Revelation was Jerusalem, and when the emperor Constantine built the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem, he was building a Christian temple, replacing not the one destroyed in 70 CE, but the original temple of Solomon.     

Facing the third millennium: An evolutionary crisis

We are witnessing the birth of the first global civilization on our planet earth due to the accelerative progress of science and technology. This is also accompanied by a crisis in health care, pollution and other environmental disasters, a rising wave of violence and crime, stresses due to globalization, and so on. Recently, we formulated “An Action Plan for Human Survival” (Reference 24).

This article explores in depth the challenges in bringing about a peaceful transition to a global civilization. It explores global civilization, environmental crisis and population. It reveals that the stresses generated by globalization and environmental crisis cannot be resolved by dualistic thought, or concepts, or ideals, or intellectual constructions; as these are sterile in bringing mutation in the human psyche. We see that the emergence of global consciousness is not keeping pace with the globalization, and it is feared that globalization may turn out to be abortive and ultimately self‐destructive.

The crisis is not political, or economic, or social. It is evolutionary in character. We have to explore nature's evolutionary impulse. The challenge is to resolve the “crisis of perception,” or to allow the mutation to happen in the mind‐brain system. The only technology for radical transformation or mutation of human psyche is purification or deconditioning of the human psyche. This leads to new relationship between man and man, and between man and environment. It ends all pain, sorrow and travails and ushers a new era of freedom, peace and bliss. This is the key to human survival, progress and fulfillment.     

A reason to be rational

This essay argues that in spite of the powerful arguments by Kolodny and Broome there is a reason to be rational. The suggested reason to be rational is that if an agent complies with rational requirements the people around him, as well as he himself, will be able to explain and predict his attitudes. Rationality allows us to make sense of an agent’s attitudes in terms of his other attitudes. This form of explainability is valuable, because it provides us with greater comprehension as regards an agent’s attitudes. Thus, I argue that there is an instrumental reason to be rational.     

"国家理由"还是"国家理性"——思想史脉络中的"reason of state"

作为现代早期政治思想史的核心概念,"国家理性"与现代早期西方世界的理性化是联系在一起的,它意味着工具理性(国家理性是其重要表现)取代传统的"道德理性"居支配地位.在当代中国学术中,国家理性没有在中文语境下获得恰当的呈现.     

Public justification versus public deliberation: the case for divorce

I drive a wedge between public deliberation and public justification, concepts tightly associated in public reason liberalism. Properly understood, the ideal of public justification imposes no restraint on citizen deliberation but requires that those who have a substantial impact on the use of coercive power, political officials, advance proposals each person has sufficient reason to accept. I formulate this idea as the Principle of Convergent Restraint and apply it to legislators to illustrate the general reorientation I propose for the public reason project.     

The skill of seeing: beyond the sensorimotor account?

How crucial a role do reason, memory and planning play alongside lower-level sensorimotor skills in our visual activity? Andy Clark has recently proposed a new skill-based account of seeing. This suggests there is more to perception than only the mastery of sensorimotor contingencies, as O'Regan, No? and others have stressed in recent influential papers.     

Rhyme as reason in commercial and social advertising

This study investigated the rhyme‐as‐reason effect on new artificially created advertising slogans. Rhymes and non‐rhymes were in Experiment 1 and 2 compared in a between‐subjects design and in Experiment 3 in a within‐subjects design. The quality of the form and content of the slogans was always evaluated by separate groups. In Experiment 1, we found a strong preference for rhyming slogans as opposed to their non‐rhyming counterparts. Rhymes were rated as more likeable, more original, easier to remember, more suitable for campaigns, more persuasive and more trustworthy. In Experiment 2, social advertising messages were evaluated favorably in both rhyming and non‐rhyming versions. However, when participants directly compared rhymes and non‐rhymes on the same scale (Experiment 3), the difference between commercial and social advertising disappeared and for all slogans rhymes were clearly preferred to non‐rhymes in terms of both form and content. A detailed analysis revealed that the rhymes scoring high on formal aspects were also favored in the questionnaire investigating content aspects.     

Transcendental Arguments and Practical Reason in Indian Philosophy

This paper examines some Indian philosophical arguments that are understandable as transcendental arguments—i.e., arguments whose conclusions cannot be denied without self-contradiction, insofar as the truth of the claim in question is a condition of the possibility even of any such denial. This raises the question of what kind of self-contradiction is involved—e.g., pragmatic self-contradiction, or the kind that goes with logical necessity. It is suggested that these arguments involve something like practical reason—indeed, that they just are arguments against the primacy of “theoretical reason.” This characterization illuminates a characteristically Indic appeal to ordinary language.

我国农村合作医疗的过去、现在和未来

回顾我国农村合作医疗的过去,分析其萎缩的原因,提出保证实施合作医疗的措施:政府重视合作医疗、加大财政投入、调整现行财政体制,合理配置农村医疗卫生资源等.     

Disputed practices and reasonable pluralism

This paper addresses the problem of disputed cultural practices within liberal, deliberative democracies, arguing against the currently dominant view, advocated by Susan Okin among others, that such problems represent a fundamental tension between two liberal values: gender equality and cultural autonomy. Such an approach, I argue, requires the state to render normative judgements about conceptions of the good life, something which is both arbitrary and unfair in societies characterised by reasonable pluralism. Disputed practices, I claim, are defined by the existence of reasonable disagreement over their legitimacy, which means they need to be resolved in a way that abstains from morally evaluating the religious or cultural doctrines of the group in question. The paper therefore articulates a cost-based approach to such problems. The cost-based approach focuses our conceptual attention on the sorts of publicly identifiable costs that any state decision will have on the various parties to a dispute. By restricting itself to public reasons, this method thereby avoids arbitrarily privileging certain conceptions of the good at the expense of others when determining the boundaries of reasonable pluralism. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.