This paper considers a recent claim that Confucianism and feminism are compatible since both are care ethics. I examine some aspects of contemporary care ethics and compare them with Confucian ethics from a feminist viewpoint. I argue that for Confucianism to be made compatible with feminism, the former must be transformed to the extent that it loses its main features.

Care ethics can be feminist ethics only when women have been made moral subjects because of their perceived ability to care for others. Caring in a Confucian culture is not as much a feminine value as a male value. I do not find Confucian ethics as care ethics to be particularly liberating for women. For Confucianism to be viable in a contemporary democratic world, it must be supplemented by feminist ethics that take justice and equality as the primary values.

Let us begin by taking a look at the semantic background: the word criticism designated an action implying judgment and discrimination based on standardized poetics or on preferred taste. By virtue of implicit or explicit criteria, the principal task of criticism—of things either beautiful or otherwise—was to make a distinction, to disapprove or to praise. If one refers to French dictionaries (from the 17th century onwards), one can see that the first and stable meaning of the noun criticism is:

“The art of judging a work of the mind” (Academy, 1694). To this first acceptation of the meaning of the word was added, in 1740, the idea of enlightenment and explanation. It has now come to designate “literary science,” independently of any judgment of value. This new acceptation, although confirmed by use, did not appear sufficiently clear to the compilers of the 8th Dictionary of the Academy (1932). The definition proposed at this date hardly differs from that of 1694:

Since the theme of this issue is ‘back to the future,’ especially to the ways in which information formats before the age of printing anticipate and perhaps even may give some guidance to principles of organization and cognitive layouts for the ‘new’ science of information design, I am going to focus in my presentation on the design of memory storage, as it was taught and practiced in the Middle Ages. It is important to recognize that ‘memory-art’ accompanied every aspect of education in the ancient trivium, though different aspects and capacities of human memory were emphasized as appropriate to its various disciplines. What is commonly now taken to be ‘the art of memory,’ namely the advice to link powerful images of ‘content’ (imagines rerum) together in dramatic scenes conceived within a mental location (locus) (as described most completely in the early first century B.C. Rhetorica ad Herennium) is not a universal technique but specifically a device of Rhetoric, and thus of composition. There is also an ‘art of memory’ associated with Dialectic, and this is the device of the ‘topics’ or ‘seats’ (topoi) of argument, syllogism and enthymeme arranged in an orderly schematic of specific mental ‘places.’ Aristotle expounded this scheme as a variety of mnemonic art in his treatise Peri Topoi, and in turn it was further disseminated to later antiquity and the Middle Ages in works by Cicero and Boethius.

Despite the phenomena of internationalization and Europeanization, legal process remains essentially national in character. However, certain domains of law are already unified. Focusing mainly on the French tradition and its contribution to the construction of a European legal space, this paper: a) criticizes the traditional methods used to manage diversity in law – unifying the law and co-ordinating those legal codes likely to be conflictual; b) studies the debate between universalism and particularism in private international law, a discipline whose essential object is the resolution of the difficulties derived from pluralism; and c) attempts to discern an appropriate path towards a ‘renewed universalism' by pursuing a comparative approach which can open the way towards unification but must also be able to preserve the irreducible diversity of law.

Heidegger's affirmation is categorical: “… the thinking expressed in Being and Time is against humanism”. Heidegger's thesis is not only categorical, it is also polemical. He maintains that the humanist conception does not grasp man's essence, and it is for this reason that he is opposed to humanism, which is a doctrine that “has not thought profoundly enough of man's humanitas.

All things by immortal power,
Near or far,
Hiddenly,
To each other linked are
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star.
Francis Thompson (1859-1907)

Picture a rainbow: under ideal conditions, you will not only see the primary and the (fainter) secondary rainbow, but you will also realize there is a zone between the two which is considerably darker than the surrounding sky, and you will see the series of very faint and narrow bands of colors, usually pink and green alternately, at the inner side of the primary bow. For centuries these narrow bands, called “supernumerary arcs,” have been a riddle to those who set out to explain the rainbow phenomenon scientifically.

Reagere, reactio does not belong to classical Latin. Reagere appears, as late as the fourth century A.D., in Avienus, but not reactio. Nonetheless, antiquity was not unaware of the concept of reciprocal action, where the “patient” reacts in return on the agent. The Aristotelian doctrine of antiperistasis occupied physicists up until the time of Galileo: “All movers, as long as they move, are at the same time moved.” The Latin authors dispense with reagere and reactio. It is the verb pati, designating the passive state to which the prefix re is added in the aphorism attributed to the Scholastics in the 18th century dictionaries: omnis agens agendo repatitur.

This paper compares leibniz’s statements about Islamic fatalism with the way in which the question has been debated in Islamic theology and philosophy, in particular by Indian philosopher muhammad Iqbal. Speaking of destiny, Iqbal writes that it is “a word that has been so much misunderstood both in and outside the world of Islam”. he meant that, on the one hand, muslims themselves have misconstrued the notion as a strong belief in absolute predestination while, on the other hand, non-muslims have mischaracterized Islam as a religion based on blind fanaticism stemming from a faith in an already written fate. Such a characterization was given philosophical dignity by leibniz when, responding to the criticism that his philosophy inevitably led to necessity and fatalism, he insisted on establishing a distinction between what his doctrine did say about necessity and what it must not be mistaken for: Islamic fatalism, or fatum mahometanum. The author concludes on Iqbal’s philosophy of time as duration (Iqbal was a Bergsonian) as the condition for an amor fati without fatalism.

Truth claims pervade the world: assertions that a speaker wishes to persuade an audience are true or at least plausible. But how to judge? Much proposed knowledge has uncertain legitimacy, evaluated through assumptions of how the world operates or by the reputation of its sponsor. In other words, plausibility and credibility shape our judgments. As students of conspiracy theories recognize, many “facts” are available, too many to be easily judged as to their accuracy. Facts are promiscuous. As judges of likelihood, we conclude that some are false, others true, and still others taken out of context. Further, knowledge is never complete and so we must consider error and ignorance (a field of epistemology labeled agnotology) as well as accuracy and awareness. In this article I examine four critical allegations made about United States President Barack Obama: that he was born in Kenya, that he is Muslim, that he engaged in oral sex with another man, and that he is a socialist. While each of these claims may be false, they are false in different ways in light of the different criteria and strategies by which we weigh uncertainty.

We have learned by now not to see myth as simple entertainment or a babbling. Where the nineteenth-century eye could find only an out-of-date toy left behind by childish peoples or a cultural stage-set for leisured social circles, the human sciences have taught us to recognise an authentic expression of man: myth says with utmost seriousness something that is of essential importance. What is more, it is a way of living in the world, of orienting oneself in the midst of things, of seeking an answer in the quest for the self. We owe this alteration of perspective to a whole group of scholars: Cassirer, Van der Leeuw, Unger, Preuss; we owe it in a quite special way to Maurice Leenhardt and to the original work which his recent death left uncompleted.

It would be idle to pretend that Mr. Macdonald's article is not about a most serious problem. In this age of disillusion one of the most serious grounds for concern, one of the deepest sources of the disillusion is the state of popular culture, if by culture we mean anything more than the sum of intellectual, moral, aesthetic habits of a people in any given moment of historical time. For to many observers who are hostile to the political movement of democracy, the present state of popular culture justifies all their fears, and to believers in democracy, the state of popular culture deceives some of the most profound hopes of the democratic movement since the French Revolution. And at this stage of the argument it is not, I think, worth making the distinction between popular and mass culture that Mr. Macdonald usefully insists on. Where the optimists have been deceived and the pessimists confirmed in their pessimism has been in the kind of culture that the people now choose or accept, and it does not, at the moment, matter whether the ‘people’ and the ‘masses’ are identical concepts.

There is a question mark hanging over the two great markers of modern civilization in the so-called Judeo-Christian, or more accurately Semitic-western-modern tradition: monotheism is the first of these two great markers. The second is the Project, that is, the idea that real life is elsewhere, messianism. Life must be saved, healed. Based on this structural schizophrenia and this transcendent project can we talk about a humanism? Our western civilization has reached saturation point. This saturation is expressed in a polytheism of values. We should no longer search for a distant utopia, but utopias in the gaps, existential ‘makeshift’ forms, close at hand, that promote something like the emotional, the domestic. It is more a question of re-emerging humanisms, pantheisms, polytheisms, something structurally plural. A re-orientalization as well, an alternative to the monovalency of western culture.

One among the concepts strongly defended by Léopold Sédar Senghor is what he called the civilization of the universal, which forms an essential component of his thought. This concept has been thoroughly commented and, at times, wrongly or controversially interpreted. My approach consists of a personal reflection on the backgrounds of Senghor’s thought. First of all I will deal with Senghor’s conception of Negritude and what it implies in terms of black identification, recognition of Africa as birthplace of races. Then I will examine the civilization of the universal as defended by Senghor and its link to the thought of Father Teilhard de Chardin, a French palaeontologist. Finally I will present the passionate debate on his work and thought. Senghor was among the African writers and thinkers probably the most admired, the most awarded throughout the world, but also the most criticized and hated.

Japan is the world’s largest producer of love simulation games, revealing a curious feature: these games, in theory, assign female players to the unique task of seducing a male character, but, in reality, they promote the establishment of a network of friendship between women. Love cannot be achieved if this network is not carefully woven both in play and in real life. Based on the analysis of this double dynamics, outwardly contradictory, I would like to advance the following hypothesis: that such games enable their users to ‘outsmart’ gender expectations. These games, called otome games, became popular in the context of a national panic related to the declining birthrate: they target the market of women who – living alone or with their parents – are held responsible for the future shortfall of the system. These new generations of women don’t start a family. They have no children. How do they manage to ward off exclusion and stigma? The study will focus on the strategies collectively devised to turn otome games into an identity-building tool, promoting friendship between players as a means of resistance against social norms.

This essay examines reflexive strategies in three contemporary Hindi-language feature films directed by women, Om Shanti Om (2007), Luck By Chance (2008), and Dhobi Ghat/Mumbai Diaries (2010). These Mumbai-set films, directed and written by Farah Khan, Zoya Akhtar, and Kiran Rao, respectively, offer insider industry perspectives and a variety of outlooks on Bollywood and Indian society more generally. I introduce the concepts of “selective reflection” to critically examine self-conscious representations of the excessively star-driven world of Bollywood filmmaking in an age of globalization (and the dominant figure of the male hero), directing styles and strategies of image-making, and the blurred boundaries between reality and artifice. This article presents a close analysis of narrative tropes (especially “breaking in” to Bollywood), filmi references, casting, spectator dynamics, and gendered agency in films that represent a taxonomic range from commercial blockbuster to art cinema.

God — as we well know since Nietzsche — is dead. However, it is necessary to correct this sentence that was a sacrilege yesterday and has become common place today. We should be talking of the death of the “gods,” rather than of God; for what has been disappearing from the social space of modernity (I do not speak of the inner conscience of the faithful here), is not just the God who sits enthroned atop altar and dogma. What has disappeared are the “gods” more generally; by this we understand the link with the world that, certainly rooted in religion but transcending it, surrounds things and beings with an aura of wonderful significances; that places them outside of those structures that modern man understands to be the utilitarian, the rational and the functional.

We have presented tolerance, right from the foreword upon which the present study opens, as the difficult course of a crested road between intolerance and the intolerable. Intolerance constitutes the obstacle never surmounted, the intolerable, the limit opposed to the abuses of a tolerance that has slid to indifference.