Scarcely fifty years ago the “Indian sphinx” posed enigmas that seemed simple. Known pre-Columbian civilizations were relatively few, and their past, however obscure, could be considered recent in contrast to the millenniums that separate us from the cultures of the ancient Orient. Today this is no longer true. The emergence of new archeological horizons has singularly transformed our summary view of the history of man in the Western Hemisphere. The date of the first human migrations through the Bering Straits has been put back some twenty or thirty thousand years—to the Aztec, Mayan, and Incan civilizations which the Spaniards knew in their full flower. Others have been added which, in turn, give rise to fresh enigmas.

This paper deals with three guiding principles of contemporary Western civilization. It explores the compatibility of Toleration, Pluralism and Truth, as well as their application to diverse domains of cultural activity and creation. There is no place for toleration, let alone pluralism, in the realm of logic and mathematics. Scientific conclusions allow diverse degrees of certainty. The realm of monotheistic religions excludes pluralism, but necessitates toleration. The domains of ethics and its related social institutions allow diversity in secondary matters, but essentially should be guided by universally valid principles. In the case of aesthetics, a diversity of taste suggests a virtually unlimited pluralism. Yet, a universal basic principle of aesthetic evaluation is suggested which would greatly reduce tolerable pluralism, although this assertion is made with less confidence than the insistence on basic norms in ethics.

This article focuses on the everyday practices that make the place of the neighbourhood – social control, legitimacy and support, while also looking at how gender is produced in everyday life in the neighbourhood. In doing this, the discussion underlines the tremendous social and cultural influence of neighbours and the neighbourhood and argues that neighbourhoods need to be seen as a social formation as important as caste, class, ethnicity or religion. This is particularly important given that a strong focus on identities in recent decades has tended to eclipse social formations such as the neighbourhood. This ethnographic discussion is based on fieldwork carried out in neighbourhoods in two towns in India, Thalassery in Kerala, South India and Bikaner in Rajasthan, North India.

In order to understand history as it has been practised in the twentieth century, we must go back in time. Not necessarily to Herodotus and Thucydides, nor even to the great founding figures of the ages of learning and of the Enlightenment, however enduring their influence. But to those historians who in the course of the nineteenth century brought to its conclusion the radical renewal of knowledge about the past: the means that enabled them to acquire it, arguments which were accepted as proofs, conceptual frameworks supposed to make deeds intelligible, ways of talking about times past - to historians who integrated this knowledge that was formerly split between literature, learned research and theology supplanted by philosophy, around a discipline comparable to philology as much from the epistemological point of view as in terms of status and driven not only by ambition to retain the exclusive right to the term history but also, very early, by that of conquering a superior position in the world of science.

Science may be designated as the search for the understanding of phenomena apprehended by one or more of the senses in terms of theoretically postulated entities and the interrelationships between them in such a manner that the apprehended phenomena may be deducible from them along with others for which it was not postulated and with respect to which its truth and falsity, or rather fecundity or sterility, could be judged. This continuous interplay between the theoretically postulated and the sensuously apprehended, initially in terms of that which is first sought to be understood but more essentially in terms of that which has not yet been apprehended but which can be apprehended if the theoretical postulation is true, is the heart of the scientific enterprise as we have come to practice it today. The theoretical postulation thus links the past with the future, and thus makes the seeking for knowledge connected in an essential manner with what can only be called its relation to the future.

To those who have observed it for a long time, the People's Republic of China today has the appearance of a convalescent who has made his way back from a long illness and is slowly relearning to use his vital organs. And this is the consequence of the decisive and remarkable measures taken after the death of Mao Tse-tung and the subsequent elimination of his abusive widow, Chiang Ch'ing, by survivors of the great cultural revolution, now in the upper circles of the Chinese Communist party. Explanations were provided in the “Resolution on the History of the Chinese Communist Party” adopted June 27, 1981, at the Sixth Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Eleventh Party Congress. But the real turning point dates from 1978, in the historic third session of this same Eleventh Congress when the opposition to Mao's chosen successor, Hua Guo-feng, called upon participants to “liberate their minds and to seek truth in the facts”. A new People's China had begun to take shape, and although it is not yet possible to pass judgement on its future prospects, visitors who travel there today can only bear witness to the return of this immense population to existential reality, while little by little the “barracks socialism” of the ultra-leftists is dying out.

For the last two centuries the novel has been the predominant literary genre; but the generic identity of the novel is far from established. Attempts to define the novel have focussed on formal features of particular types of texts, with the result that definitions of “the” novel have merely canonized one or another of the innumerable novelistic manifestations—Bildungsroman, eighteenth-century English novels, novels of the kind George Eliot or Henry James or Marcel Proust or Feodor Dostoevsky wrote, etc. By basing themselves upon such formal attributes, such definitions exclude a vast number of potential texts on essentially normative grounds. Further, the history of the novel has outgrown and contradicted those conceptions; no sooner than a theory has been formulated, the novel itself has moved forward, adapting to changing conditions and substituting for those formal properties a set of new ones, thus rendering the theories obsolete and revealing the inadequacy of formalist categories to define the genre. This predicament is certainly not unique to the theory of the novel but rather a necessary concomitant of any theoretical project; what makes any attempt to theorize about the novel particularly vulnerable is the genre's resistence to formalist analysis, its lack of precisely those organizing categories upon which a formalist theory of any genre can be built.

Perhaps modern man's major mistake was that of considering science as the quintessence of reason and of believing, accordingly, that scientific progress is synonymous with human progress.

It is understandable that, since the fall of the Berlin wall, researchers interested in the social and political upheavals brought about by this phase of history should have concentrated their attentions on what had been the immediate sphere of influence of the Soviet centre of power. However we are within our rights today to ask why our understanding of the structural (economic and social) transformations in what is conveniently called the ‘post-communist’ period and space, and of post-bipolarisation regional relationships, should be confined to that region of the world corresponding to the ex-USSR and the Eastern countries.

By the nineteenth century the struggles in Europe against those forms of authority which go back to the Middle Ages resulted in giving everyone a standard of freedom perhaps without precedent in history.

If utopias in the western cultural tradition owe their model of ideal, final, unitary order to the objective basis of metaphysics, have they not, like metaphysics, undergone a dissolution in Heidegger's sense of Verwindung? Insofar as the very notion of unity, like that of an ultimate metaphysical foundation, now reveals its violence and will to domination and as we are interested instead in thinking utopia as a ‘project for emancipation’, the author suggests replacing the unity that was hitherto characteristic of utopia with a multiplicity that is defended as a value and not as a phase of ‘confusion’ to be overcome.

Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge attracts the attention of ethnologists who are interested by the symbolical analysis of kingship. Although this book does not deal with the theme of kingship as such, it overlaps it on a mythical level. It is a novel about the rise and fall of a man, Henchard, whose initial act is to sell his wife and daughter; in order to commit this act he deviates from the context of the human norm by way of drunkenness. He then enjoys great success as a corn merchant and becomes mayor of the town. Twenty years after this the graph of his destiny starts to fall with the arrival of a young man named Farfrae, who eventually ousts Henchard from his business as well as from his political position, and who goes to the length of taking over not only Henchard's mistress, Lucetta, but also his daughter, Elizabeth-Jane.

During the imperial period, French colonial law developed regimes of exception for indigenous peoples in contravention of the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. These were justified by the need to secure order and by the claim that ‘natives’ were too ‘backward’ for the juridical principles upheld by the Declaration to apply to them. Introduced as temporary measures in Algeria in the 1840s, these measures, which discriminated between the French settler ‘citizens’ and the native ‘subjects’, became firmly entrenched by the Third Republic, supported by the emergence of the ‘colonial sciences’ and the International Colonial Institute in the late 19th century. The exception became the rule. The colonial juridical regimes were derogatory of principle in two major ways: they subsumed universality to territoriality and defined the personhood of indigenous peoples according to racial, cultural or religious affiliations rather than as part of a shared humanity. Two particularly exorbitant measures of wide application were administrative internment without right of review and collective responsibility of a group for individual actions. Such regimes of exception persisted in French colonies until after World War II.

The author discusses in detail the basic issues related to the practice of philosophical discussions with children. He identifies and problematizes the different methods or modalities for doing philosophy with children currently practised throughout the world. He presents a series of pedagogic and didactic issues and puts forward some proposals and directions for the future that might allow us to facilitate philosophy-oriented discussions with children.

This paper deals with the nature and direction of constitutional thinking and practice in Pakistan. It is argued that the country reflects a general malaise of postcolonial societies characterized by tension between the locus of power in the politico-administrative machinery and the source of legitimacy in the constitution. In the post-independence period, the State increasingly absorbed pressures from the newly enfranchised public, which sought to reshape politics in pursuit of nationalist goals. The institutional-constitutional framework of the post-colonial state was ill-equipped to accommodate much less to sponsor and pursue these goals in earnest. This led to a general accusation of institutional decay, leading to a crisis of democracy. The inherent institutional imbalance between bureaucracy and politicians in Pakistan made a mockery of such constitutional provisions as parliamentary sovereignty, procedural and substantive aspects of the legislative process at the federal and provincial levels and the principle of the government's accountability to its public representatives.

The flames of Alexandria continue to rage. After twenty centuries, they still dazzle us, as though the Mouseion were the only massacred library. One would believe that Julius Caesar, Theophilus of Antioch and Omar (the three pyromaniacs, the pagan, the Christian and the Moslem) had had no predecessors or imitators. But the race of incendiaries is as numerous as the waves of the sea. It is monotonous, it is indestructible, it is equal to that of the ants. It was born at the same time as the first Babylonian tablets. In 1988, it continues its work. All over the world and in all times, the incendiaries were there with their torches. They burned parchments, wood or clay tablets, leather manuscripts, papyrus or folios. The same warriors who profaned temples set fire to incunabula. The same ones who slaughtered the Aztecs threw their firebrands into the collection of codices. What is it, this unleashed fury of prince and priest, judge and soldier against these small monuments of clay or paper, against these sepulchres in which the dead say that they have lived and loved, suffered and hoped?

Thinking is a festival and thus human beings experience, through cogitation, the sociable structure of their thinking. As they think, speak and listen they listen and speak and they are in the company of others. It was Plato, the sociable one, who thus spoke and was listened to: “And thinking, is it the same thing to you as to me?” This is the question that Plato puts in Socrates's mouth, when faced with Theaetetus in a dialogue named after him. Theaetetus in turn asks a question: “How do you describe it?” And Socrates replies: “As a discourse that the mind carries on with itself about any subject it is considering. …, but I have a notion that, when the mind is thinking, it is simply talking to itself, asking questions and answering them, and saying yes or no.”

Derrida perhaps most interests Chinese Marxist scholars through his way of separating the spirit of Marx from the ‘‘specter’’ of Marx. All those things interpreted by Derrida as ‘‘specters’’ are mainly practiced in China after 1949. Since China’s historical transition began in 1978 those ‘‘specters’’ considered by Derrida include the challenge of economic reform, and economic globalization, and could also include public ownership which has been replaced by multiple owner-ship or stock ownership, as well as allocation according to contribution which has been replaced by allocation according to contribution combined with allocation according to capital investment. The predictable result is that income equality in theory or in practice has now given way to great income difference. These phenomena are opposite to those ‘‘specters’’ of Marx, and they are the targets of the critical spirit of Marx. When Derrida name those things as ‘‘specters’’ presumably this means they could never be actualized. So when those things actually disappeared again, people would like to accept the supposition that they are only ‘‘specters’’ and could not be objectified, while what actually could be practiced is the critical spirit of Marx. It is just the paradox of the ‘‘specters’’ and the spirit of Marx in the actual situation of China that brings it about that Derrida’s deconstructive method interests some Chinese Marxist scholars, especially the younger ones. In order to understand Derrida’s appeal in China better, we need to look at the general situation of Western Marxism in China.