Since the 1960s the bio/technosciences have occupied a central place in philosophical thinking. The paper sets out three theoretical configurations embodying major challenges for today's gender studies in philosophy, since they raise an obstacle, each in its own way, to the discussion on implications of the bio/technosciences in the political field and the area of gender theory: firstly naturalism in the field of the philosophy of science; secondly the paradigm of applied ethics; and thirdly the discourse of philosophical anthropology that has been reactivated in philosophical debates about the bio/technosciences. To conclude, some of the future tasks will be mentioned which fall to gender studies in philosophy.

Social influence and persuasion are not synonyms. This paper traces back the different approaches and distinctions constituting the two concepts and argues that the two research traditions focused respectively on social influence in group processes and on individual attitude change through persuasive communication, could be re-examined from a different vantage point, casting a new light on the continuities between them.

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 earliest Chinese record of the maritime relations between India and China can be found in the “History of the Former Han Dynasty” (Chien Han-shu) which covers the period from B.C. 206 to A.D. 23. In its chapter (28b) on geography it is stated that ever since the time of the Emperor Wu (Wu Ti, B.C. 14087) the country called Huang-chih has sent tribute to the Chinese court, which in turn dispatched envoys to this remote country. Huang-chih has been identified by many scholars with Kāñcī (Conjeeveram) on the east coast of South India. It is recorded that there were chief interpreters belonging to the Yellow Gate (the office of eunuchs serving in the palace) who went to sea to buy bright pearls, opaque glasses and other rare articles, taking with them from China gold and various kinds of silk for exchange.

Around the turn of the century, political philosophy became one of the most lively areas of philosophical study in China. An important trend of development is represented by the shift from macro-political philosophy to micro-political philosophy. A careful analysis of this trend is the object of this paper. It shows how, in the Chinese context, micro-political philosophy, micro-history, critique of everyday life, and other theories much debated in the West, are relatively new. As such, a solid foundation for micro-political philosophy must be found within the theoretical resources established in the 20th century western culture, then integrated to the Chinese context and absorbed by this latter to get inspiration.

The first part of this article presents an overview of civil resistance theory and practice, including key concepts and the historical record of nonviolent movements ending authoritarian and occupying regimes. It will also present a practical checklist for assessing why people power movements succeed or fail. The second part of this article will demonstrate how civil resistance applies to the global scourge of financial corruption. It will first illustrate two recent successful people power campaigns against financial corruption, then examine their dynamics in terms of new research and analysis of organized, collective nonviolent action targeting graft and abuse. Finally, it will adapt the general civil resistance checklist to the anti-corruption arena, concluding with the specific elements that are most critical to curbing financial corruption.

I borrow this title from an English mystical text written at the end of the fourteenth century, The Veil of Unknowledge, which has long been part of my life. The explicit aim of the book is to tear away this veil of unknowledge, or to give us the means to do it ourselves. The image of the veil invites a reciprocal gesture of raising, tearing, piercing. The desire that motivates this act goes beyond the veil, toward Isis and the truth, the naked figure we're endeavoring to know. Once we have cleared away the obstacles and gained a clear view of her, we—and she—are transformed.

Socrates’ exact words are unknown. Nor do we know precisely what the Buddha said. All we have, in both cases, are statements attributed to them. Our ignorance of their own words is irremediable. This is not the only trait that these two contemporaries share. The statements ascribed to them are similar in many ways, particularly the therapeutic concern that motivates them. Both the Athenian and Prince Gautama strive to cure the ravages of ignorance, to treat the ills ignorance engenders and eliminate its source. This common aim produces comparable results, such as the use of dialogue to remove illusory questions rather than the teaching of a doctrine.

Since the end of the 19th century, Brazilian researchers have speculated about the phenomenon of ethnic coexistence they have witnessed in their country. How may the mixed culture that is its obvious result be explained? Should it be attributed to some sociocultural syncretism, to an interpenetration of civilizations or, quite simply, to a synthesis? Whatever the case, it is certain that cultural elements of very different origins became united in Brazil and that they have remained closely associated there in spite of their disparity. The best example of this “cultural conglomerate,” if we may call it that, is without a doubt that of the Afro-Brazilian religious cults and, although numerous studies have already been devoted to them, they have a richness of content and meaning, plus a capacity for renewal, that is far from being exhaustively investigated.

In this article I propose to explore the meanings, mechanisms and issues at stake in the reconstitution of identities which can now be seen taking place in the countries of the post-communist space. We shall consider this space not as a thing in itself, but in terms of its old and new interactions with the countries of western Europe, in order to understand the phenomena of reconstructed identities in general, in the context of their relationship to the period of globalisation in which we now find ourselves.

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.

Unlike positivism, which took the form of a protest by the individual against the canonization of the general, and unlike existentialism, which expressed a revolt of the concrete against abstraction erected into a dogma—structuralism is an ideology of capitulation to the bureaucratic and technocratic supremacy of means over ends and of society over individuals. The dogmatic systems of the last decades have finished by creating an intellectual atmosphere in which “the whole” is put in the foreground, leaving its component “parts” in the shade.

Structuralism idolizes structure at the expense of its components, and structural analysis at the expense of induction and generalization. For the structuralists, supporting elements are seen merely as interrelated elements, and things related to one another are swallowed up by the relations between them. In their eyes, the elements that make up a structure are in themselves meaningless; they exist only by virtue of being grouped according to a certain pattern of organization. Only relations are regarded as constant, and thus as proper objects of a science; properties are merely ephemeral and illusory.

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.

Among the multiple aspects that are apparent to us in the religious life of the ancients, our attention is quite naturally directed toward the extremely important occurrences which interrupt the normal course of things and reveal the intrusion of the sacred into the life of men. These phenomena, called τέρατα in Greek, prodigia a in Rome, are of diverse, but always significant, value, according to the particular case. They sanction the privileged state of being of people who are marked by the imprint of the divine, they adduce irrefutable confirmation of the will of the gods, they interpret the joy and, far more frequently, the anger of the all-powerful beings who decree the course of the world.

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.

This paper discusses in critical terms muhammad ‘abd al-Jabiri’s influential philosophical work. It engages, in particular, in the analysis of the assumptions underlying the radical contrast that al-Jabiri sets up between avicenna’s philosophy – which is supposed to represent irrationality and Gnosticism – and that of averroes who, according to him, breaks decisively with that current of thought and thus makes exercising philosophical thought once again possible. after a close discussion of the positions of classical philosophers (falasifa), the author concludes that it is the very validity of the notion of “arab reason” that has to be questioned in al-Jabiri’s analysis.

Modern cities have recently evolved as centres for material and intangible exchanges and this obliges us to rethink the urban scene. The passing from the industrial era to the new age of information has rendered obsolete the models envisaged by Max Weber, Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin. Basing her argument on the typology put forward by Saskia Sassen, Barbara Freitag sketches out the different profiles of contemporary cities. Urban centres are now defined by the level, scale and intensity of the exchanges to which they give rise. On the first level is the global city, nerve centre of the globalized economy (Tokyo, New York, London …) and capable of challenging the power of the state. On the second level are the megalopoles (Mexico, São Paulo …), which are only prevented from joining the ranks of the global cities because much of their population is excluded from the global economy. Next come the metropoles, cities like Paris (‘19th-century capital’), which have retained a way of life global centres can no longer provide. However, most of the world's population is concentrated in the peripheral boroughs of the information society's global economy. It is for the sake of this population that attention must be paid to the transformations endured by 21st-century cities.

A history of the comic has not yet been written. According to historians, the comic had very different, and sometimes even opposite causes, in relation to different ages and cultures. What provoked laughter in one civilization could be taken quite seriously in another. The comic has always had a particular function and its nature, its internal composition, has not been immutable. It could be kept within the limits of a single sphere that was assigned to it in particular (the comic, as opposed to the tragic), but it could also be elevated to a conceptual vision of the world, and in this case, it embraced much more universal domains of human history. Nevertheless, nothing has been written on the history of the comic throughout all ages and encompassing all peoples. Serious studies concerning the place it occupies in the history of civilizations are, however, of great interest.