The expression “République des lettress” is still used today. It appears in most recent dictionaries of the French language, and it even occasionally occurs in ordinary conversation or in the press, a pompous and ironic circumlocution to designate the Parisian literary “milieu.” This archaistic and pejorative survival masks (somewhat similarly to the word “rhetoric”) the attention that researchers are now according to the older meaning of this surviving expression, and to the concept of an international exchange of ideas that it represented for scholars of the Ancien Régime. As proof that this scientific interest is recent, Paul Hazard, in the famous Crise de la conscience européenne (1936), devotes not a single line to the “Republic of Letters,” while in the chapter dealing with Pierre Bayle he cites the “Nouvelles de la République des Lettres” (1684), the learned periodical published in Amsterdam by this erudite Calvinist, apparently without feeling a need to explain a title that seemed self-evident. For the history of ideas, this notion was not a subject for history. It resided outside the field of perception of a discipline that was completely devoted to a sort of chemistry of pure ideas, removed from the literary form that carried them, and a fortiori from institutional circuits, and forms of sociability and dialogue that “invent” and spread them, and even more so from the awareness that “scholars” might have had of the solidarity that united them and of the meaning they might be able to attribute to it.

One day a newly hatched eagle fell from its mother's clutches as she was flying over a chicken yard. The young eagle grew up in the chicken yard with young chickens and took on the habits, customs, and behavior of chickens. He ate like a chicken, walked like a chicken, and generally performed his daily routine like the birds who surrounded him. One day an eagle flew over the chicken yard, perhaps a parent eagle, looking for the lost eagle. Perched high on a tree's limb over-looking the chicken yard, the eagle saw the young eagle that had fallen out of its mother's clutches. The old eagle called to the young eagle, “Eagle, can you hear me?” The young eagle thought of himself as a chicken and did not respond to the call of the eagle in the tree. However, the old eagle continued to call out to him, “Eagle down there, hello.” Finally the eagle in the chicken yard thought, can that eagle in the tree be yelling to me? So he looked up at the tree and saw that the old eagle was beckoning to him to fly up to the tree's branch. The young eagle said, “I cannot fly. I am a chicken.” Insisting that he try to fly the old eagle said, “No, you are not a chicken you are an eagle and I know your parents, in fact, I am your mother and your father is waiting for me to bring you.”

Chinese culture is distinguished among the world's other great traditions by the depth and intensity of its love for rock and stone. This enduring passion manifests itself both in the art of garden making, where rocks form the frame and the central focus of the classical Chinese garden, and also on a smaller scale, in the practice of collecting stones to be displayed on trays or on scholars’ desks indoors. This essay sketches a brief history of lithophilia in China, then adduces the most important philosophical presuppositions for it, and concludes by suggesting some implications for our experience of, and interactions with, the realm of stone and rock.

The problem of the construction of memory that faces the Afro-Brazilian population presents itself as more than a simple need for an identity connected to an original past, but in addition as essential, because for historical reasons their social reality has not yet reached the end of its struggle.

Chemical structures are among the trademarks of our profession, as surely chemical as flasks, beakers and distillation columns. When someone sees one of us busily scribbling formulas or structures, he or she has no trouble identifying a chemist. Yet these familiar objects, which accompany our work from start to end, from the initial doodlings (Fig. I) to the final polished artwork in a publication (Fig. II), are deceptively simple. They raise interesting and difficult questions about representation. It is the intent of this article to reflect upon molecular graphics.

This essay examines how somaesthetics is related to the field of fine arts, though the scope of somaesthetics is indeed wider, extending into all practices of life in which we can enhance our perception and performance through improved somatic self-use and self-knowledge. I first explain the project of somaesthetics and why it is needed to counterbalance the strong tendencies in mod-ern aesthetics, beginning with its founder Alexander Baumgarten, to neglect or reject the body’s role in aesthetic experience. Because Hegel is a crucial figure in this anti-somatic tradition, I then critically examine his ranking of the arts in terms of their relation to material embodiment. Using his classificatory scheme heuristically to highlight the body’s wide-ranging role in the different arts, the essay demonstrates how somaesthetics can improve our understanding and performance of that role and thereby improve the arts and our aesthetic experience.

Weber's famous “Protestant Ethic” thesis—the thesis published originally by him as “ Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus” in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft in Sozialpolitik, in 1901-02 (Vol. XX) and reprinted in his Gesammelte Aufsätze für Religionssoziologie, in 1920—which has allegedly attributed the rise of modern, as distinct from pre-modern, types of capitalism to the influence of Protestantism and especially of Calvinism, has provided—probably more than any other single specific thesis in the social sciences—a continuous focus of scientific controversy.

Historically Turkey has been the ‘other’ for Europe. Turkish identity has taken shape via an ambivalent relationship with an idealized Europe. There was resentment due to the perception of exclusion, but also an intense desire to belong. As the project of official association with the European Union progressed, each of the partners had to ask questions about the meaning of culture and identity. At first there was a conviction that the prospect of entry would never turn into reality. The entrenched state elite in Turkey could therefore go through the steps with impunity. However, after the 1990s, new Turkish social groups, independent of the state elite, took the project more seriously, and embarked on serious democratization, as promised in various agreements with the EU. At the same time the Union experienced a similar reversal, with Brussels envisaging Turkey's accession as a real possibility. This new alignment of forces led to an intense debate on the topics of European identity and the frontiers of Europe. If the EU opts for a more constitutional and less cultural representation of the meaning of Europe - thereby implying that its borders could extend even further in the future - then Turkey's accession may well take place.

This brief essay examines emergent spaces for politics and emergent political actors. The particular concern here is with types of politics that do not run through the formal political system, one with shrinking options for a growing number of US citizens and immigrants. Informal political actors and street-level politics in cities are major instances of this. US cities have a long history of street-level politics. The contents, the purposes, the mobilizers and the enactors of these politics have changed over time. Today's global cities are a very specific type of place because they bring together both the most globalized sectors of capital and the new transnational professionals, on the one hand, and a growing number of immigrants and native minoritized groups in a single, complex space.

‘Culturology’ is an integral, often compulsory, part of Russian university courses; the discipline has largely replaced chairs in Marxist-Leninism and dialectical materialism, and bookshops are full of texts on the subject. This article is based on analysis of more than ten university textbooks recommended to first-year students. Marlène Laruelle examines why culturology has become so important, the place claimed for it within the human sciences, and what it means for changing Russian ideas of identity and nation.

I intend to explore the relationship between the history of historians and the public use of history. This relationship, in my opinion, is both conflictual and convergent. As we shall see later on, this assertion is anything but obvious; among historians the idea of a neat opposition prevails, with no possibility of reconciliation, between professional practices of history (the profession of historians) and the extremely vast and confused domain of its “public use.”

Before undertaking an analysis, I must explain what I mean by the public use of history. I have adopted, at least initially, a purely extrinsic definition of the term. By the “public use of history” I am referring to all that is developed outside the domain of scientific research in its strictest sense, outside the history of historians which is usually written by scholars and intended for a very limited segment of the population. Public use of history includes not only the various means of mass communication, each with its own particularities (journalism, radio, television, cinema, theater, photography, advertisement, etc.), but also the arts and literature; public places such as schools, history museums, monuments and urban spaces, etc., and finally institutions, formal or otherwise (such as cultural associations, parties, and religious, ethnic and cultural groups, etc.), which, with more or less clearly partisan objectives, endeavor to promote a more or less polemic reading of the past as compared to the generally accepted common sense of history or historiography, a polemical reading based on the memory of their respective groups. Indeed, politicians have a large role in the most visible and most talked about manifestations of the public use of history and they have a particular responsibility in its degeneration (I shall return to this point in my conclusion).

As we push closer to the twenty-first century, it is relevant to speculate whether the different peoples of the world can have any prospect of a more peaceful coexistence in the coming millennium than hitherto. It seems reasonable to suppose that intercultural dialogue in philosophy can be of service in the pursuit of this ideal and ought therefore to be promoted or, at least, cherished by all philosophers of goodwill. In this way they would be playing their part in the re-education of humankind. But if “ought” implies “can” then whether philosophy can be intercultural is a prior and more fundamental question.

The ubiquity of gender-bending and sexually ambiguous imagery in the media seems to herald a post-gay era. But are LGBT/Q identities and representation politics really a thing of the past? Inspection of the circulation patterns of LGBT/Q images on a global scale suggests a more nuanced story. Taking the lead from distribution and film festival studies, in this essay I sketch out how LGBT/Q images travel around the world. The festival network was always an alternative channel to mainstream work. Therefore, I pay particular attention to the international film festival circuit with its art film bias, on one hand, and activist festivals, such as LGBT/Q film festivals and their LGBT/Q-themed films, on the other. Utilizing Lisa Henderson's notion of “queer relay” I argue that the relationship between the queer film ecosystem and the larger art film circuit is highly ambivalent. The deployed art film strategies reveal that we have not yet arrived at actual acceptance and universality in a post-gay, post-identitarian world. However, the positions on the side of distinction and cultural capital do not just lean towards exploitation of queer subcultural productions by neoliberal forces but offer also a relay position that accounts for queer agency in the wider cultural arena.

Hegel is the great denier of the meeting and dialogue between civilizations and, contrary to every idea of hybridization as the very spirit of culture, he carefully undertook a thorough ethnic cleansing of history: from the Greek beginning to the European ending the circle is continuous even when it went through other spiritual universes. They could scarcely have the breadth to confront the movement of Reason carried along by the idea of its goal. So it mattered little to the making of its history that philosophy spoke Syriac then Arabic.

It is well-known that as a term, Nietzsche’s Übermensch derives from Lucian of Samosata’s hyperanthropos. I argue that Zarathustra’s teaching of the overman acquires new resonances by reflecting on the context of that origination from Lucian’s Kataplous – literally, “sailing into port” – referring to the soul’s journey (ferried by Charon, guided by Hermes) into the afterlife. The Kataplous he tyrannos, usually translated Downward Journey or The Tyrant, is a Menippean satire of the “overman” who is imagined to be superior to others of “lesser” station in this-worldly life and the same tyrant after his (comically unwilling) transport into the underworld. As a reflection on the life and the death of Zarathustra, this essay also explores the politics of kingship for Empedocles as reformer in terms of Hölderlin’s Death of Empedocles and Nietzsche’s unpublished drafts on the same topic. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche points to a perspective beyond the here and now, including the “values” of our all-too-worldly and all-too-human concerns, no matter whether in terms of perceived political/economic advantage, or indeed in the pursuit of more trivial satisfactions.

This article examines an Africana philosophy of culture of black existence through, after offering a critique of a theodicy of textuality and social reality, exploration of the construction of “problem people,” of people whose existence, marked by blackness, has been treated as a challenge to reason and the search for knowledge in the modern world. As Africana philosophy raises concerns of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of freedom, and a metacritique of reason, it offers, as well, a case for the central importance of philosophy of culture in modern and late modern thought.

According to Auguste Comte, whose extravagant statements are almost always meaningful, the whole of the physical and mathematical sciences, once integrated into positivist dogma, must become cosmology—or, more properly, he qualifies, geology, in the etymological sense of the word: the study of the earth, of the “human planet,” as the necessary environment “of all the higher functions, vital, social, and moral.” Even astronomy should be no more than “the heavenly study of the human planet, that is to say, the knowledge of our relations with those stars that are liable to affect and destroy our destinies by modifying the conditions of the earth.” His religion is focused on the world, not on the universe.

One cannot understand religion in general, and religious truth or error, save by stressing at the start the fact that, although it goes beyond the narrow confines of Comte's positivism, it flows from the cosmos of the world, the historico-geographical domain of man, not of nature, as an ensemble of the non-temporal laws or laws of the universe, devoid of center, which interests science. Religions contradict the positivist and humanist limitations of Comte. But this contradiction, this transcendence, is intelligible only if we define that which is transcended; and, in order to understand this, we must go all the way back to animal psychology.

Tolerance is the fruit of an asceticism in the exercise of power. It is a virtue. An individual virtue, and a collective virtue. It would in fact be a mistake to believe that it only takes on meaning with a form of power, that of the State. Intolerance has its first impulse in the power that each of us has of imposing our beliefs, our convictions, our manner of leading our lives on others, from the moment that each believes only these to be valid, only these to be legitimate. For each of us, to act is to exercise a power over … This initial asymmetry of action makes it such that every act has an agent and a receiver, a passive agent. But if intolerance is armed with a power over …, it is justified in the eyes of the one exercising it by the alleged legitimacy of the belief, of the conviction. This presumption of legitimacy results from the disapproval of opposed or simply different beliefs, convictions, ways of life. Two elements are therefore necessary to intolerance: the disapproval of the opposed beliefs and convictions of others, and the power of preventing them from leading their life as they see fit. It is here that lies the double reason for the propensity towards intolerance in the human heart. We could think that intolerance only rages when, on the one hand, the power to prevent sits in the hands of the public force, using the secular arm, and when, on the other hand, the disapproval takes the form of a public condemnation by a State partisan professing a particular vision of good. In this respect the religious wars of Europe would constitute the lasting paradigm of intolerance, the Church - or the Churches - offering the unction of truth to the States and the State furnishing the sanction of the secular arm to a given Church. In accordance with this ancient paradigm, the residual religious fanaticisms of old Europe would today find themselves relayed by the fundamentalist fanaticisms coming principally from Islam. It is also against this version of intolerance that the discourse of tolerance constituted itself in the Western world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But if the power of the State, joint until a recent past to ecclesiastical power, is alone in giving a public dimension to reprobation and an historical efficiency to the power of prevention that individual will lacks, public force ultimately only operates through the individual passions that serve as relays in the direction of the most intimate dispositions of the human heart. Even the tyrant needs a sophist to extort the belief by persuasion, flattery or intimidation. It is in the last instance within the individual, even driven by fear, that the destiny of intolerance plays itself out. To reduce the discontinuity between the individual and the institution, it is legitimate to underline the role of what Michael Walzer calls in Spheres of Justice “shared understandings”: it is true that we can always find intermediary communities of allegiance, conviction and power between the individual level and the state level. It is even at this privileged intermediary level that the education of passions which we will discuss later on can be exercised …. In the same way, to return to the period of Enlightenment, it is as much to the individuals called out of the voluntary state of minority (Kant) to the States invited to lift the censorship and also to the enlightened part of the public that the Encyclopedists’ plea in favor of tolerance addresses itself. From this moment it is in a double - or even triple - sense that tolerance is a virtue. The ultimate reason is that power is a general anthropological structure which lets itself be discerned at all levels in which one's power (puissance) to act is susceptible to affecting the other's power (puissance) to act and to diminishing it (Spinoza).

So varied and complex is the world of games that there are many ways in which a study of it can be approached. Psychology, sociology, anecdotal history, pedagogy, and mathematics all share a domain whose unity ends by ceasing any longer to be perceptible. Works like Homo ludens by Huizinga, Jeu de l'enfant by Jean Chateau, and Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by J. von Neumann and O. Morgenstern are not addressed to the same readers, nor do they appear to deal with the same subject. Ultimately, this question arises: How much does one profit from the facilities or contingencies of vocabulary by continuing to act as though such different and almost incompatible inquiries are fundamentally concerned with a same specific activity? It is doubtful whether common characteristics permit one to define this specific activity and consequently whether it can legitimately constitute the object of a comprehensive study.

For quite some time there has been a collective perception of a moral crisis in post-Mao China. This perception is informed by standards held by members of Chinese society rather than by standards outside of it. In this article, the author attempts to lay the groundwork for a philosophical analysis of this moral crisis. He first explains why it is appropriate to speak of a moral crisis and then examines the structure of the crisis. This examination is partly conceptual and partly causal. The conceptual section of the article discusses terms frequently used in connection with the crisis and introduces some terms and distinctions of the author's own for further clarity. The causal section traces the moral crisis to a crisis of identification with moral authority or exemplars, the latter crisis in turn containing important clues to the structure of self and agency in Chinese moral culture.