This paper attempts to show that the Shianbei word for ‘paper’ was *qaɣVdu, which is cognate to Written Mongolian qaɣudasu ‘tree bark, sheet of paper’, and that *qaɣVdu was subsequently borrowed into other languages as Sogdian kāγaδā, Persian kaġad, kaġid, Old Turkic qaɣat/qaɣaz and Turkish kâğĭd. The etymology of Greek Séres “China” is also discussed.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:CONRAD'S REPLY TO KIERKEGAARD by Jerry S. Clegg Varied answers to a fixed question have often guided interpretations of Conrad's novella, Heart ofDarkness. Who, that question has been, was Conrad's model for the enigmatic colonial official he calls Kurtz? Hannah Arendt has speculated that it was Carl Peters, an early explorer of east Africa.1 Norman Sherry has picked Arthur Hodister, a Belgian officer, as his candidate.2 Ian (...) Watt has likewise suggested historical figures: Henry M. Stanley and King Leopold of Belgium.3 Since all these men had a reputation for cruelty, those thinking that Conrad had them in mind when describing Kurtz have stressed the political message of his story; for them it is basically an indictment of colonialism. Stephen Reid has argued for a mythic model. Kurtz, he holds, was meant to be seen as one of the man-gods of Frazer's Golden Bough—a primitive king who is obliged to maintain his political position by engaging in certain bestial rites.4 Kenneth Bruffee has recendy cast Kurtz as Conrad's version of Byron's Childe Harold, arguing that the eventualjudgment on him by the character Marlow represents the effort of a squire-narrator to free himself from the pernicious influence of his knight-hero.5 For Bruffee Heart of Darkness is the prototype of a genre oftwentieth-century literature thatrejects the values ofaristocratic romance in favor of democratic norms. There may be truth in all these associations of Kurtz with known colonizers, mythical kings, and fictional knights, but they share a pair of deficiencies. They do not clarify the argument of Heart ofDarkness and so do not dojustice to its copious philosophical content. They also 280 Jerrys. Clegg281 fail to note those features ofKurtz that identify his model most precisely. The prototype of Conrad's famous character is biblical. He is a modern version of Abraham, and the work most intimately related to Heart of Darkness is Kierkegaard's panegyric on Abraham: Fear and Trembling. Conrad's story is, in fact, an addendum to Fear and Trembling written from the point of view of a poet-narrator—Marlow—who has accepted some, but not all, of the tenets of Kierkegaard's own poet-narrator, Johannes de Silentio. It is Marlow's quarrel with de Silentio that explains the structure of Heart ofDarkness, that constitutes its deepest message, and that tells the reader who the model for Kurtz was. An appreciation of that quarrel also helps clarify other matters. It makes plain, for example, the symbolism of light and dark that Conrad uses as an accompaniment to his argument.6 Heart of Darkness is, unarguably, a meditation on several subjects. It is about the Belgian Congo under the administration of King Leopold. It is also about European colonialism in general. It may be about other matters as well. Its primary subject, however, is the relationship of the religious to the ethical and the aesthetic. Since for Conrad the ethical and the aesthetic were allied, this subject may be best cast as the relationship ofreligion to art. It is introduced at the very start ofthe novella. Conrad's primary narrator there offers a theme for his seafaring friend, Marlow, to meditate on aloud: the great English knights-errant of the sea who, like "jewels flashing in the night of time," have born the torch of civilization into the mystery of an unknown earth.7 As this theme is announced, what was a mournful gloom that had hung over London becomes a lurid glare under the stars, and Marlow begins to talk of these, and still other, kinds of light and their relationship to the dark. The primary narrator has already identified what the dark stands for: time. Marlow does not challenge that equation. He only asks who, and with the aid of what kind of light, effectively combats "the night of time." During his meditation he considers four answers to his question, three of which are of primary importance. Certain "redeeming facts," illustrated by the restraint shown by hungry cannibals, quietly dazzle with reassurance, and so what mightbe called the person ofethical conduct— when stripped bare of pretense and the opaque "cloak of time... (shrink)

Reprint of the original, first published in 1919.

Let me start with my general thesis: that psychoanalysis has gone through three phases. It has been a psychology first of the unconscious, second as psychology of the ego, and today, I believe, a psychology of the self. . . . To a surprising extent, the modern American literary critic has sought the same impersonal, generalized kind of quasi-scientific knowledge. We anglophones reacted against the over-indulgence in subjectivity by Victorian and Georgian critics. We also reacted against the uncritical use of (...) extraliterary knowledge, connections that were often aimless and unconvincing between literary works and their authors' autobiographies or literary periods. We sought instead an analytical rigor, at first by searching out the organic unity of particular literary works, then by extending the methods of close reading we developed that way to the total works of an author, to myths and popular arts, to the language of everyday life, and even to such artifices as Volkswagens, supermarkets, and political candidates. Norman N. Holland is professor of English and director of the Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of six books, of which Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare , The Dynamics of Literary Response , Poems in Persons , and Five Readers Reading deal directly with problems of psychological criticism. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Human Identity" and "Why Ellen Laughed". (shrink)

En 1983, Cedric J. Robinson introduit sous le titre d’une « tradition radicale noire », l’idée d’une généalogie spécifiquement africaine de la lutte contre l’esclavagisme, le capitalisme et l’impérialisme, distincte du marxisme européen. La pensée « afropessimiste»s’inspire d’Hortense Spillers pour mesurer les conséquences de la soustraction des Noirs aux ordres de l’humanité et de la subjectivité politique, en une violence qui convertit les vies africaines en chair. Le poète et théoricien africain américain Fred Moten revisite aujourd’hui ces pensées en inventant (...) un « optimisme noir », qui entend faire valoir l’ambivalence et l’ambiguïté de la noirceur, soulignant ses potentialités particulières et désignant dans « la chair » une possibilité de formuler de nouvelles formes de vie. (shrink)

Bastiat belonged to the optimist French tradition of liberal economic thought. Following Jean-Baptiste Say, he argued that the market was immensely creative in the discovery of new opportunities for improving human well-being and creating social harmony. He also recognized the importance of the entrepreneur, who earned a profit in contrast to the capitalist who simply earned a return for his investment. Although he was no great theorist, Bastiat demonstrated with relentless informal logic the social value of freedom. This is best (...) exemplified in his demonstration of the virtues of free trade. Bastiat anticipated modern public choice theory with his argument that people tried to use the coercive power of the state to get what they would not achieve by market transactions. He was also concerned with the moral virtue of liberty and in his final work, The Law, he showed how the modern system of law had been perverted. Instead of protecting individual rights it had become an instrument of plunder. Socialism was most malevolent form of plunder.Bastiat appartenait à la tradition optimiste française de la pensée économique libérale. Dans la lignée de Jean-Baptiste Say, il considérait que l’économie de marché recelait une créativité significative ouvrant sur la découverte de nouvelles opportunités permettant d’améliorer le bien-être humain et donnant parallèlement lieu a une harmonie sociale. Bastiat avait aussi conscience de l’importance de l’entrepreneur, celui qui glane des profits contrairement au capitaliste qui perçoit simplement une rémunération pour ses investissements. Bien que n’étant pas un très grand théoricien, Bastiat démontre avec une logique informelle implacable la valeur sociale de la liberté. La meilleure illustration en est sa démonstration des vertus du libre-échange. Bastiat anticipe la théorie moderne des décisions publiques quand il argumente que les individus essayent d’utiliser le pouvoir coercitif de l’Etat pour obtenir ce qu’ils ne peuvent obtenir à travers les transactions marchandes. Bastiat était aussi préoccupé par la vertu morale de la liberté et dans son dernier ouvrage, La Loi, il montre de quelle manière le système juridique moderne a été perverti. Au lieu de protéger les droits individuels, ce système est devenu un instrument de pillage public et le socialisme est la forme la plus pernicieuse de ce pillage. (shrink)

The Catalogue of Palm Leaf Manuscripts kept in the Otani University Library. Otani University Library, Kyoto 1995. lxxxi, 778 pp. No price given.

One important problem in cognitive science is to understand the development of cognitive processes in children and to devise computer models to explore the mechanisms that underlie these changes. Our research addresses these general goals. In particular, we are concerned with developmental changes in cognitive strategies in typical children and in children with mild mental retardation.

The director of the Center for Ethics and Public Life presents a series of essays on the philosophical implications of the Narnia series, exploring Lewis's ...

A philosophical inquiry into the meaning of immortality that ties all men together.

As is clear to any user of software, quality control of software has not reached the same levels of sophistication as it has with traditional manufacturing. In this paper we argue that this is because insufficient thought is being given to the methods of reasoning under uncertainty that are appropriate to this domain. We then describe how we have built a large-scale Bayesian network to overcome the difficulties that have so far been met in software quality control. This exploits a (...) number of recent advances in tool support for constructing large networks. We end the paper by describing how the network was validated and illustrate the range of reasoning styles that can be modelled with this tool. (shrink)

A carpet vendor has to measure her customer's living room for some new broadloom. She has forgotten her tape measure, but does have a meterstick. She lays the meterstick on the floor, snug up against the wall, with the left edge of the stick in one corner of the room. She then makes a pencil mark at the right edge. Next she shifts the stick right until the left edge of the stick is at her mark, and again marks the (...) right edge. She does this three times, but then finds that less than a full length remains to be measured. She turns the stick around so that the zero is now at the right side and lays it in the right corner and notes that her last pencil mark is at 70 cm. She concludes that the wall she is measuring is 3.7 meters in length. She then measures the opposite wall and concludes that it, too, is 3.7 meters in length. She then repeats the process for the remaining two opposite walls, and finds that they each measure 4.1 meters. To see if the room is rectangular, she runs a piece of twine from one corner to its opposite, pulls the twine taut and then cuts it to fit exactly. She then uses the same piece of twine on the other two corners to see if they are the same distance apart as the first two. The twine fits exactly. On the basis of these measurements, she.. (shrink)

Socratic philosophy represents a long-standing tradition within philosophy that understands the journey to truth in terms of the traveler's innate capacity. Anamnesis, maieutics, and elenchus each confirm that truth is not utterly foreign but is instead always within my possession or grasp. Other people, to the extent that they participate in my philosophical exploration, serve only to enable my capabilities or potential. They are not teachers to me. Nor would I need them, since I am always already in the neighborhood (...) of truth. ;Emmanuel Levinas's description of the "face to face" encounter between people challenges the adequacy of this model. Another person is not simply a midwife who leads me to a recovery of truth that was always within me or within my domain. Rather, the Other comes to me from a dimension of height or transcendence and teaches me. By this teaching Levinas means that I, as one who might claim truth for myself, find myself put into question. Before the Other I discover that my claims to knowledge are inadequate, even unjust, insofar as the Other exceeds, and thereby resists, my comprehensive claim on the world. The Other, in other words, reveals the naivete and the dogmatism characteristic of my familiar world, and puts me on a new and unforseen path to truth. ;This dissertation, by way of an explication of the category of transcendence, examines how the autonomous world of Socratic maieutics is transformed by the teaching encounter with another person into a heteronomous world. Heteronomy suggests my answerability to an order beyond the resources of anamnesis. This answerability, which Levinas describes as my responsibility to the Other, demands that we re-examine language not in terms of its systematicity or thematic capability but as the condition for all speaking whatsoever, i.e., my being called into communication. The word of the Other signifies a transcendent domain, a domain beyond my familiar world. It also makes possible a sincere life lived to the Other. (shrink)

This Essay examines debates surrounding Qu Tongzu's ‘Confucianization of law’ theory. Qu's theory claims that Chinese law underwent a process of ‘Confucianization’ starting in the Han dynasty (202 BC–220 AD) and ending and culminating in the Tang dynasty (618–907), where the Confucian concept of li and other Confucian moral teachings were introduced and incorporated into the written law. I argue that Qu's theory should be properly characterised as a theory of descriptive jurisprudence and also a form of the mirror thesis. (...) In light of this characterisation, this Essay then lays out the possible counterarguments that could be raised against Qu's theory and then situates existing scholarship in the debate in these categories. I then test Qu's theory using a case study about kinship concealment in traditional Chinese law The Essay then concludes by urging that the debate should include more jurisprudential approaches. (shrink)