科学客观性的历史建构--科学哲学视域中的历史认识论

在尼采的视角主义和福柯的主体解释学等欧陆哲学的影响下,历史认识论结合观念史、思想史和文化史的历史语境,考察了科学客观性的概念的历史建构过程,加深了人们对科学实践的复杂性的认识,并为科学哲学在新世纪的发展提供了诸多有价值的启示。     

Accommodating toleration: on Balint’s classical liberal response to the multiculturalism challenge

ABSTRACT

Peter Balint identifies three challenges to toleration, one of which is the multiculturalism challenge. This is the charge that liberal toleration fails to accommodate minorities adequately, which requires positive recognition rather than negative toleration. I discuss his response to the multiculturalism challenge and its connection to a classical liberal view of toleration. This involves Balint’s claim that liberal neutrality should be understood as reflective and ‘difference-sensitive’, which should be realised by the state being ‘hands-off’ in the sense of withdrawing support for privileged ways of life. I argue that Balint’s classical liberal view that the state needs to be ‘hands-off’ is in need of specification and that it does not fit well with his claim that neutrality needs to be reflective and difference-sensitive.     

The good of toleration: changing social relations or maximising individual freedom?

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I take issue with Peter Balint’s recent account of the value of toleration as an instrument for securing freedom-maximising outcomes in pluralistic societies. In particular, I question the extent to which the ideal of toleration can be entirely reduced to someone’s intentional withholding of negative interference whose value lies in the protection of individual negative freedoms. I argue that couching the value of toleration entirely in these freedom-maximising terms fails to do justice to the relational value of toleration. To see this value, we must also have in sight the drastic changes that appeals to toleration make to the nature of what goes on between the tolerator and the tolerated, not only to the state of affairs that is created by their relation.     

Can a value-neutral liberal state still be tolerant?

ABSTRACT

Toleration is typically defined as follows: an agent (A), for some reason, objects to certain actions or practices of someone else (B), but has outweighing other reasons to accept these actions or practices nonetheless and, thus, refrains from interfering with or preventing B from acting accordingly, although A has the power to interfere. So understood, (mutual) toleration is taken to allow for peaceful coexistence and ideally even cooperation amongst people who disagree with each other on crucial questions on how to live and what to value, which is why it has traditionally been regarded as an important part of political liberalism. An explicitly value-neutral liberal state then avoids taking sides when it comes to different and competing ways of life. However, following this idea of liberal neutrality, it has been questioned whether a value-neutral liberal state still needs toleration or is even compatible with it, for apparently neutrality leaves no more room for the objection component of toleration to take hold. In this paper, I take up this question and argue that there is, indeed, conceptual and practical room left for a value-neutral liberal state to be tolerant. Drawing on the interplay between four kinds of reasons (pragmatic, ethical, moral, and political), pragmatic and political reasons may still provide the needed evaluative and normative ground upon which the combination of objection and outweighing acceptance can be made sense of. However, the possible scope of toleration for a value-neutral liberal state is considerably limited.     

村官归谁管——对有关村民自治问题的思考

村民自治作为中国农村向现代社会转变的制度形式,近年来,得到了很大的发展。许多学者对此进行了深入地研究,并把重点放在了乡村选举方面。然而民主选举村干部,只是村民自治的第一步,如何使民主选举出的村干部遵照村民的意愿正确行使职权则是关键,这涉及到如何封其进行监督和管理的问题,村民一旦把村干部选出来就觉得自己的民主权利已行使,忽视了选举后监督管理的问题,上级又因法规等的限制无权干涉村民自治方面的工作,封村官的监督造成了漏洞。本文就村干部的监督和管理问题进行了探讨．总结对其管理的各种途径,探索行之有效的方法和策略。     

再论以党内民主推进社会民主——关于党内民主的几个问题

以党内民主推进社会民主,应看作是中国进行渐进性政治体制改革的合理路径选择,是符合中国实际情况,代价最小收益最大,最能获得各方面认同而形成最大共识的改革方案。但如何发展党内民主,目前仍有不少问题,如党内民主的可能性问题,党内民主建设的顺序问题,对民主集中制的理解问题,如何有效保障党员的民主权利问题,我们都需要进行认真地讨论,其中一些错误的观念也需要澄清。     

Immigrants into Citizens

This paper examines the citizenship test which is part of the UK naturalisation process. The test is based on the government publication Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship. A detailed analysis of its two editions (2004 and 2007) reveals that the conception of the citizen, and the picture of British government and society underlying each are very different. There is, additionally, a mismatch between the rationale offered for the Life in the United Kingdom test and what the latter can in fact test: the attitudes and civic virtues mentioned in the rationale are untestable on-line. A society which aspires to be a democracy, it is argued, needs to scrutinise carefully the fairness and democratic appropriateness of its procedures for admitting new citizens.     

The weakness of postcommunist civil society reassessed

During the last two decades, scholars from a variety of disciplines have argued that civil society is structurally deficient in postcommunist countries. Yet why have the seemingly strong, active and mobilised civic movements of the transition period become so weak after democracy was established? And why have there been diverging political trajectories across the postcommunist space if civil society structures were universally weak? This article uses a new, broader range of data to show that civil societies in Central and Eastern European countries are not as feeble as commonly assumed. Many postcommunist countries possess vigorous public spheres and active civil society organisations strongly connected to transnational civic networks able to shape domestic policies. In a series of time‐series cross‐section models, the article shows that broader measures of civic and social institutions are able to predict the diverging transition paths among postcommunist regimes, and in particular the growing gap between democratic East Central Europe and the increasingly authoritarian post‐Soviet space.     

What can deliberative mini-publics contribute to democratic systems?

Can deliberative mini-publics contribute to deepening the democratic dimensions of electoral democracies? The question is framed in this article using a problem-based approach to democratic theory–to count as democratic, political systems must accomplish three basic functions related to inclusion, communication and deliberation, and decision making. This approach is elaborated with an analysis of a real-world case: a deliberative mini-public with a citizens’ assembly design, focused on urban planning convened in Vancouver, Canada. This example was chosen because the context was one in which the city's legacy institutions of representative democracy had significant democratic deficits in all three areas, and the mini-public was a direct response to these deficits. It was found that Vancouver's deliberative mini-public helped policy makers, activists and affected residents move a stalemated planning process forward, and did do so in ways that improved the democratic performance of the political system. Depending on when and how they are sequenced into democratic processes, deliberative mini-publics can supplement existing legacy institutions and practices to deepen their democratic performance.     

Varieties of contemporary democratic breakdown and regression: A comparative analysis

The goal of this article is to understand which combinations of explanatory conditions account for the qualitative differences within forms of democratic breakdown (i.e., transition from democracy to a hybrid or authoritarian regime) and democratic regression (i.e., transition within democracy through a loss of democratic quality). The analysis focuses particularly on the specific features of those processes of change ending up with a transition from democratic rule, compared to those producing a simple loss of democratic quality within the democratic regime. Applying two‐step fuzzy‐set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), the study aims to integrate different types of explanatory factors, offering a fresh and comprehensive perspective on this phenomenon.