John Paul Jones: An Overlooked Autopsy Finding that May Explain His Terminal Illness

A finding in the autopsy of John Paul Jones, the American Revolutionary War naval hero, may explain his terminal illness. During his last 2 years, he had a persistent productive cough and dyspnea. Ten days before death, he developed rapidly progressive dependent edema and ascites. He died in France in 1792. His body, preserved in alcohol in a lead coffin, was, in 1905, removed to the United States. Glomerulonephritis was noted on an autopsy, performed in France, but there was no comment then or since about ventricular wall thickness being the same in both ventricles at 5–6 mm. Hypertrophy and dilatation with biventricular failure followed by tissue shrinkage during 113 years in alcohol could have resulted in these ventricular wall findings. Systemic hypertension and left ventricular failure are consistent with his respiratory symptoms complicated perhaps by pulmonary emboli, right ventricular failure with tricuspid regurgitation, peripheral congestion, and jaundice.     

《野性的呼唤》中对忠诚的呼唤(英文)

The Call of the Wild is one of the masterpieces of Jack London.The hero,Buck,is a dog.The dog is not only an animal but has features of human beings.By comparing Buck's attitudes and behavior to its masters with the way the masters treat Buck,and analyzing Buck's response to John Thornton's death,we can see that the author expresses the desire for loyalty in this novel.     

论罗尔斯对功利主义的批判

罗尔斯对功利主义的批判是为了建立一种正义理论,以期代替居于统治地位的功利主义,他对功利主义的批评,涉及到功利主义的三个错误:即功利主义没有认真考虑在一个社会里如何分配利益和福利;功利主义没有认真地考虑人与人之间的差别;功利主义没有考虑欲望满足方面的特性.而这三个错误在罗尔斯看来是目的论和道义论之间的差异、是善与正义之间的差异、是效率原则与平等原则之间的差别.在<政治自由主义>中,他又联系社会多元论的事实,对功利主义的综合性学说进行批评,使他对功利主义的批判上升到一个新的阶段.罗尔斯对功利主义的批判给我们两点启示:如何正确处理效率原则和平等原则关系问题以及如何正确处理一元与多元的关系问题.     

洛克对政治权力内涵的分析

洛克在《政府论两篇》中分析了政治权力的内涵。他的学说对英美自由主义理论的发展产生了深远的影响。尽管如此,学界却一直忽视了洛克的政治权力理论,仅仅强调了他的权利理论。本文试图弥补这一缺陷。洛克分析政治权力的起点是享有财产权和自由的个体,这些个体构成了一个前政治的自由秩序。以此为基础,洛克通过社会契约解释了政治权力的生成逻辑,并在这一论证过程中赋予政治权力以特定的道德属性。他阐释政治权力内涵的另一个特点是他赋予了政治权力以一种特殊的存在形态,即"立法权力"。洛克阐述的这一政治权力有效地在理论上对抗了当时的父权理论和绝对主权理论,为他设计一个宪政国家奠定了基础。     

论洛克有限政府思想及其宪政价值

洛克作为近代宪政民主政治思想重要的奠基人之一,凭借《政府论》上、下两篇的论述,在批判"君权神授"的基础上,对"有限政府"思想进行了较为全面的阐释。尤以《政府论》下篇为代表,对后世宪政的发展产生了莫大的影响。可以说在洛克相关理论的影响下,才有了今日限制政治权力、保障公民权利的现代宪政理论。本文通过对洛克有限政府思想进行溯源剖析,分析其中所蕴含的宪政价值。     

Vectors of traumatic memories and mass-mediated representations of the ‘last’ Nazi trial of John Demjanjuk

This is an ideological critique of key vectors of memory that could have circulated during the Munich trial of John Demjanjuk. While many members of the mainstream press applauded the efforts of German prosecutors who seemed to be dispensing belated justice to Europe’s ‘second generation,’ the circulation of these select legal vectors left us truncated World War II histories. Moreover, the binary choices that were posed stood in the way of more comprehensive and nuanced studies of Stalinism, Nazi and collaborator culpability.     

Reconciliation Arguments in John Rawls’s Political Philosophy

Abstract

Recently debates about the worth of “ideal theory” have directed attention to the functions that an account of a perfectly just society can serve. One function is that of “reconciliation”: learning that a seemingly undesirable feature of the social world would exist even in the perfectly just society can show us the value that it has in the present as well. John Rawls has emphasized reconciliation as among the roles of political philosophy. For instance, Rawls claims that his theory of justice can reconcile us to the pluralism of liberal democracies. In this essay, I argue that Rawls’s political theory also can reconcile the inhabitants of liberal democratic societies to the fact that such societies may be cognitively confusing on account of their complexity. Then I contend that Rawls’s work offers valuable theoretical resources for analysing a society’s transparency or lack thereof.     

Innocents and Oracles: The Child as a Figure of Knowledge and Critique in the Middle-Class Philosophical Imagination

Abstract

This paper argues that the figure of the child performs a critical function for the middle-class social imaginary, representing both an essential "innocence" of the liberal individual, and an excluded, unconscious remainder of its project of control through the management of knowledge. While childhood is invested with affect and value, children's agency and opportunities for social participation are restricted insofar as they are seen both to represent an elementary humanity and to fall short of full rationality, citizenship and identity. The diverse permutations of this figure, as it develops in the middle-class imagination, are traced from the writings of John Locke to the films of Michael Haneke (via Charles Dickens and Henry James), to interrogate what this ambivalence regarding childhood reflects about middle-class, adult identity.     

The Tragedy of Liberal Diplomacy: Democratization,Intervention, Statebuilding (Part I)

Since the end of the Cold War, democracy promotion, intervention and statebuilding have once again been explicit features of American foreign policy. Current assessments of this return, however, overlook both their longer term history and their roots in liberal (and not just American) ideology. The contradictions and dynamics entailed in the liberal philosophy of history have already played themselves out once before, in the modernization theories and policies of the early Cold War period. Despite their academic and political failures at the time, the same assumptions now underpin democracy promotion in the post-Cold War period and show signs of the same dynamics of failure. In this two part essay, I argue that the repetition of such counterproductive policies constitutes a recurring ‘tragedy of liberal diplomacy’ in which the shaping of US foreign policy by assumptions deeply rooted in the liberal philosophy of history plays a central part in producing the very enemies that policy is designed to confront and transform.     

Public Reason and the Need to Identify State-Relevant Desert

Plausible retributivist justifications for punishment assert that the commission of a moral wrong creates a pro tanto reason to punish the person who committed it. Yet there are good case-based and theoretical reasons to believe that not all moral wrongs are the proper subjects of criminal law or that they are within the proper domain of the state. This article provides these reasons, which suggest that a plausible retributivist justification for punishment must make distinctions between state-relevant and non-state-relevant moral wrongs and (consequently) state-relevant and non-state-relevant desert. The article makes the case for Rawlsian public reason as a plausible method for making these distinctions.