Humanitas articles from March 22 2004

Humanitas archives from March 22 2004

Irving Babbitt's influence in China: four perspectives.
March 22, 2004... Since the 1920s Irving Babbitt has been a continuing influence in the moral and cultural life of China, his thought having been, in effect, "naturalized." The following four articles describe and elucidate the nature and extent of his impact....

The birth of a Chinese cultural movement: letters between Babbitt and Wu Mi.(Irving Babbitt, )
March 22, 2004... My late father, Wu Mi, had carefully kept three letters written to him by his esteemed and beloved teacher Irving Babbitt. Later I was able to read, in the archives at Harvard University, three letters written by my father to Professor Babbitt....

Chinese reactions to Babbitt: admiration, encumbrance, vilification.(Irving Babbitt)
March 22, 2004... Irving Babbitt, the great American humanist, was bound to the modern Chinese culture even though Babbitt himself might not have been aware of it. His erudition and glamour enticed a dozen young Chinese scholars into Harvard University to seek...

Babbitt's impact in China: the case of Liang Shiqiu.(Irving Babbitt)
March 22, 2004... Liang Shiqiu (1903-1987), one of Irving Babbitt's Chinese students at Harvard, was an important critic, litterateur, lexicographer and translator in twentieth-century China. Liang was chairman of the English departments at Peking University and...

Kafka's afflicted vision: a literary-theological critique.(Franz Kafka)
March 22, 2004... I Literary critics often point out that Franz Kafka's posthumous, unfinished novel The Castle (Das Schloss, 1926) tells the story of the novel's main character, simply called K., in pursuit of salvation. The novel's aesthetic and...

Bedeviled by boredom: a Voegelinian reading of Dostoevsky's Possessed.
March 22, 2004... Introduction This article is about boredom. It does not concern boredom as a problem of analytical philosophy, nor does it concern boredom as a specific political problem. While boredom can, and often does, give rise to issues...

The Matrix, liberal education, and other splinters in the mind.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2004... Here are superbly imaginative treatments of logical principles, the uses and meanings of words, the functions of names, the perplexities connected with time and space, the problem of personal identity, the status of substance in relation to its...

On the skeptical 'foundation' of ethics.
March 22, 2004... 1. Introduction The series of essays by David Hume--"The Epicurean," "The Stoic," "The Platonist," and "The Sceptic" (1)--is relatively well known but has perhaps received less philosophical attention than it should receive. Fortunately,...

Cain, Abel, obligation, and right.
March 22, 2004... When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood As a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then Face to face: now I know in...

History, the past, and the inner life.
March 22, 2004... A character in Michael Crichton's scientific mystery novel Timeline employs the term "temporal provincials" to describe people who believe only the present time matters. In the view of these people, he says, the past has no meaning, studying...