Daedalus articles from June 2008

Daedalus archives from June 2008

Fear & trembling, strangers & strange lands.(on sixteenth-century Germany, fear, and cosmopolitanism)
June 22, 2008... Jean Delumeau begins his classic study of fear in early-modern Europe with an account, drawn from the travel journals of Montaigne, of entering the great walls of the free imperial city of Augsburg, Germany, by night. (1) Four massive gates,...

The cosmopolitan as a lived category.
June 22, 2008... Cosmopolitans, as French philosopher Denis Diderot put it in his encyclopedia of 1751, are "strangers no where in the world." (1) By the time Diderot wrote, the term had become a commonplace. Since then, the cosmopolitan has remained largely...

What is a world? On world literature as world-making activity.
June 22, 2008... Modern cosmopolitanism is largely an affair of philosophy and the social sciences. Whether one thinks of the ideal ethical projects of worldwide solidarity of the eighteenth-century French philosophes or Kant, or of more recently emerging...

Paths to a more cosmopolitan human condition.
June 22, 2008... To be good citizens of the World and the Nation we live in, yet to have especial fellowship with the descendants of our ancestors, is perfectly consistent with true patriotism and universal philanthropy. --Constitution and Rules...

The concept of the cosmopolitan in Greek & Roman thought.
June 22, 2008... Cosmopolitan, the English equivalent of the older French word cosmopolite, derives from the ancient Greek term kosmoplites (kosmos pluspolites) to signify "citizen of the world." The original Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (c. 390-323...

Rousseau, the anticosmopolitan?(Jean-Jacq Rousseau)
June 22, 2008... A complex and paradoxical thinker, Rousseau has rightly been called "the great wrecker of theories and categories." (1) This description is particularly fitting when it comes to cosmopolitanism, an ideal and a constellation of values that he...

Cosmopolitanism, justice & institutions.
June 22, 2008... 'Cosmopolitanism' is not-or not yet-the name of a determinate political philosophy. Although many contemporary theorists have put forward views that they describe as cosmopolitan, there is little agreement among them about the central elements...

Toward a globally sensitive patriotism.
June 22, 2008... In 1892, a World's Fair, called the Columbian Exposition, was scheduled to take place in Chicago. Clearly, it was gearing up to be a celebration of unfettered greed and egoism. Industry and innovation were to be its central foci, as America...

The legitimacy of human rights.(Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
June 22, 2008... In recent years, the language of human rights has become ubiquitous around the world, shaping such nascent transnational institutions as the International Criminal Court, and justifying international interventions to halt genocide. (1) Yet...

Cosmopolitanism in the modern social imaginary.
June 22, 2008... One day in the early 1980s, I was riding in the backseat of an old Land Rover through the desert southwest of Khartoum. There was no road, but the landscape, mostly flat, was marked by the occasional saint's tomb distinctive to Sudanese Islam....

Murder one: mad dog Taborsky & me.(Joseph "Mad Dog" Taborsky)(Personal account)
June 22, 2008... The city's celebrities had little in common but a taste for the westbound train Katherine Hepburn left in 1928. Mark Twain came for twenty-one years and departed. Harriet Beecher Stowe came and went several times, spending twenty-four years in...

Paradise.(Poem)
June 22, 2008... Perfection is the mote in the maker's eye. The ape believes he's meant for a better place Then this our prison of shadows-that is why Dante could stare at the sun in Paradise: "There, many things are granted to be done ...

The teacher.(Short story)
June 22, 2008... On Doug and Carol's wedding day, murder was committed in their small town, which they steadfastly refused to take as a bad sign. They were that much in love. They spent their first married night in the Newport hotel wrapped in each other's...

On man, nature & air pollution.
June 22, 2008... About three decades ago, it was reported that a correlation existed between wet winters in San Francisco and episodes of air pollution the following summer. Wet winters, it was hypothesized, led to greater plant growth, with an associated rise...

On Chinese, European & American universities.(Wuhan University)(Essay)
June 22, 2008... In North America and in Europe, the past three decades have seen an unprecedented expansion of higher education and, in the most recent time, efforts at reform and restructuring. (1) My own university, Harvard, has overhauled its undergraduate...

On museums in a postmodern world.
June 22, 2008... In the spirit of trying to make our academic research more socially engaging, my colleagues and I have supported the construction or rehabilitation of small, community-based archaeological and ethnographic museums in Bolivia and Peru over the...