Rival Versions Research Articles

Letter from the Guest Editor

Letter from the Guest Editor

Newton in China: Translating the Principia into Chinese (c. 1855–2015)

SUMMARYThis paper provides an account of Chinese translations of Newton’s Principia produced over the past century and a half within the larger context of the dissemination of Newtonian philosophy in China. Given its fundamental importance in the history of science, the Principia, originally penned in Latin, has been translated into a number of other languages. While in all these languages no more than two full translations have appeared, as many as four complete versions in Chinese have been produced since the 1850s, when first attempts were made to translate the Principia in late imperial China. They include a 1931 version in semi-classical Chinese completed during the Republican era and three rival versions in modern Chinese published in contemporary China. This rich history of translating the Principia into Chinese, which remains little known to scholars in the West, is for the first time reconstructed and presented in English. This account is based on a meticulous scrutiny of manuscripts, historical records, secondary literature and interviews with some of the contemporary translators. It demonstrates that Chinese translation of the Principia is a complex process that involves scientific traditions, linguistic peculiarities, translators’ subjectivity, readers’ expectations and even the role of the market.

Christian Historiography: Five Rival Versions by Jay d. Green

Christian Historiography: Five Rival Versions by Jay d. Green

The Crimean Tatar Question: A Prism for Changing Nationalisms and Rival Versions of Eurasianism

The Crimean Tatar Question: A Prism for Changing Nationalisms and Rival Versions of Eurasianism

From Equality of Opportunity to the Society of Equals

Any attempt to reaffirm equality as a fundamental democratic value faces two tasks: it must respond to social and cultural changes accompanying the most recent phase of capitalist development, and it must reactivate the original context of the democratic transformation that brought equality to prominence, in close conjunction with other aspects of an innovative vision. At the outset, equality was interpreted in terms of “a world of similar human beings, a society of autonomous individuals, and a community of citizens”. In this context, equality was closely linked to liberty, but their interconnections were also open to historical changes. Later developments – including the shift to a more organized kind of capitalism, two world wars and the rise of a temporarily successful rival version of modernity – led to significant upgradings of equality. But during the past half-century, the case for equality has been undermined by historical trends. Mutations of the capitalist economy, on the level of organization as well as production, and the disappearance of a really existing alternative, lent support to a new type of individualism. Drawing on Simmel’s distinction between the individualism of similarity and the individualism of distinction, the present phase can be interpreted as a radicalization and democratization of the individualism of distinction into an individualism of singularity. A social-liberal strategy, aiming at a reconciliation of liberty and equality, must take this new individualism on board and understand it as a social relationship, thus maintaining critical distance from neo-liberal ideology.

Rival Versions of Corporate Governance as Rival Theories of Agency

Trends in corporate governance to minimize employee participation and to promote shareholder rights, in both the EU and US contexts, evidence the practical efficacy of the separation thesis and the dominance of models of corporate governance founded upon decision theory. Giving expression to a vision of human agency in terms of instrumental rationality, such models of corporate governance, presuppose clearly defined objectives. Drawing on the work of Talbot Brewer, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Robert Brandom, this paper offers an alternative practice-based model of corporate governance that emphasizes the role of socially and historically embodied forms of reasoning in promoting a better understanding of the aims or objectives of the corporation, particularly with respect to the social, environmental, and economic context of the firm. After reviewing recent empirical literature concerning employee participation, criteria are offered concerning effective employee participation programs, as a means of implementing a practice-based model of corporate governance.

Are Growth and Conversion Being Confused in the Spiritual Life? Is Conversion Really Continuing?

Are Growth and Conversion Being Confused in the Spiritual Life? Is Conversion Really Continuing? Mark Slatter (bio) An eighty-seven year old learned Benedictine monk in the course of his presentation at a conference on spirituality calls out a thin but consistent thematic strand in Christian mystical tradition emblematized as “God and I are one.” At that moment and in that place his meaning is worlds away from the New Age novice who professes the same, a Christian neophyte who is confident she has witnessed pantheism first hand, some theologians whose ire is raised with the critique his position lacks alterity, one or two who leave the room because they are scandalized by the monk’s apparent pretension at diluting divinity with humanity, some for whom his message seems to contradict the astonishment of their first experience of God as Living Other, a handful who confess their unfamiliarity with mystical epistemology but grant the monk the benefit of the doubt, and one person for whom the monk’s remark is corroborated with the Holy Spirit. True to form the workshop finishes with loose ends, pressing questions, and even some back room accusations. The monk might remind the attendees of Saint Catherine of Genoa’s words, “my self is God, nor is any other self known to me except my God,”1 or of Jesus’ prayer to his Father “that they may be one as we are one” (Jn. 17:22b) that accommodates the quasi-alterity of God. These might otherwise give pause, or at the very least lend analogous support to his statement, but this would only quiet the objections without addressing their underlying cause. There is no reasoning that can align these distinct interpretive worlds orbiting the singular contentious point, and no brilliant logic can thaw their respective intractable judgments. Accusations to the contrary, the disagreements do not stem from someone departing from a core doctrine or being doctrinaire, that she is morally relativist or classicist, or because he is mistaken with the facts, and no intuitive leap can make up for the communication shortfall. Granted, clashes routinely occur among rival versions of truth and morality because the underlying premises are incommensurate, conflicts do erupt from rattling ideological attachments, and disagreements always arise because a position has been poorly framed, but all things being equal no wordsmithing or oratorical nuance can bend these sorts of conflict back into shape. No qualification will help. The disagreements at the fictitious conference cannot be [End Page 41] mediated by a theological Esperanto that speaks to a common religious experience because it does not exist within the discussion’s parameters. The phrase “religious experience” rings familiar but the assertion “God and I are one” does not. Click for larger view View full resolution Spring Growth Sepia. Courtesy of Gary Williams These divergences reflect the order of intelligibility of meaning, its controls, its contexts, and its pedigree. One statement has manifold interpretations, and to understand the scenarios that fall under this regime one must look to the polymorphic symbolic nature of language that mediates worlds of meaning, as the Canadian theologian and philosopher Bernard Lonergan describes it: If one is to understand this enormous diversity, one must, I believe, advert to the sundry differentiations of human consciousness. A first differentiation arises in the process of growing up. The infant lives in a world of immediacy. The child moves towards a world mediated by meaning. For the adult the real world is the world mediated by meaning, and his philosophic doubts about the reality of that world arise from the fact that he has failed to advert to the difference between the criteria for a world of immediacy and, on the other hand, the criteria for the world mediated by meaning.2 If this fundamental distinction of the worlds of immediacy and meaning can be trusted, it appears that the conference attendees were unwittingly [End Page 42] caught in a web of undifferentiated meanings. In the final analysis their reactions were emissaries from different states of religious consciousness and maturity. In striking corroboration with Lonergan’s statement, the great twentieth-century Thomist and mystical theologian Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange describes how these differentiation of meaning function...

Editorial: Contested Interpretations of Christian Identity

This issue of Studies in World Christianity explores some keenly contested and sensitive areas of Christian identity. Yvonne Haddad’s and Joshua Donovan’s timely article on ‘Good Copt, Bad Copt’ examines two divergent narratives of contemporary Coptic Christian identity: one, disseminated by vocal elements of the Coptic diaspora and their neoconservative allies in the United States, focuses on Coptic experiences of persecution in Egypt at the hands of Islamic militants; the other, widely supported by the Coptic hierarchy and by many ordinary Copts in both Egypt and the USA, emphasises the identity of Copts as full citizens of modern Egypt who are determined in partnership with their Muslim cocitizens to find a stable basis for the future of their nation. As alternative ‘secular’ national and Islamicist visions of the Egyptian nation continue to contest the field on the streets of Cairo and to populate television news bulletins, these rival versions of Christian citizenship in Egypt will doubtless continue to argue their respective claims. Debates over the appropriate style of Christian citizenship in Muslimmajority states frequently invade the public sphere and can even impinge on questions of foreign policy in the West. Our next two articles, by contrast, are concerned with areas of identity contestation that are only intermittently discussed and are quite often entirely hidden from view within the life of the churches. Francis Machingura explores the plight of women in Zimbabwe who are the victims of male oppression and violence, with particular reference to women living with HIV or AIDS.

The poetics of consent: collective decision making and the Iliad

The Poetics of Consent breaks new ground in Homeric studies by interpreting the Iliad's depictions of political action in terms of the poetic forces that shaped the Iliad itself. Arguing that consensus is a central theme of the epic, David Elmer analyzes in detail scenes in which the poem's three political communities - Achaeans, Trojans, and Olympian gods-engage in the process of collective decision making. These scenes reflect an awareness of the negotiation involved in reconciling rival versions of the Iliad over centuries. They also point beyond the Iliad's world of gods and heroes to the here-and-now of the poem's performance and reception, in which the consensus over the shape and meaning of the Iliadic tradition is continuously evolving. Elmer synthesizes ideas and methods from literary and political theory, classical philology, anthropology, and folklore studies to construct an alternative to conventional understandings of the Iliad's politics. The Poetics of Consent reveals the ways in which consensus and collective decision making determined the authoritative account of the Trojan War that we know as the Iliad.

Libertas and the Practice of Politics in the Late Roman Republic

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 415 avec le précieux commentaire de J. Thornton et la veille bibliographique qui précède chaque volume3 . Avec ses deux Indices qui le rendent maniable et son appareil de notes remarquable pour établir brièvement des états de la question, il deviendra indispensable aux antiquisants comme à tout lecteur intéressé par la pensée politique, les relations internationales et l’historiographie. Universit e de Franche-Comt e (ISTA) Marie-Rose Guelfucci LIBERTAS and the Practice of Politics in the Late Roman Republic. By Valentina Arena. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2012. Pp. ix, 324. This learned and important monograph sets out “to study the conceptualisations of the idea of libertas and the nature of their connections with the practice of politics in the late Roman Republic” (1). In order to do this, Arena concentrates on the reconstruction of the ways in which political ideas were or could be used and on the “principles adopted in debate to justify a politician’s position on particular political measures” (2). The work thus draws upon, and seeks to make a contribution to, studies of oratory and rhetoric, politics, and the history of ideas. A short “Introduction” sets out the key questions that the work will address and the evidence that will be interrogated. Arena’s approach to the evidence for contemporary thought is agreeably circumspect without being dismissive. Throughout, she highlights the potential of using ancient sources to shed light on the world of ideas, even in a context in which the preserved text may bear only a distant relationship to the “reality” of the speech delivered (see, e.g., on Cicero and Sallust, 2–3). Arena carefully locates her work within a long tradition of writing on libertas whilst at the same time differentiating her project from earlier scholarship.1 Her key contributions to the discussion of libertas are clearly articulated: Arena argues that, far from having no “abstract Idée of liberty” (6), Roman political thought—in the form of the intellectual traditions of the optimates and the populares—“itself informed the discourse on libertas,” and that Roman politicians were able to draw upon a shared understanding of libertas (rather than competing interpretations of the term) and that they actively made use of this shared understanding in rhetorical debate. Thus debates about libertas could be framed not in terms of rival versions of the term, but in terms of rival claims to be the true defender of libertas. Finally, Arena argues that the very idea of libertas underwent a “form of conceptual change” in the late republic. Two chapters (“Roman libertas” and “The Citizens’ Political Liberty”) lay the foundation for an examination of the concept of libertas at Rome. Drawing on the work of Patterson and Raaflaub,2 Arena demonstrates the interconnectedness of the “conceptual3 D. Musti (éd.), Polibio, Storie (Milan, 2001–2006) ; voir aussi J. Thornton, « Polibio e Roma : Tendenze negli studi degli ultimi anni », Studi Romani, 52 (2004), 108–139, 508–525. 1 C. Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome during the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge 1950); J. Bleicken, Staatliche Ordnung und Freiheit in der römischen Republik (Kallmünz 1972); P. Brunt, The Fall of the Roman Republic and Related Essays (Oxford 1988); I. Cogitore, Le doux nom de liberté: Histoire d’une idée politique dans la Rome antique (Paris 2011). 2 O. Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (London 1991); K. Raaflaub, The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece (Chicago 2004). 416 PHOENIX isation of liberty” and the “historical development of slavery.” Libertas was “a condition opposed to slavery” (39) and, as such, owed much of its conceptual framework of ideas to the legal/juridical constructions of slave and free. The citizens’ own political liberty was, therefore, “conceptually defined as a status of non-slavery” (45). It was dependent on the idea that “all citizens should be equally endowed on the same basis with the same basic liberties” and on the idea that the relationship between citizen and state was such that the state could not dominate its citizens or be dominated by a power external to itself (72). The liberty...

Neither Lausanne nor Cambridge: Pantaleoni and the missing boundary between economics and sociology

By the turn of the twentieth century, Lausanne and Cambridge were the centres of diffusion of two rival versions of marginalism. This paper focuses on the position of Maffeo Pantaleoni, a leading figure of the late nineteenth century ‘renaissance’ of Italian political economy, with respect to the eminent representatives of the two schools: Pareto and Marshall. Pantaleoni's position is examined with reference to the two main bones of contention between Pareto and Marshall, namely general as opposed to partial equilibrium, and pure as opposed to mixed economics.

Belarus: the last dictatorship in Europe

This book is the first in English to explore both Belarus's complicated road to nationhood and to examine in detail its politics and economics since 1991, the nation's first year of true independence. Andrew Wilson focuses particular attention on Aliaksandr Lukashenka's surprising longevity as president, despite human rights abuses and involvement in yet another rigged election in December 2010. Wilson looks at Belarusian history as a series of false starts in the medieval and pre-modern periods, and at the many rival versions of Belarusian identity, culminating with the Soviet Belarusian project and the establishment of Belarus's current borders during World War II. He also addresses Belarus's on-off relationship with Russia, its simultaneous attempts to play a game of balance in the no-man's-land between Russia and the West, and how, paradoxically, Belarus is at becoming a true nation under the rule of Europe's last dictator.

El paradigma intencional en la evaluación ciudadana de la administración local. La utilidad frente al bienestar

In the last years, one can find a renewed interest in the citizen´s assessment of local services. This article examines the possibility of applying the so called intentional paradigm to this field. The paradigm is based on the theory of reasoned action and it links service evaluation to the citizen´s political intention within the same explanatory mechanism. nevertheless, this mechanism has been formulated in two rival versions, “satisfaction” and “service value”. The purpose of this paper is to determine which of these models works better in the assessment of local services. Using empirical data collected in nine cities from the east of spain, a secondary analysis was applied using structural equation models in order to find out the most plausible mechanism (utility versus wellbeing) that explains the formation of favorable attitudes towards local entities.

Rival Concepts of God and Rival Versions of Mysticism

There is a well known debate between those who defend a traditional (or classical) concept of God and those who defend a process (or neoclassical) concept of God. Not as well known are the implications of these two rival concepts of God in the effort to understand religious experience. With the aid of the great pragmatist philosopher John Smith, I defend the process (or neoclassical) concept of God in its ability to better illuminate and render as intelligible as possible mystical experience.

The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good (review)

The Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good. By John Lauritz Larson. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 208. Cloth, $75.00; Paper, $20.99.)Reviewed by Daniel Walker HoweIn this model monograph, John Lauritz Larson explores the transformation of the American economy from independence to the eve of civil war, emphasizing its consequences for the population. A master of the subject, Larson beautifully lays out not only the broad outlines of his theme but its complexities and subtleties in two hundred judicious, insightful pages. He manages to convey the sophistication of current scholarship in language accessible to students or any other curious, literate reader.Larson here redeems the term from the treatment accorded it by Charles Sellers in TL· Revolution: Jfacksonian America, 1815-1846 (Oxford, UK, 1991). Sellers reified the market revolution, making it an actor in his story - indeed, its villain. Sellers's wicked Market ruined the lives of happy subsistence farmers, forcing their sons and daughters to become a proletariat in the service of a repressive bourgeoisie. By contrast, Larson shows how the market revolution was made by the people themselves, bit by unwitting bit. His own stance toward this process is richly ironic and nuanced; he never fails to point out ambiguities and paradoxes.Larson punctuates his account with interludes on the Panics of 1819 and 1837, moments when the public were shocked by the miscarriage of their plans, but not sufficiently disillusioned to scrap their various projects of improvement and self-improvement which, eventually and unintentionally, added up to the modernization or of the country. (These terms are used in a common sense rather than a technical sense.) Larson looks at the process from many points of view, including those of farmers, artisans, factory workers, entrepreneurs, black people, and women. The peculiarities of southern slavery in distorting the various developments are explained.Larson follows conventional historical understanding in referring to the situation that preceded the market revolution in America as classical republicanism. Sellers portrayed the Jacksonian Democrats as defending classical republicanism against the Whig supporters of the market revolution. In his telling, the Jacksonians lost their struggle against the Market, even though they won their battle for white male political democracy. Larson presents a different take on the political debates of the antebellum period, a more accurate one in my judgment. In his narrative, the political conflict of the Second Party System wasn't between capitalism and classical republicanism; instead, the two parties endorsed rival versions of the market revolution. Neither side in the Second Party System actually wanted to maintain the old classical republicanism, though both of them enlisted it for rhetorical purposes. When all the ambiguities and subtleties in Larson's account are said and done, his Jacksonians suplaissez-faire capitalism; his Whigs, government-sponsored economic development and diversification.This analysis aligns the Jacksonians with Adam Smith, whose economic theory Larson presents at some length, and Smith's later American disciple William Graham Sumner. (It could have helped Larson make his point if he had thought to mention that Sumner was a Democrat.) So, in Larson's understanding, the Jacksonians win on both political and economic fronts: Mass-participation political parties and free enterprise each become the American norm. …

The idea of an educated public in the Macintyre’s critique of the enlightenment

The article analyzes MacIntyre?s notion of ?educated public? which is presented in his lecture The Idea of an Educated Public and in the concluding chapters of the Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, where this idea is conceptualized in the context of the question about the place of universities in contemporary society. While the clames which MacIntyre gave in this texts are intepretated like questions about the ?conditions of possibility? for the realization of an educational project which belongs to liberal and Enlightenment tradition, we are critically interpreting his notion of ?independent thinking? and the issue of the relationship between ?independent thinking? and ?standards of rational justification?. The thesis form which we started in this paper is that MacIntyre?s reaffirmation of the idea of an educated public does not only represent his answer to the question about the aims of education but also an invitation to the humanities to be more actively involved in the discussion of the issues which are important to larger society.

SOLIDARITY: RIVAL VERSIONS, CONFLICTING INTERPRETATIONS, AND THE SHAPE OF HOPE

What do we mean when we utter the word ‘solidarity’? How do we apprehend its meaning when we hear it spoken of by others? The ancient Greeks ‐ Homer, Thucydides, and Aristotle ‐ offer a vantage point from which this inquiry may begin. The Book of Genesis sets before us a cycle of stories about brothers, along with questions about the bonds that keep them together. The sagas of Iceland explore the nature of conflicts between one family and another. Thomas Aquinas gives a distinctive account of solidarity between Christians. Emile Durkheim, too, provides an influential analysis of solidarity. Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Scheler, and Richard Rorty make significant contributions to the discussion. John Paul II elaborated an impressive vision of solidarity. This essay undertakes a form of reconnaissance, then, by exploring the border region between these rival versions of solidarity.

Dunkirk and the Popular Memory of Britain at War, 1940—58

The evacuation of the British Army from Dunkirk in 1940 has an iconic place in British culture. This article draws on a concept of popular memory that suggests that rival versions of the past compete for cultural centrality, to ask how Dunkirk acquired this position. During the war, accounts stressed the importance of the sea in the ‘deliverance’, but while some focused on the Navy, others concentrated on the civilian small boats, and criticism was rare. Immediately postwar there was a lull in representations. In the 1950s, attention switched to the land and to the problematic place of the defeated Army in the story, culminating in Ealing Studios’ film Dunkirk (1958). Ealing attempted to synthesize previous emphases and struggled to achieve agreement about the representation of the evacuation. The film ensured the public prominence of the memory of Dunkirk, yet its reception was fractured along class and gender lines, indicating the instabilities of Ealing’s negotiated consensus. The history of the contested inscription of Dunkirk in British culture emphasizes that at no point since the events occurred has the representation of the second world war been secure; the popular memory of the war is continually subject to construction, contestation and revision.

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE: Essais I, Essais II, Essais III

At the time of his death in 1592 Montaigne had not yet finished work on the sixth edition of his Essais. In the absence of a final, corrected state of the text, modern editors must choose between two rival versions, neither of which is without important shortcomings. The edition under review is based on the ‘Exemplaire de Bordeaux’ (EB), a copy of the 1588 edition containing extensive additions and corrections in Montaigne's hand. As Naya, Reguig-Naya, and Tarrête make clear, EB is an ‘exemplaire imparfait et incertain en sa nature’ (i, 91), an unfinished and provisional ‘brouillon’ (i, 98). It is therefore best regarded not as an alternative but as a complement to the posthumous edition prepared by Marie de Gournay (Paris: Abel L'Angelier, 1595), which provided the basis for all editions of the Essais until the nineteenth century. The authenticity of Gournay's text was cast in doubt following the discovery of EB, from which it diverges in more than two hundred and fifty instances. In recent years, however, a convincing case has been made for its rehabilitation, as a transcription not of EB but of a later set of authorial revisions, now lost. This approach reached its culmination in 2007 with the publication of a major critical edition (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade) based on the 1595 text. Naya and his fellow editors profess a judicious, if slightly gingerly, ‘suspension du jugement’ regarding the ‘degré exact d'authenticité’ of Gournay's text (i, 94), rightly drawing attention to its suppression of EB's langage coupé — an energetic, paratactic style of writing produced through thousands of careful adjustments to the punctuation and capitalization of the 1588 text. A further important feature of this edition — and one that it shares with the Pléiade text — is its rejection of the bracketed letters conventionally used (notably in the Villey-Saulnier edition) to distinguish successive stages in the composition of the text: ‘A’ for the 1580 edition, ‘B’ for text added between 1580 and 1588, ‘C’ for all later additions. This ‘genetic’ approach to the Essais, Naya and his colleagues argue, can only do imperfect justice to the movement of a text that ‘à chaque instant […] se clive entre une pensée relue et un commentaire ajouté’ (i, 20). In keeping with EB's status as a draft, however, different fonts are used for the printed part of the text and for the manuscript additions made in its margins, in order to highlight the latter's status as ‘zones d'incertitude’ (i, 98). The minimal paragraphing of the original text is also preserved. Yet ‘il ne s'agit pas ici de fournir une édition scientifique et critique qui excéderait le format lié à une large diffusion’ (i, 98–99): the spelling has been modernized and only the most significant variants are indicated in the apparatus. This is a valuable and well-conceived edition, sensitive to the open-ended nature of the Essais, in keeping with Montaigne's commitment to doubt and to an unfinished conférence both with his readers and past texts.

Rival concepts of God and rival versions of mysticism

There is a well known debate between those who defend a traditional (or classical) concept of God and those who defend a process (or neoclassical) concept of God. Not as well known are the implications of these two rival concepts of God in the effort to understand religious experience. With the aid of the great pragmatist philosopher John Smith, I defend the process (or neoclassical) concept of God in its ability to better illuminate and render as intelligible as possible mystical experience.