Historical studies of the ideas that gave rise to abolitionism, whether in the Caribbean, Latin and South America, Africa, or the United States, have provided analyses that are variously political, economic, social, demographic, or religious in focus. This entry examines the political, religious, and economic ideas surrounding abolitionism to illustrate that these factors were often intertwined. T…
"Absolute music" is an idea that took root in the writings of early German Romantics such as Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–1798), Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), and E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) beginning at the turn of the nineteenth century, and came to dominate musical aesthetics over much of the next two centuries, frequently invoked to argue for music'…
Africa has more than two thousand languages, representing several thousand cultures, each with its own system of logic. No single aesthetic philosophy characterizes the continent, and any concept of a coherent "Africa" is arbitrary, given such extraordinary diversity. Furthermore, a given culture may possess several aesthetic discourses, as may any artistic genre. Globalization comp…
Culturally, Asia encompasses an enormous range of cultural diversity, with philosophical traditions going back 2,500 years. And aesthetics is the philosophical study of art and the elaboration of criteria of value in arts and in nature, as well as how these two notions overlap with the study of nature and being human. In many Asian traditions value focuses on human well-being. In Daoism and Shinto…
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy concerned with aesthetic experience and the fundamental principles of art and criticism. It is distinct from the history of art and the practice of art criticism, although its own history follows a path parallel to both. It is not an empirical study of the psychology or sociology of art, nor is it the same as aestheticism, which names a particular attitude to a…
The idea of "Africa" is an exceedingly complex one with multiple genealogies and meanings, which make any extrapolations of "African" identity in the singular or plural, any explorations of what makes Africa "Africa," quite difficult. Both Africans and non-Africans have conceived "Africa" differently in various historical and geographical con…
For four hundred years, African-Americans have been engaged in a fierce struggle, a struggle for freedom, justice and equality, empowerment and self-determination, or social transformation, depending on one's ideology and its discourses. The lived African-American experience, in its class, gender, generational, and regional specificity, and the struggle against black racial oppression in th…
Afrocentricity is a theory that emerged in the early 1980s in the United States within the academic context of African-American studies. Afrocentricity was articulated by Molefi Kete Asante, a professor of African-American studies at Temple University and creator of the first Ph.D. program in African-American studies in the nation, in three major essays published between 1980 and 1990. Like most t…
Afropessimism refers to the perception of sub-Saharan Africa as a region too riddled with problems for good governance and economic development. The term gained currency in the 1980s, when many Africanists in Western creditor countries believed that there was no hope for consolidating democracy and achieving sustainable economic development in the region. The earliest use in print of the word was …
The heyday of agnosticism was in Victorian Britain between the 1860s and the 1890s. Its leading exponents were Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) (who coined the term), Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), John Tyndall (1820–1893), and William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879). This group all shared a disillusionment with orthodox Christianity; an opp…
Chinese alchemy is based on doctrinal principles, first set out in the founding texts of Daoism, concerning the relation between the domains of the Absolute and the relative, or the Dao and the "ten thousand things" (wanwu). Its teachings and practices focus on the idea of the elixir, frequently referred to as the Golden Elixir (jindan), the Reverted Elixir (huandan), or the Medicine…
To a modern observer, alchemy likely connotes only the transmutation of base metals into gold, or perhaps a more metaphorical transformation of the soul. In its roughly two-thousand-year history, however, alchemy's practices and ideas have ranged much more broadly, encompassing everything from the production of dyes, medicines, precious metals, and gemstones to assaying techniques, matter t…
The word algebra refers to a theory, usually mathematical, which is dominated by the use of words (often abbreviated), signs, and symbols to represent the objects under study (such as numbers), means of their combination (such as addition), and relationships between them (such as inequalities or equations). An algebra cannot be characterized solely as the determination of unknowns, for then most m…
The notion of alienation is a very unusual one because it is at once an attempt to explain a widespread feeling—a very subjective, somewhat indefinable feeling—and a critique of the nature of any society that regularly produces it. This was not always so. The feeling that one is not at home in the world, the sense of estrangement from one's surrounding, oneself, and other peop…
The term altruism was coined by the French philosopher and sociologist Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Derived from the Italian word altrui, meaning "to others" or "of others," "altruism" was introduced as an antonym for "egoism" to refer to the totality of other-regarding instincts in humans. The new terms altruism, altruist, and altruisti…
According to Aristotle, the substitution of opposite qualities hosted by a substance during a transformation has a discontinuous character. His logic seems to imply a step-by-step flow of time and rules out the intervention of a critical situation where opposite qualities can smoothly cooperate and compete together in the same substance. This schematizes evolution as a quasi-static change of objec…
America is one of the greatest political-philosophical symbols in world history. It is equal in importance to Athens representing philosophy, Jerusalem representing biblical religion, Rome representing both its pagan and Catholic manifestations, and Mecca representing the home of Islam. But what is meant by America? When people refer to it are they signifying the precise measurements of the landma…
Americanization refers to processes of "becoming American," and to organized efforts to encourage the transformation of immigrants into "Americans." The term was in informal use in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, but it is most prominently associated with the movement of that name during the 1910s and early 1920s. The term is often used interchangeably …
It was only in the 1960s that the phrase "analytical philosophy" came into frequent use as a way of describing the kind of philosophy characteristic of much English-language philosophy of the twentieth century. But occasional references to "analytical" (or "analytic") philosophy as a new kind of philosophy can be found much earlier, where it is primarily u…
The term anarchy comes from an ancient Greek word meaning "without a leader or ruler." However, proponents of anarchism have most often used the term to refer to a natural state of society in which people are not governed by submission to human-made laws or to any external authority. Anarchism is above all a moral doctrine concerned with maximizing the personal freedom of individuals…
Ancestor worship is the reverent devotion expressed by descendants for their deceased forebears through a culturally prescribed set of rituals and observances. The prominence of ancestors as a focus of worship within a broader religious tradition is common in many parts of the world, including Asia, Africa, and Native America, but there are few unifying characteristics cross-culturally. Commonalit…
Animism has had a long and important history in anthropology and outside it, as an intellectual concept with important implications not only for the study of religion, but also for the political struggles of indigenous peoples around the world. The anthropological study of animism has been a two-edged sword for indigenous people. It has brought their religious concepts, and thus their rich intelle…
As an academic discipline, anthropology is somewhat less than two centuries old, but speculations, if not rigorous scientific theories, about where we human beings came from and how to account for the physical and cultural differences that distinguish our communities and nations from one another probably began during prehistory. In the United States (but not in most other academic settings, for ex…
In post–World War II history, decolonization is a term generally employed to describe and explain the struggle for, and attainment of, freedom from colonial rule by most countries in Asia and Africa. This attainment was marked by a transfer of power; national political elites assumed the administrative responsibilities and duties previously discharged by the colonial authorities. Thus, new…
Over the past five hundred years, Latin America has experienced three and possibly four periods of colonization, all of which gave rise to anticolonial movements. The first period symbolically began with Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas on 12 October 1492, launching three centuries of Spanish, Portuguese, and British colonial control over the hemisphere, with the French, Dutch…
Between the early nineteenth century and the outbreak of World War I, much of the area between Morocco and what is now Turkey came under different forms of European colonial rule. Thus France began the conquest of Algeria in 1830, took over Tunisia in 1881, and (in partnership with Spain) took over Morocco in 1912. Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, formalizing the occupation by the declaration of a …
Anticolonialism in Southeast Asia has been considered from a wide range of perspectives, resulting in deliberation over its character and place in the region's history. Generally, anti-colonialism refers to one type of Southeast Asian response to the encounter with Euro-American colonialism. One might then describe anticolonialism as including everything from the personalities, institutions…
Since they became widely used in the late nineteenth century, both feminism and antifeminism have been hotly contested words, an indication of their politically charged complexity. Activists and thinkers in both camps have sought to control the field of discourse by defining their opponents, while resisting definition themselves. Each camp has adapted to circumstances that change with each victory…
Anti-Semitism is that hatred of the Jews that defines them as a threat to humankind. The most important contemporary quarrel about anti-Semitism is the issue of its very nature. While some scholars have been insisting for decades that there is no continuing phenomenon of anti-Semitism, arguing on the contrary that "Jew hatred" has reinvented itself many times, others adhere to the co…
Anti-Semitism became in the late twentieth century an integral part of Islamic and, particularly, Arab cultural discourse. Like other modern intellectual and political movements, such as nationalism, socialism, and fascism, anti-Semitism is a European import of fairly recent vintage into the Muslim world. …
Apartheid, an Afrikaans word meaning "apartness," describes an ideology of racial segregation that served as the basis for white domination of the South African state from 1948 to 1994. Apartheid represented the codification of the racial segregation that had been practiced in South Africa from the time of the Cape Colony's founding by the Dutch East India Company in 1652. Its…
Architecture is the crystallization of ideas. Architecture has been defined many ways—as shelter in the form of art, as a blossoming in stone and a flowering of geometry (Ralph Waldo Emerson), as frozen music (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), man's triumph over gravitation and his will to power (Friedrich Nietzsche), the will of an epoch translated into space (architect Mies van der Rohe…
Sketching a comprehensive history of African architecture remains a daunting task because of the enormous size of the continent, the thousands of distinct ethnic groups that inhabit the vast lands, the differences in climate, and the various colonial, economic, political, and religious experiences. Yet, African geography, characterized by the large size of the continent, which encompasses multiple…
Parallel to cultural developments in the West during the centuries around the start of the common era—and in essential isolation from the West—completely separate developments were occurring in southern and eastern Asia, shaping civilizations and cultures that continue to this day, and whose fundamental philosophical views continue with little change, despite long contact with the We…
Aristotelianism is the tradition that stressed the theoretical "sciences" rather than the practical disciplines in Aristotle's encyclopedia of the disciplines, and within the theoretical disciplines the systematic presentation of "true and certain" knowledge rather than the inductive search for its principles. …
While people have always made objects that are rightly considered works of art, the idea of the arts is a separate category of human endeavor—distinct, that is, from other kinds of human activity such as hunting or food gathering or making in general—is a relatively modern construction. …
Between 1520 and 1521, the famous German painter and engraver Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) purchased two African ivory carvings in the Netherlands. He was so impressed by their craftsmanship that he noted in his diary: …
The English term asceticism derives from the Greek askesis, originally meaning "to train" or "to exercise," specifically in the sense of the training and self-denial that an athlete undergoes to attain physical skill and mastery over the body. The Stoics adapted the word to refer to the moral discipline of the sage who learns, through self-mastery, how to act freely…
Asceticism, defined for our purposes within the context of the premodern tradition, refers to specific passive and active practices that are engaged in out of ideological motives: on the one hand, abstinence from nourishment, sleep, sexuality, social communication, and social ties—thus from natural human expression—and from other components of civilization, such as bodily cleanliness…
Asian migration to the United States is a trans-Pacific flow of people, social networks, and cultural values. Asian immigrants arrived in America with their own lifestyles, labor and vocational skills, business expertise and capital, family rituals and traditions, religious and philosophical beliefs. As Asians have adapted to American society, some of their home cultures have remained, others have…
In 1964 Milton M. Gordon (b. 1918) produced a groundbreaking book called Assimilation in American Life. He informed readers that three different theories of assimilation existed in the United States: "Anglo-Conformity," the "Melting Pot," and "Cultural Pluralism." Gordon acknowledged, though, that Anglo-Conformity was "the most prevalent ideology of…
Greek interest in astrology began in the Hellenistic period, as Alexander the Great's (r. 336–323) conquests exposed Greek thinkers to Mesopotamian culture. The Greeks put astronomy in a cosmological framework, emphasizing the motions of the planets rather than static correlations. Hellenistic Alexandria was a center of astrology, and the Hermetic texts that originated there incorpor…
As originally conceived, the twenty-eight lunar mansions did not technically constitute a zodiac, since, with the exception of comets, novae, and the like, the sun, moon, and planets did not actually appear among their constituent stars: many of the latter in ancient times actually lay closer to the equator than to the ecliptic. Rather, astronomical phenomena occurring within a given astral field …
The sun and the moon, the planets and the stars are the same the world over. One might hypothesize, therefore, that diverse cultures of the world would think the same of them. The two American continents, having been cut off from the Old World from the time of the Asian migration across the Bering land bridge more than ten thousand years ago up to European contact in the fifteenth century, provide…
The term atheism usually refers to the belief that there is no God or are no gods. This position has been called positive atheism, since it involves an actual belief and not just the absence of belief. In contrast, negative atheism involves the absence of belief in a God or gods. Atheism is typically contrasted with agnosticism, the view that one cannot know if a deity exists. Negative atheism, ho…
Ideologies of authenticity within African thought are self-affirming and counterideological positions adopted by individuals, groups, and communities of resistance who have all had their identities traumatically impacted upon or disrupted by forces of imperialism and conquest—namely slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism. African authenticity is in this sense fundamentally an ongoing cult…
The term authoritarianism can be applied to a great variety of contexts. It can refer to authoritarian behavior, leadership styles, or personality types in families, industrial enterprises, bureaucracies, and other forms of organizations. Here, it refers to political regimes that fall under this broad label. The major characteristics of authoritarian regimes include a limited political pluralism w…
Grand claims have been made about the superiority and inevitability of liberal democracy. Do they hold true for East Asian countries? According to typologies in political science, most East Asian countries are considered authoritarian. Japan, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, and South Korea are considered democracies; Indonesia is considered ambiguous while all other East Asian governments (Brunei, …
Traditional interpretations of authoritarianism in Latin America root this phenomenon in the style of Iberian colonization in the region. The Hispanic world, this argument alleges, was naturally more authoritarian than Anglo-Saxon cultures. Furthermore, the cultures they encountered in the New World (particularly the Aztec and Inca Empires) were themselves very hierarchical, which further facilita…
The conceptual history of authority reveals it to be an essentially contested concept because of the many debates about its sources, purposes, and limits, as well as its proximity to the concept of power. Since Plato's critique of Athenian democracy, physical force and rhetorical persuasion have been viewed as types of power but not authority. Hannah Arendt observes that "[i]f author…
Growing scholarly interest in the relationship between truth and fiction, along with popular interest in personal life-narratives and the "culture of confession," have brought new prominence to the genre of autobiography. Indeed, according to Leigh Gilmore, the number of English-language autobiographies and memoirs roughly tripled from the 1940s to the 1990s (p. 1, n. 1), and scholar…
Autonomy was first used by the ancient Greeks to describe city-states that had the power to legislate their own laws and direct the course of their own affairs. The etymology (auto [self] nomos [law]) suggests self-governance or the imposition of law on oneself. The original implication of autonomy was pejorative when applied to the individual. When, for example, in Sophocles' tragedy, the …
Beginning in the nineteenth century, the term avant-garde has been applied to a wide range of social activities, from military to political to artistic. Since the early twentieth century, however, it has most commonly been used to designate those artists who, in making works of art, knowingly transgress aesthetic and social norms, seeking thus to scandalize, to disrupt established canons of taste,…
Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) was the first artist to assume the mantle of the avant-garde, savoring its military associations from within his outpost in the Pavillon du Réalisme he had constructed to exhibit his paintings that had been rejected by the official salon of the 1855 World's Fair. While the largest of these works—Studio of the Painter: A Real Allegory (1855)…
As a region in mythical geography, Aztlán (the land of the [white] herons) has a long history. According to the Náhuatl myth, the Aztecs (whose name is derived from Aztlán) were the last remaining tribe of seven, and they were advised by their god Huitzilopochtli to leave Aztlán in search of the promised land, which they would know by an eagle sitting on a cactus, devouring a s…
Barbarism and civilization are salt and pepper concepts that are inextricably interlinked. In the Western world, "barbarism" is derived from the classical Greek word barbaros (barbarian) that referred originally to foreigners who did not speak Greek. In the modern world, barbarism carries a negative connotation of unrefined and savage. "Civilization" is derived from the…
Beauty is a vital and central element of human experience. It is associated with pleasure, which influences personal choices and cultural developments. Poets praise it, artists strive to capture it in their works, moralists warn against its deceiving influence, scientists seek to uncover its secrets, and philosophers reflect on its illusive nature. Expressions of the vitality of beauty in its role…
Behaviorism is a theoretical approach in psychology that emphasizes the study of behavior—that is, the outwardly observable reactions to a stimulus of an organism, whether animal or human—rather than the content of the mind or the physiological correlates of behavior. Largely centered in the United States, behaviorism had an early stage (1910–1930) that was dominated by the wo…
A bilingual individual, generally, is someone who speaks two languages. An ideal or balanced bilingual speaks each language as proficiently as an educated native speaker. This is often referred to as an ideal type since few people are regarded as being able to reach this standard. Otherwise, a bilingual may be anywhere on a continuum of skills. Literacy abilities may be an additional dimension to …
Bioethics as a field is relatively new, emerging only in the late 1960s, though many of the questions it addresses are as old as medicine itself. When Hippocrates wrote his now famous dictum Primum non nocere (First, do no harm), he was grappling with one of the core issues still facing human medicine, namely, the role and duty of the physician. With the advent of late-twentieth-century science, a…
One of the oldest genres of literature, biography is a written account of a person's life. It is also known as "life writing," a broader term that encompasses autobiography and other narrative forms such as letters, memoirs, journals, and diaries. The term biography derives from the Greek bios (life) and graphein (to write). Latin and Greek terms for biography were used in ant…
Biology comes from the Greek word for life, bis, and the Greek word for thought or reasoning, logos. It denotes the science that studies life, the properties and processes that sustain life, the evolutionary history of life, and particular living organisms. It is a science of enormous diversity, breadth, and heterogeneity unified only by the conceptual framework provided by the theory of evolution…
In writing The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Paul Gilroy sought to devise a theoretical approach to understanding race that encompassed three crucial elements. First, the idea of race as fluid and ever-changing, rather than static; second, the idea of race as a transnational and intercultural, rather than strictly national, phenomenon; third, the focus on analyzing res…
Black consciousness is the name of a black nationalist political movement originating in South Africa during the 1960s and 1970s. It proclaimed the necessity of black South Africans to rely on themselves for liberation and to claim South Africa as an African nation. Black consciousness drew on a tradition of black nationalist thought in South Africa associated with Africanist political movements a…
What is "the body"? If the question seems ridiculous to you, you are undoubtedly not alone. At any given time, in any given culture, most people have an intuitive, if not always easy to articulate, notion of what the body is, and probably regard that notion as shared by all human beings. The fact is, however, that human cultures have not only done an amazing variety of things to huma…
At first glance the concept of borders, borderlands, or frontiers would seem to be straightforward. A border or boundary is a line on a map delineating a territorial boundary or the limit of a political jurisdiction. Borders are primarily, but far from exclusively, seen as properties of and under the control of states. Nevertheless, this has generally not always been the case. Even in the contempo…
Buddhism has been known in the West since at least the time of Alexander the Great and possibly influenced some forms of Greek philosophy, the Gnostics, and early Christians. In modern times, as a result initially of immigration of Asians to Western countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and increasingly because of interest among Westerners themselves, Buddhism can no longer be regard…
The idea of bureaucracy formally begins with Max Weber (1864–1920); indeed, the idea of bureaucracy ends with Weber as well. Prior to Weber's explication of the "ideal type" of rational, efficient organization of public or private business as a bureaucracy, the idea was simply a commonsense, practical method for the organization of economic or government action. While t…
Literally translated as "way of the warrior," Bushido evolved into a clearly defined ethical system of the bushi, or warrior class of Japan, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the term first appeared in the Kōyō gunkan in about 1625. In his 1899 Bushido: The Soul of Japan, Nitobe Inazō, the first to articulate the concept in English, enumerated seven e…
Words containing the roots calcul- and comput- have existed since antiquity. The study of concepts used to indicate actions, professions, and (mental and material) artifacts suggests that calculation and computation have not been, as canonically assumed, an exclusive concern of modern times. The mere existence of both word clusters throughout the decades (and centuries) prior to World War II also …
A calendar is a system of reckoning and ordering time beyond the period of a day in a repetitive, usually annual, cycle. A calendar's primary function is regulating and organizing human activities; the word derives from the Latin calendarium or calendra, "account book," and kalendae or "calends," the new moon and first day of the Roman month, when Romans paid the…
The possibility of cannibalism has been an object of thought and imagination in virtually every society. The idea of consuming human body substance as food or for symbolic purposes invokes emotionally charged cultural and psychological concerns with boundaries between self and other, persons and nonpersons, the meanings of food and ingestion, and the limits of a moral community. Many societies, bo…
Capitalism has been the dominant economic system in the West since the nineteenth century and has increasingly spread across the globe. Characterized by unfettered markets in labor and natural resources, commodity production, and the reinvestment of profit, capitalism must be distinguished from other forms of commercial society that existed in early times or outside of the West, in which market-or…
Debates over capitalism in Africa revolve around the best means to rescue the continent from a prolonged period of stagnation and decline. Observers agree that the program, in the absence of a socialist alternative, must focus on capitalist development. There is disagreement, however, over the role of the African state in this process, as well as over whether to make raw materials exports or indus…
When René Descartes died in 1650, his work had already attracted both critics and followers. In 1632 Cartesian philosophy was being taught in the Netherlands by his disciple Henri Reneri (1593–1639), and by the mid-1630s the far more independently minded Henri Regius (1598–1679) was setting out his own version of Cartesianism in a less guarded and more polemical way than had Des…
From the Latin casūs (cases), casuistry is a method of practical reasoning that aims to identify the scope and force of moral obligations in the varied contexts of human action. While the golden era of casuistry belongs to the period 1450–1660, its origins as an intellectual outlook on moral decision-making can be traced back to ancient philosophy and to the legal traditions of mediev…
The causality debate has been centered on two issues, one metaphysical, the other epistemic. The metaphysical issue concerns the nature of the connection between cause and effect: How and in virtue of what does the cause bring about the effect? The epistemic issue concerns the possibility of causal knowledge: How, if at all, can causal knowledge be obtained? …
Philosophers have theorized about causation since well before Aristotle, who distinguished several types of causation: efficient, material, final, and formal. For example, a wood carving is made by an artist (the efficient cause) by chiseling a piece of wood (the material cause) for the purpose of creating a beautiful object (the final cause), arriving at something that has the properties of a woo…
Causation is defined most commonly as a relationship between two events or two states of affairs in which the first brings about the second. The idea of causation has long existed among the peoples in South and East Asia, but as a historical notion, it has taken different forms of expression in these regions. …
Censorship comprises many methods of preventing the publication or dissemination of speech, printed matter, art, theater, music, electronic media, or other forms of expression. The most common subjects that are censored are religion, politics, and sex. The usual justification is that such expression is subversive, blasphemous, heretical, obscene, pornographic, or otherwise offensive or harmful. Ce…
"Cold things warm up, the hot cools off, wet becomes dry, dry becomes wet," observes Heracleitus (fr. 126), as if to state an obvious fact. Yet this fact became highly troublesome to early philosophers. …
The word character, when applied to persons, has two sources, distinguished lexically in ancient Greek by the terms êthos and charaktêr. Êthos, originally referring to a disposition or custom, from Aristotle on refers to the stable dispositions that guide a person's actions and that are suitable objects of moral praise and blame. The earliest uses of charactêr in Greek, …
Where and when did chemistry originate? Some chemists would identify ancient Egypt as the birthplace of chemistry because of that culture's glassworks, cosmetics, and mummification techniques. Advocates of this theory might also refer to a possible etymology of the word chemistry from the Egyptian word for black. Other historians place the origins of chemistry amid ancient Greek theories of…
Between 1966 and 1977, members of the Mexican-American community engaged in a period of widespread political activism akin to other civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. The resulting challenges and concurrent mentalities became the Chicano movement, or as it is now known in recognition of the equally important participation of Chicanas, the Chicana/o movement. During this period large-…
During the last two centuries, even amid poverty and war, more children have had the opportunity for successful lives than ever before. The modern concern for child health, education, and well-being, however, emerged only after long millennia in which children's welfare was subordinated to the needs and goals of caretakers and communities—a pattern also encountered today in developin…
Chinese thought is a generic term, referring to the ideas produced, expanded, and transmitted in the history of China. First, these ideas are not simply general opinions, but the philosophical views of the world, life, and society that have been commonly accepted as concepts or systematic theories. These ideas or theories are the end-products of logical reasoning—in Chinese, the two charact…
The term junfa became part of the Chinese vocabulary in the 1910s and gained popularity in the 1920s to describe the phenomenon of militarism that dominated the Chinese political scene between 1916 and 1928. While both characters, jun (military) and fa (as in menfa, prominent lineage), are ancient Chinese words, it was in Japan that fa as a suffix was paired with other words to mean "a cliq…
According to the writers of the Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth gathered a small group of disciples and went about for three years in first century Galilee, preaching a message of hope to the poor and healing the sick. John the "Baptist" had gone before him, calling people to repent and be baptized, promising the imminent coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. He recognized in Jesus a far great…
Since the 1970s, the study of Christianity in Asia has been transformed by new approaches in which the scholarly perspective has become less Eurocentric and more Asian. Particularly in regard to China, Western missionary sources have given way to Chinese sources while the meaning of Christianity has been broadened beyond a narrow religious content to include Asian cultural elements. The history of…
The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed a swift decline in the popularity and significance of cinemagoing in the West, associated with suburbanization and the rise of competitor media like rock and roll and television. From the 1990s, cinema release was repositioned as a cornerstone of multimedia-themed product lines, including alternative forms of distribution and exhibition (in-flight…
Citizenship consists in sharing a political community, and enjoying the benefits and assuming the political responsibilities that give effect to this experience of shared political community. If the purpose of political philosophy is to provide a principled account of the nature and appropriate boundaries of political community, then it makes sense to say that the tradition of political philosophy…
Cultural citizenship has been part of a broader discussion on cultural pluralism that began in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Since then pluralism has undergone at least three noteworthy transformations, beginning with, during the first quarter of the twentieth century, attempts to preserve primarily European immigrant cultures vis-à-vis the state, followed by th…
Citizenship rests with territory at the heart of the definition of nation-state. If territory determines the geographical limits of state sovereignty, citizenship determines a state's population. Beyond these limits one finds foreign land, foreign sovereignty, and foreigners. Drawing the boundary within which some human beings are included and others excluded as foreigners, permitting some…
From the early days of urbanization, several often competing conceptions of cities were evident: As a unit of analysis the city is often characterized through the emphasis on diversity, fragmentation, strangeness, encounters with strangers, the mosaic of variety, contingent interactions, moving borders, everyday life and events, and the multitude of interactions. However, another perspective focus…
In Western political thought, ideas about cities, citizenship, and democracy have always been inextricably linked. Since Socrates suggested in The Republic that his interlocutors help him to create a city in speech, the city has functioned as a real and metaphorical center for struggles over what it means to be political. Ideas about civilization and barbarism, egalitarianism and exclusion, virtue…
Islam first developed and spread in a region of the world where urban civilizations had originated. Caravan routes crisscrossed the Fertile Crescent and the Arabian peninsula several millennia prior to the birth of Christianity, linking the urban-centered civilizations of Mesopotamia, the Nile Valley, and the Indian subcontinent. Overland routes were supplemented by water transit via the Red Sea a…
The history of the city in Latin America stretches over three thousand years and a vast geographic area. The cities vary considerably over space and time. Prior to the coming of the Spaniards, many pre-Columbian cities are thought to have been cosmograms or cosmologically conceived—the cities' buildings and plans emulated the cosmos as their leaders conceived of it. After the conques…
Civil disobedience is an illegal act performed publicly in contravention of a law or laws of the government for the short-term purpose of bringing about a change in the law or laws and for the long-term purpose of improving society as a whole. It is a political act because its underlying principles are the principles of political justice that regulate the state and its institutions, and not those …
An ancient term of Western political and social theory, civil society has enjoyed enormous popularity in recent years and has outstripped its geographic origins to spread all over the world. Public leaders, newspaper writers, religious figures, social theorists, political activists, and commentators from many different perspectives now use the term on a regular basis. The term's meaning has…
"All vogue words tend to share a similar fate," observes Zygmunt Bauman. "The more experiences they pretend to make apparent, the more they themselves become opaque. The more numerous are the orthodox truths they elbow out and supplant, the faster they turn into no-questions-asked canons" (p. 1). Bauman's specific subject was globalization, but he may well have b…
The Latin genesis of class nomenclature does not mean that the idea behind it (in either a social or general sense) did not exist prior to the rise of the Roman Republic. Aristotle's Organon proposed a logical system of classification of natural and linguistic types into genus and species according to categorical criteria. For the ancient Greeks, the Few and the Many constituted a central m…
The next neoclassical period, which we call the Renaissance, exploded in Italy under the patronage of such personages as the Medicis and Pope Leo X. The Renaissance with its focus on secular life, fortified by the availability of the important literary works of the Romans and by translations of the Greeks into Latin, sometimes via Arabic, and then by the study of Greek, enabling educated people to…
The concept of classification seems obvious and benign. To classify is to arrange or distribute according to a system or method, a sense of the word that has not altered since its inception in antiquity. The significance of classification lies not in what it means, but in how it is applied. How people classify—according to what principles—has evolved and altered over time as their un…
Conceptions and characterizations of colonialism vary considerably among scholars of Africa. Differences and debates center on four sets of interrelated issues: first, the place and importance of the colonial period in African history; second, the nature of the colonial encounter and its driving force; third, the typologies of African colonialism; and fourth, the legacies of colonialism for postco…
Colonialism is all about the exercise of power and its consequences. Theoretically, the exercise of power entails the interaction of at least two parties negotiating (by various means or practices) their wills on one or more issues, as shown by their various actions or statements. This definition holds for interactions of both individuals and institutions. The imposition of one state's will…
Studies detailing the nature of colonial policy and practice in Southeast Asia have all acknowledged its disparate nature and overwhelming range of characteristics. While many European powers shared the desire to establish colonies overseas, the manner in which this was accomplished was more random than regular. Factors contributing to this variance include differing philosophies of administrative…
The common-sense philosophers of the Scottish school—including Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, James Beattie, George Campbell, and James Oswald—argued against George Berkeley and David Hume that ordinary human perception and moral judgment need not be defended against skeptical inquiry but ought to be taken as self-evident. As Campbell put it, "to maintain propositions the revers…
