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Attempts to apply the methods and findings of The Authoritarian Personality to Chinese culture and politics reveal the limits of its cross-cultural reach. Additional qualms result from a considerat...

Kant maintains that while claims to property are morally possible in a state of nature, such claims are merely “provisional”; they become “conclusive” only in a civil condition involving political institutions. Kant’s commentators find this thesis puzzling, since it seems to assert a natural right to property alongside a commitment to property’s conventionality. We resolve this apparent contradiction. Provisional right is not a special kind of right. Instead, it marks the imperfection of an action (that of acquiring ordinary rights) where public authorization is lacking. Provisional right thereby functions as a methodological device in a sequential elucidation of the moral basis of public law. To develop this reading, we first explain Kant’s two-step account of property rights—his division between ‘having’ and ‘acquiring’. Then we explain what is involved in a sequential exposition of right more generally.

Theodor W. Adorno resisted Sigmund Freud’s explanation of artistic creation as the sublimation of the artist’s libidinal drives. It focuses too much on the artist rather than the work and is in the service of accommodation to the status quo. But Adorno also questioned the simple reversal of Freud’s formula, pointing out the dangers of unmediated desublimation. The artist, he suggested, should sublimate his or her rage instead. No less significant was the retrospective cultural sublimation of objects from exhausted devotional or cultic contexts, which preserved the unfulfilled yearnings originally expressed in them.

Además del testimonio de la propia “experiencia histórica sublime” del autor durante una visita al campo de concentración de Theresienstadt, este ensayo se basa en el análisis de Georges Didi-Huberman de cuatro fotografías del Holocausto en su Images in Spite of All, para demostrar el poder del argumento de Ankersmit. Especula sobre la relación entre esas experiencias y las nociones teo- lógicas de la “presencia real”, la cual, además, busca colapsar la distancia entre el pasado y el presente, y confundir las nociones historicistas convencionales de continuidad temporal y determinación contextual. Contra la declaración de Ankersmit, que sostiene que las experiencias históricas sublimes ocurren sólo cuando una transformación civilizatoria provoca nostalgia por un pasado perdido, este artículo argumenta que, tal vez, también se puedan sentir cuando acontecimientos traumáticos, cuyo retorno nadie anhela, interrumpen la inteligibilidad de las narrativas históricas y la representación significativa.

Excerpt from the Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Acquisition Research Symposium There is a deficit of data on the detailed execution of design acquisition processes, data which is needed to truly understand and improve them. Simultaneously, the movement to digital engineering, and specifically model based engineering, offers a key opportunity to gather continual data needed to move acquisition processes forward. To address this issue, methods must be developed and implemented to capture key process metrics on the full product life cycle, which includes conception, design, development, and test. The engineering acquisition process should be instrumented, capturing engineering metrics at a level of granularity sufficient to provide actionable information to other acquisition programs. These methods would be implemented on a set of diverse engineering programs, utilizing internal engineering design tools, product data and life-cycle management tools, and manpower reporting systems to capture data. This paper first discusses a number of specific examples of process instrumentation undertaken by the authors, then concludes with recommended lines of research for fully instrumenting acquisition processes. Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.

Em resposta à recente exortação do historiador David Armitage para retornarmos a uma história de “grandes ideias” traçada por longos períodos de tempo, este artigo examina as razões para a resistência a suas propostas, conforme expressa por estudiosos da História Intelectual textualistas e contextualistas. Discutindo a “História Conceitual” e a “Metaforologia” como alternativas à História das Ideias tradicional, defendem-se as virtudes de um método que reconhece e até acolhe a ambiguidade semântica e o campo de força dinâmico das relações em que as ideias estão historicamente inseridas. Em vez de se contentar com a suavização das diferenças inerentes às técnicas de "leitura à distância", baseadas na recuperação digital de tendências de longa duração, pleiteia-se a atenção às rupturas de sentido e às inovações imprevistas que impedem que a História das Ideias seja um exercício de meta-narrativa de progressão, desenvolvimento e disseminação de significados unívocos.

No longer capable of serving as a nodal point of a single coherent narrative or as a marker for parallel events across national borders, “1968” is best understood in a tense relation to “1967”. Jux...

Building on the argument of a 1996 piece called “For Theory,” which situated “theory” in a force field of its putative opposite terms, this essay explores the way “philosophy” has come to be considered an antonym of “theory” in much contemporary discourse. It argues that despite their often contrasting meanings and connotations, the two terms would benefit from a dialogue in which the strengths of each were acknowledged without their being either hierarchically positioned or turned into bland synonyms.

In addition to the testimony of the author’s own “sublime historical experience” during a visit to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, this essay draws on Georges Didi-Huberman’s analysis of four photographs from the Holocaust in his Images in Spite of All to demonstrate the power of Ankersmit’s argument. It speculates on the relationship between such experiences and theological notions of “real presence,” which also seek to collapse the distance between past and present and confound conventional historicist notions of temporal continuity and contextual determination. Against Ankersmit’s claim that sublime historical experiences occur only when a civilizational transformation causes nostalgia for a lost past, it argues that they may also be felt when traumatic events for whose return no one yearns disrupt the intelligibility of historical narratives and meaningful representation.

Neste texto, Martin Jay debruça-se sobre a perspectiva cartesiana, explorando principalmente as consequências de sua invenção para o regime visual da modernidade. Ele defende que a perspectiva cartesiana, dada sua grande adesão durante o Renascimento, foi tomada desde então como equivalente do modelo escópico moderno. Diante disso, Jay reavalia a suposta unidade desse arranjo visual, enunciando os momentos de inquietação a ele inscritos: a arte de descrever dos Países Baixos no século XVII e a visualidade barroca. Trazendo o debate para o presente, Jay interroga não apenas os resultados como também os limites da crítica à perspectiva cartesiana enquanto modelo dominante e propõe uma abordagem eminentemente pluralista como resposta à hierarquização dos modelos visuais que conduziu ao panorama analisado.

Although philosophers and theologians have speculated on the ability of timeless, ontological truth to manifest itself in the flux of history, most working historians have focused on epistemological questions concerning the relationship between history as what actually happened and history as its present representation. Two extreme positions—naïve positivism and radical constructivism—have proven equally untenable. This chapter examines three alternatives: falsificationism, the new experientialism, and institutional justificationism. It defends the last of these, which posits a self-reflective community of competence, morally obliged to be truthful and engaged in an endless quest for plausible narratives and compelling explanations of past occurrences, as the most persuasive answer to skepticism about historical truth.