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Translation of "De beteekenis van de wijsbegeerte der wetsidee voor de theorie der menschelijke samenleving" by Herman Dooyeweerd (1937), Philosophia Reformata 2 (2), pp. 99–116. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including diplomatic tussle in 1940 between British Burma and Imperial Japan; Kalimpong Chung Hwa School as a site of international espionage; and concept of Asia and its relation to issues of universality.

Bergson’s troublesome relation to Judaism has been examined briefly by Aimé Pallière in Bergson et le Judaisme (Paris: F. Alcan, 1933) and his ambivalent attraction to Roman Catholicism by the learned Dominican philosopher-theologian Antonin Sertillanges in Henri Bergson et le catholicisme (Paris: Flammarion, 1941). Vladimir Jankélevitch, in his study Henri Bergson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), has an appendix entitled “Bergson et le Judaisme,” However, he is concerned with the affinity between Bergsonism and Judaism rather than with Bergson’s adverse criticism of the Jewish religion. I mention these studies without discussing them further in appreciation of their pioneering work and to acknowledge that I have taken cognizance of their opinions. The belief that one can ignore the work of previous scholars leaves no basis for the expectation that our own work will prove of any value to others, but I do believe that Bergson’s strictures on Judaism deserve an examination of Jewish and Christian texts as well as an analysis of time by Jewish thinkers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues universality of human rights while still taking into account the historical and cultural particularity of human rights. It mentions that first criticism against the universality of human rights came from the American Anthropological Association. It states that Mary Ann Glendon emphasizes the important role played by Charles Malik of Lebanon and Peng-chun Chang of China in the drafting of the Universal Declaration.

Indonesia's environmental diplomacy during Yudhoyono's administration gained positive international recognition, yet Indonesia's high-profile diplomatic initiatives took place amid a continued path of environmental decline. Broadly defining environmental diplomacy as a mediating institution between universalism and particularism through the co-constitutive processes of environmental regimes, this article employs a critical-institutionalist-constructivist framework to explain the gap between Indonesia's commitments to universal norms of environmental preservation and the corresponding local practices. Using both primary and secondary data, the research offers a boundary analysis of diplomacy as the hub between universal norms and local values concerning human-nature relations. Findings suggest that however assertive Indonesia may be in its external diplomatic initiatives, the benefits that it expects to gain from a 'green reputation' will only go as far as its efforts to strengthen the foundational local institutions that are required to adapt and localize its global environmental diplomacy strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professor Ali Mazrui embodied an optimistic universalism and the capacity to find common ground for global dialogue amidst conflicts. When receiving a lifetime achievement award – Mazrui, in his acceptance speech, pointed to two specific poems of Rumi and Wordsworth as a source of inspiration for awakening the ‘love of beauty and the beauty of love.' In the context of the shared humanity of these experiences, one realizes the ability of such experiences to create a common language across barriers, a language of social justice and human rights. Using integrative interdisciplinary approaches from the fields of comparative religion and comparative literature, this essay explores the similarities and differences of the messages of Mazrui, Rumi, and Wordsworth to achieve an awakening. Such an awakening involves the individual's awareness of being a part of something greater, often achieved in nature, which may serve as a basis for the universal grammar of social justice and human rights. Hermeneutic and phenomenological approaches, including intersubjectivity, are employed in the exegesis of the poetic material and its context. Also explored are the historical similarities and differences, anthropological and psychobiographical factors in the life histories of Mazrui, Rumi and Wordsworth. Ultimately, the dialectic between the polarities of themes of the pain of separation and longing for union, often linked to losses and life changing experiences such as migration, can be understood as opportunities for personal growth – motivating individuals to reach toward connection, reparation and the ability to engage in cultural dialogue and move past difference toward social justice and human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The word "cosmopolitanism" is often used to describe a form of civic universalism that in the view of some contemporary philosophers is a well-matched response to present circumstances. Given that the fact of pluralism is among the salient features of these circumstances, how does contemporary thinking on cosmopolitanism suggest that we resolve the ethical dilemmas that cultural differences presents? As early as 308BC the Stoics taught on the use of reason and autonomy in the individual. Self control was believed to be a method to achieve virtue, wisdom, and unbiased character. The Stoics believed in the development of clear judgment through logic and experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1949 Bremen Lectures, Martin Heidegger characterizes the essence of technology as a universal, or total, condition of modern existence. This makes it appear as though nothing can exist in the world independent of the technological. The fact that technology attempts to do away with distance, however, means that technology's very workings presuppose the existence of distance and nearness that oppose it. Things, insofar as they are, according to Heidegger, essentially near remain independent of technology. By describing the nearness and nearing of things, this article reinterprets the Heideggerian concepts of the fourfold and world-formation to critically challenge the universality of technology. The human experience of things in their spatiality--especially the human aesthetic enjoyment of and abiding with things--is an example of a facet of life where technology does not annihilate distance and nearness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between the coherence of the League of Nations' (LN) actions and universality, conceived both as an ideal of 'universalism' and universal membership. Universality in international institutional law essentially means the principle of open and comprehensive membership of international organizations. As popularly known, the LN failed to secure comprehensive membership. Such membership is thought to be a condition sine qua non of coherent and effective actions of organizations. This article takes a different stance, arguing that it was not lack of such membership that was responsible for the constitutional crisis within the LN and the incoherence of its actions. Rather, the LN suffered from a constitutional crisis almost from the very beginning, preventing it from gaining universal membership. It was the fragile awareness of the common aims and values embodied in the LN that affected the LN's membership and the universality and coherence of its mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diversity of international actors numbers among one of the main phenomena of the modem international system. Dating the diversity to recent years is understandable in view of how it increased after 1945, but it has an earlier history. The League of Nations encountered a range of potential participants much wider than the core group of Powers which had been instrumental at the Peace Conference in constituting it. To an extent, the Covenant of the League envisaged a widening of participation. This was through a provision for admission of new members that, unlike Article 4 of the United Nations Charter, was not limited to entities described as States as such. In practice, only States became members; but there were other innovations which are relevant to institutions seeking to accommodate diversity in the present day as well. These merit further consideration as part of a renewed focus on the interwar era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much like their literary peers, contemporary artists across the Mediterranean and Arabic-speaking world have turned their attention to migration in recent years. This migratory turn has prompted many artists, art historians, critics, and curators to celebrate the migrant as a new figure for universality or the human while eliding migration writ large with a specific form of migration, that of clandestine movement from the "global South" into Western Europe. In so doing, these celebrations of the migrant evidence what I call "migratory orientalism," which I define as the dominant frame for representing and analyzing migration in contemporary art today. A theory of migratory orientalism points to the ways in which representations of migrants in contemporary art and its discourse frequently rely on visible markers of racial, linguistic, and geographic difference in ways that recall earlier Orientalist and colonialist representations of the "Other." To analyze how migratory orientalism manifests both in an artwork's conception and its reception, the article compares recent photographic and video works by Moroccan-French artists Yto Barrada (b. 1971) and Bouchra Khalili (b. 1975). I argue that rather than taking a similar approach to migration, as critics often suggest, these artists evidence opposed ways of representing migration. Khalili's video series, The Mapping Journey Project (2008-2011), which focuses exclusively on the migrant's journey, depicts the African or Middle Eastern migrant as anonymous, ahistorical, and always Europebound. In contrast, Yto Barrada's series of photographs, A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project (1999-2006), takes migration as a starting point for a broader consideration of migrants' multiple destinations and its social, economic, and political underpinnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including tension between the League of Nations' quest for universality, League's difficulty in maintaining coherence and universality, and the League's capability to reform itself.