81 research outputs found
Art. XVII.—The Yi king of the Chinese, as a book of Divination and Philosophy
No full textAn important point in the study of the Yi king is the recognition of its existence before Wen wang's time. The elements of main difference between the Yi king of the early dynasties and that of Wen wang was in the order of the Kwa. The same names were current, and probably the admonitory remarks were, many of them, the same also. These remarks are all anonymous, and we are at liberty to guess who wrote them. The appendices are anonymous also, and they may have mainly been written by men before the time of Confucius. The three sages, Wen wang, Cheu kung, and Confucius, were all editors, and Fu hi the original author.</jats:p
The effect of atmospheric pressure on Snowball Earth deglaciation
No full textThe most common explanation for the escape from a Snowball Earth state involves, among other factors, a strong greenhouse effect caused by a large partial pressure of CO2. This leads to an increase in surface pressure, which most models do not account for. With a higher surface pressure, pressure broadening increases, and convection reaches a deeper layer, both of which result in higher surface temperatures. The latter mechanism, which has not previously been reported, is found to be a greater source of warming than pressure broadening in the normal range of CO2 partial pressures at the point of deglaciation
Sovereign-less subject and the possibility of resistance
No full textThis article explores exclusionary practices of contemporary politics and alternative forms of resistance. It starts off explaining how Giorgio Agamben's theory can be understood in the context of resistance. In so doing, it turns to the arguments put forward by Edkins and Pin-Fat. In their article 'Through the Wire', they identify two forms of resistance. Drawing on Agamben's thought: refusal and the assumption of bare life. This article argues that these two forms are not sufficient for thinking resistance. This is so because of a gap in Agamben's thought and the way Edkins and Pin-Fat read him. In order to explore resistance in a more fruitful way, the article critiques Edkins and Pin-Fat's conclusions on the understanding bare life as a form of resistance; it amends Agamben's account by explaining the move from bare life to whatever being, and ultimately, the article finds whatever being as a fruitful way of understanding resistance on the example of Tiananmen. At the end I conclude that the Tiananmen protest successfully challenged the sovereign power from the position of in-between. © The Author(s), 2009
Crisis is governance : sub-prime, the traumatic event, and bare life
No full textThe article provides a critical analysis of the role of discourses of trauma and the traumatic event in constituting the ethico-political possibilities and limits of the subprime crisis. It charts the invocation of metaphors of a financial Tsunami and pervasive media focus on
emotional ‘responses’ like fear, anger, and blame, suggesting that such traumatic discourses
constituted the subprime crisis as a singular and catastrophic ‘event’ demanding of particular
(humanitarian) responses. We draw upon the thought of Giorgio Agamben to render this constituted logic of event and response in terms of the concomitant production of bare life; the savers and homeowners who became ‘helpless victims’ in need of rescue. We therefore
tie the ongoing production of the sovereign power of global finance to broader processes that
entail the enfolding and securing of everyday financial subjects. These arguments are illustrated via an analysis of three subjects: the economy, bankers and borrowers. We argue that it was the movement between subject positions – from safe to vulnerable, from
entrepreneurial to greedy, from victim to survivor, etc. - that marked out the effective manner
of governance, confirming in this process sovereign categories of financial citizenship, asset
based welfare, and securitisation that many would posit as the very problem. In short, (the
way that the) crisis (was constituted) is governance
Art. I.—Vajra-chhediká, the “Kin Kong King,” or Diamond Sútra
No full textThis work belongs to a class of Buddhist books called Prajná Páramitá. It was translated first into the Chinese by Kumára-jíva (A.D. 405), who was brought into China from Thibet. “The King of Tsin had sent an army into that country with directions not to return without the Indian whose fame had spread amongst all the neighbouring nations. The former translations of Buddhist works were to a great extent erroneous. To produce them in a form more accurate and complete was the task undertaken by Kumára-jíva. More than eight hundred priests were called to assist him; and the king himself, an ardent disciple of the new faith, was present at the conference, holding the old copies in his hand as the work of correction proceeded. More than three hundred volumes were thus prepared.” (Edkins).</jats:p
Molecular structural dynamics in water–ethanol mixtures: Spectroscopy with polarized neutrons simultaneously accessing collective and self-diffusion
No full text『油拉八國』に関する資料調査
No full textThe material of studying Shanghai dialect can not only be found in China but also from other countries, which was written by missionary who had been Shanghai and learned Shanghai dialect. Such as Walter Henry Medhurst （1796-1857）, John Macgowan （1845-1922）, Joseph Edkins （1823-1905）, they all have wrote some books about the study of Shanghai dialect. By my Professor Uchida, I learned a geography book titled You la ba guo written in Shanghai dialect. But it is uncertain about the background information of this book. I found a Geography textbook titled System of Geography use of Schools written by Sidney Edwards Morse （1844）, and this maybe the prototype of You la ba guo. This research note is to show how I found System of Geography use of Schools, and offer the information of this book and its author.研究ノートdepartmental bulletin pape
The Bellicose politics of peace
No full textDespite its presentation as a pragmatic and universally applicable path to peace, the author argues that liberal peacebuilding offers no clear break from past colonial and imperial relations. Liberal peacebuilding is, in fact, colonial in its attempt to penetrate the markets and political systems of post-conflict countries and restructure economies and political life through the hegemonic imposition of liberal norms, facilitating their integration into global capitalism and a liberal community of states. The “liberal peace” created by this political and economic order often involves violent conditions of assimilation and exclusion. Moreover, the confluence of security and development concerns in the 1990s has set the strategic foundation for the incorporation of locally-driven “civil society” approaches to peacebuilding within statebuilding operations.
In this thesis, the author identifies existing criticisms of peacebuilding, and, drawing on theorists such as Michel Foucault, Partha Chatterjee, David Scott, and Jenny Edkins, initiates a deeper critique that considers the historical context of colonialism, legitimations of violence, the construction of the non-west in categories of development, and the relations of power and knowledge associated with liberal approaches to making peace. The author provides a historical and political overview of wars in Angola, proposing that discourses and practices of international peacebuilding have concealed the continuation of war by other means
Indo-European vocabulary in Old Chinese : a new thesis on the emergence of Chinese language and civilization in the late Neolithic age
No full textThis study is a much expanded version of the paper I read at the XXXII International Congress for Asian and North African Studies on August 28, 1986 in Hamburg (Germany). Contents 1. Recent developments in the field of historical linguistics 2. Monosyllabic structure of Chinese words and Indo-European stems 3. Tonal accents of Middle Chinese 4. Preliminaries on the comparison of consonants and vowels 5. Some IE stems corresponding to Chinese words of entering tone 6. Middle Chinese tones and final consonants of IE stems 7. Some IE stems corresponding to Chinese words of rising tone 8. Some IE stems corresponding to Chinese words of vanishing tone 9. Some IE stems corresponding to Chinese words of level tone 10. Reconstruction of Middle Chinese vocalism according to Yün-ching 11. Old Chinese vocalism 12. Vocalic correspondences between Chinese and IE 13. Initials of Old Chinese 14. Initial consonant clusters in Old Chinese as seen from IE-stems 15. Proximity of Chinese to Germanic 16. Relation of Old Chinese to neighboring languages 17. Emergence of Chinese Empire and language in the middle of the third millennium B.C. Appendix * Abbrevations * Bibliography * Rhyme Tables of Early Middle Chinese (600) * Rhyme Tables of Early Mandarin (1300) * Word Index o English o Pinyin In 1786, just over two hundred years ago, comparative historical linguistics was born, when Sir William Jones (1746-1794) discovered the relationship between Old-Indian Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. Since then, the emerging Indo-European philology has thrown much light on the early history of mankind in Eurasia. During the past two hundred years, many suggestions were also made in regard to relationships of Indo-European to other languages such as Semitic, Altaic, Austronesian, Korean etc., but Indo-Europeanists commonly rejected such attempts for want of convincing evidence. As to Chinese, Joseph Edkins was the first to advance the thesis of its proximity to Indo-European. In his work China's Place in Philology. An Attempt to show that the Language of Europe and Asia have a Common Origin (1871) he presented a number of Chinese words similar to those of Indo-European. In his time, Edkins' thesis seemed bold and extravagant. But today, more than a hundred years later, we are in a much better position to carry out a comprehensive and well-founded comparative study. Since the end of the nineteenth century, many Sinologists have been engaged in reconstruction of the mediaeval and archaic readings of Chinese characters. Among them, Karlgren (1889-1978) was the most successful, and in 1940 he published a comprehensive phonological and etymological dictionary entitled Grammata Serica. In the meantime, the Indo-Europeanists Alois Walde (1869-1924) and Julius Pokorny (1887-1970) were devoting themselves to the compilation of a useful etymological dictionary. The result was the Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch by Pokorny (1959) which provides a solid basis for our lexical comparisons. Soon thereafter, some Sinologists made use of the two dictionaries by Karlgren and Pokorny to compare Chinese and Indo-European words. In 1967, an unaffiliated German scholar, Jan Ulenbrook, published an article "Einige Übereinstirnrnungen zwischen dem Chinesischen und dem Indogermanischen", in which he claimed that 57 words are related. Shortly afterwards, Tor Ulving of the University of Goteborg, Sweden, wrote a review of this article framing the title as a question: "Indo-European elements in Chinese?" While working on his thesis on word families in Chinese, Ulving compiled for his own use two dictionaries: "Archaic Chinese - English" and "English - Archaic Chinese", and discovered thereby 238 Chinese words similar to Indo-European roots. In spite of this considerable number of word equivalents, however, Mr. Ulving became discouraged and, as he told me in his letter of April, 1986, has given up his researches in this field. The skepticism, common among Indo-Europeanists in regard to comparative studies with other languages, is largely based on the dogmatic opinion that only morphology is relevant but not vocabulary. Since the typology of Chinese seems to preclude a cognate relation to Indo-European, they are inclined to discard any lexical correspondences as merely accidental or onomatopoetic. Besides, prehistorical contacts and mixtures between these languages seem not conceivable, as the Indo-Europeans are supposed to have originated in Northern Europe or at best in the Central Asian steppe, thousands of miles away from East Asia. Hence, any research into a relationship between Old Chinese and Indo-European languages would be but futile from the outset. Yet there are also opposing views among Indo-Europeanists. Investigations into Germanic languages and the oldest Indo-European language, Hittite, led some of them to a critical revision of the prevailing conception about a Proto-Indo-European. Hermann Hirt (1934) for instance states: "Inflexion of Indo-European languages is due to a relatively late development, and its correct comprehension can be achieved only by proceeding from the time of non-inflexion." And Carl Karstien (1936) holds the opinion that "Chinese corresponds most ideally to the hypothetic prototype of Indo-European." Regarding vocabulary, there are striking similarities in the monosyllabic structure of the basic words. In modern German and English, all the words of everyday speech are monosyllabic and their stereotypical structure is: initial consonant(s) + vowel(s) + final consonant(s). The same word structure is valid for Chinese as well. It is fundamentally different from the disyllabic structure of Altaic words and from the triconsonantal-disyllabic structure of Semitic words. Characteristic of the monosyllabic word structure is, besides, the complexity of the syllable nucleus, which consists of different vowels and vowel clusters in contrast to the monophthongal vocalism of polysyllabic words. Another objection raised to comparisons between Chinese and Indo-European is the existence of tonal accents in Chinese. Since most modern Indo-European languages have only expiratory accents, Chinese is considered to be a highly exotic language. Yet, even in Chinese, the use of tonal accents as a means of lexical differentiation is a result of comparatively recent development in the long history of Chinese language, the earliest monuments of which date back to 1300 B.C. (cf. Chang 1970, p.21). Unknown to Old Chinese, the existence of tonal accents was for the first time mentioned in the 5th century by Shen Yüeh (441-513). In Middle Chinese (Mch.) there were four tone categories: A P'ing-sheng 平 a level tone (which developed into Mandarin tone 1 or 2). B Shang-sheng 上 a rising tone (Mandarin tone 3). C Ch'u-sheng 去 a vanishing, i.e. falling tone (Mandarin tone 4). D Ju-sheng 入 an entering tone with a staccato effect, the word being abruptly stopped by a final consonant -p, -t, -k. (In Early Mandarin the words of this tone lost their final consonant and were distributed among the tones 2, 3 and 4, respectively according to the phonation of initials). In Middle Chinese, words of the entering tone were the only group which still preserved the final stops and therefore a close syllabic structure. So they are most appropriate for convincing comparisons with monosyllabic Indo-European word stems. The final stops -p, -t, -k of the entering tone are nowadays still extant in daily speech of several dialects in South China as well as in Chinese borrowings in Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean. As a speaker of a Taiwan dialect of Minnan origin, I could immediately identify some Indo-European stems with corresponding Chinese words. Besides, the command of Japanese and German was also a great help for this study. In the following lists I have chosen a number of Indo-European stems which are phonetically and semantically equivalent to Chinese words. Correspondences in initial and final consonants refer to the points of articulation, thus we have equations: IE labials = Old Chinese labials, IE dentals = dentals, IE l, r = dentals (cf. p. 31); Ø, i (final and medial) IE velars = velars and laryngeals, and occasionally (the so-called "satem"-forms) IE velars = dental sibilants and affricates. Regarding the manner of articulation, there are no regular correspondences between Indo-European and Chinese consonants like Grimm's law which is valid among Indo-European dialects to a certain extent. But this is not astonishing, since in Old Chinese the alternation of initials in voicing was a conventional means of creating new words from one basic form. The rules of vocalic correpondences among Indo-European dialects are quite complex. Vowels permanently change their qualities from one language to another, and from time to time within one language also, as is well known from the history of English pronunciations. Generally, the vocalism of Old Greek is taken as the standard for Proto-Indo-European. Old Chinese vowels corresponds nearly (cf. p. 30), but the details about the reconstruction of Middle and Old Chinese vocalism will be treated later (pp. 26-30). For the moment, it is necessary to notice in advance that the stem of ablauting Germanic verbs is the form of preterite or noun, rather than that of infinitive as assumed hitherto. Therefore, in some cases I must slightly modify the basic vowel of verbal stems given in Pokorny, in order to get better basis for comparison. As Old Chinese verbs were non-flexional, they might probably have preserved the original vowel the best
The political economy of hedge fund regulation
No full textThe currency crises and episodes of market unrest of the 1990s sparked a series of regulatory initiatives to reform the Global Financial Architecture. One of these initiatives tackled the activities of hedge funds, a type of investment vehicle that was frequently cited as one of the causes of these crises. The key research question of this thesis is why efforts to regulate an apparently destabilising aspect of financial markets failed, despite the setting up of an ad hoc forum at the international level (the Financial Stability Forum) and various domestic initiatives in the US, the country where most hedge funds operate.
The thesis develops a theoretical framework that examines this regulatory inaction through three explanatory models. The first model draws upon mainstream economic accounts and argues that the empirical evidence did not justify more interventionist public regulation of hedge funds. The second model assumes that a form of relational power has been exercised at the regulatory table: those actors with an interest in leaving hedge funds unregulated prevailed over those that favoured a more mandatory approach. The third model argues that it was not just relational power that determined outcomes, but mainly the power of the structure of meaning within which discussions took place and problems were framed. This structure of meaning led to a particular formulation of the problem at stake, which excluded other concerns and actors from the regulatory agenda.
Each model is analysed for its policy implications. The first model leads to regulatory solutions that rely upon private actors' due diligence and self-assessment of risk. The second model leads to policy options that favour a greater inclusion of developing countries and other stakeholder groups in decision-making processes in global finance. The third model leads to a rethinking of the very tenets of financial market regulation and of the financial theories used to explain and govern the market. The thesis argues that the third model is better able to grasp the complexity of power beyond the seemingly technical nature of financial regulation. For this reason, it is deemed more suitable to provide policy solutions that challenge the current neo-liberal framework of regulation
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