Globalization of Ethics Can Bond Regions By: Hans Kung | The Japan Times Many Europeans doubt that Asia can catch up with Europe in terms of regional integration. But Asia not only has the type of stable common ethical foundations that were so important to European integration; it also has a well developed set of moral principles, some of which were an established part of Asian culture long before similar principles were adopted in Europe.

When Iran was Welcomed into the Nuclear Club:In all the recent back-and-forth about the capabilities of Iran to produce a nuclear bomb, it is well to remember how Iran was once welcomed into the nuclear club defending the free world (well, not that free in Iran at that time), when the Shah was in now-all-too-clear power.

Lectures on Heidegger / Being and Time

by Reflection Cafe

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Hubert Dreyfus/Univ. of California-Berkeley

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One of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century, Being and Time is both a systematization of the existential insights of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and a radicalization of Husserl's phenomenological account of intentionality. What results is an original interpretation of the human condition leading to an account of the nature and limitations of philosophical and scientific theory. This account has important implications for all those disciplines that study human beings........

Paris Week - A Major Series of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary Art SalesPablo Picasso, Un Matin au Harem, 1954

Climate change: all together now, Tom Burke

The "global" problem of climate change is endlessly discussed, but rarely looked at in a cold light. The crux of the matter is that all of us, everywhere, share this same monumental problem. To prosper we need energy security; but if we persist in using fossil-fuels with current technologies, our prosperity will founder. The roadmap drawn up at the Bali climate-change convention on 3-14 December 2007 will show what we need to do to establish the post-Kyoto regime. But to get through the ferocious complexity of the process, we will need a change of mindset. Moving away from a focus on who is to blame and who should act first, we must gain a new political maturity.

From Time, an article on the death of French culture: The land of Proust, Monet, Piaf and Truffaut has lost its status as a cultural superpower — can it regain its glory?

John Lichfield: The death of French culture? I don't think so

From TLS, a review of books on Nicolas Sarkozy

Promising Prospects for Islam & Democracy

by Patricia Lee Sharpe

Below are some excerpts from a thoughtful and well-informed paper on "Political Islam and the Future of Democracy in the Middle East" by Radwan Masmoudi, an MIT engineering graduate who is now President of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy. (You might also check out their website and see what went on at their latest conference on the Rights of Women in Islam and Muslim Societies.)

Tips for academic job applications

By alex on General

Obviously, I cannot talk about our current hiring process, but I can say that academic hiring is always a difficult process—all the more difficult because it tends to be fraught with administrative restrictions in a way most hiring in the private sector is not. This is the fifth academic search committee I’ve been on, I think (plus chairing one more committee for hiring an administrative university position), and so, I have some bits of advice to pass along. All of this comes from real applications, without going into specifics.

would you date someone with no books on their shelves?

By sebastian mary

I'm not completely sure about the netiquette of blogging about a conversation heard around the digital watercooler, ie on a close-knit community messageboard; but I came across one such recently that made me pause.

Paraphrased, the thread started out asking about the ethics of going through other people's stuff. But it moved on to the subject of snooping on others' bookshelves. The question then became: if you were left alone in someone else's house the morning after a date, would you make a judgement about their suitability for future dates from their book collection? The answer was an overwhelming yes.

"digitization and its discontents"

By ben vershbow

Anthony Grafton's New Yorker piece "Future Reading" paints a forbidding picture of the global digital library currently in formation on public and private fronts around the world (Google et al.). The following quote sums it up well—a refreshing counterpoint to the millenarian hype we so often hear w/r/t mass digitization:

Who are the 10 most influential on climate change?

by Blake Hounshell

The Weather Channel recently announced something called the "Forecast Earth 2007 Hot List," billed as the world's most influential people when it comes to climate change. Most of the list is predictable, if a bit myopically focused on New York (New Yorkers always think their glorified provincial town is the capital of the universe):

The best books of 2007

From sport to science, from art to politics – our critics choose their favourite titles of the year

The Global Gender Regime: Persistence or Decline?

by Shawn Dorius

Does Culture Matter for Development? AFD
Papers delivered at this conference addressing the relationship between culture and development

Gladwell: Problems With IQ Tests

By Amardeep

Malcolm Gladwell's latest in the New Yorker is a must-read for anyone who's been stuck arguing with an IQ fetishist at a dinner party (sadly, this has happened to me once too often). Gladwell relies heavily on the work of James Flynn, who has a new book out called What is Intelligence?. Flynn shows that IQ scores, in various parts of the world, tend to rise over time -- and delves into the

The Two Nobel Lectures of Doris Lessing

By J.E. Luebering

The Internet has fragmented culture and destroyed reading.

That seems to be the essence of Doris Lessing’s Nobel Lecture, given last Friday on the occasion of her having been named the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. (So, at least, has it has been distilled in newspapers and elsewhere online over the course of this week.)

More specifically, Lessing’s charge against the Internet is this:

Der Spiegel Weighing the Global League: Study Ranks World Powers

The End of the Vasco de Gama Era Lowy Institute A 35-page Australian paper on the changing balance of power in global politics

Globalisation and Diplomacy NUPI A 16-page Norwegian working paper discussing possible consequences of globalisation for the character and conduct of diplomacy

Lucian Freud Show Explores Crucial Relationship Between Etchings and Works on Canvas;Self-Portrait: Reflection (detail). 2002

You are what you read

By Kiki

I'm currently reading this article in the Guardian, which focuses on the reading habits of the Brits, the French, and the Americans during the holidays. For example, it points that Americans in general prefers to buy self-help books. This fact doesn't surprise me because Americans are so practical that they believe that anything can be taught and that there is a secret formula to having a successful life. The French on the other hand are more idealistic and prefer to believe that it is more important to learn philosophical principles rather than just the knowhow, which is meaningless if you don't understand the why of things. I agree with them. Sugary excerpt:

Today's girls prefer to look sexy rather than be clever

Guardian:Women have fought for decades to be treated as men's equals. Yet today's girls are being told that female empowerment simply comes from being 'sexy', according to a new book by the managing editor of the Harvard Law Review.
In Prude: How The Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls, Carol Platt Liebau says popular culture is undermining girls' sense of worth in their most vulnerable, formative years and glorifying destructive behaviour .

Risk-taking men 'not attractive'

BBC: Women are not attracted to dare-devil men, US researchers believe.
Men thought the opposite sex would be attracted by risky stunts such as bungee jumping and fast driving, a study of 48 men and 52 women found.

"Skepticism" and Ignorance: Experts can be wrong, but non-experts aren't the best corrective.

Doctoral education in the United States needs serious reforms: A review of The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century.

From In These Times, Slavoj Zizek on China's valley of tears: Is authoritarian capitalism the future?

Shakespeare' s art works like the cry of "action" on a film set, by sudden peaks of excitement and drama breaking through into consciousness... more »

From Democratiya, a review of The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West by Mark Lilla; The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the West by Lee Harris; and Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 by Matthias Kuntzel (and more).

A language for the world: An interview with Amartya Sen.

From Think Tank, broadcasting in the war of ideas: Are the lessons of the Cold War applicable to the battle with radical militant Islam?

An interview with Francis Fukuyama, editor of Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics .

From Monthly Review, Samir Amin on political Islam in the service of imperialism.

How secure are your online passwords
'Americans talk of the death of French culture'
Bernard-Henri Levy on why France has been stung by a lament in Time magazine that French culture is all but dead

From Wired, Clive Thompson on the Age of Microcelebrity: Why everyone's a little Brad Pitt.

Hittites 'used germ warfare 3,500 years ago'

Global climate change, war, and population decline in recent human history
Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

A history to be handed down

by Laurent Dubois, Michel Giraud, Marc-Olivier Padis, Lilian Thuram, Patrick Weil

The Caribbean-born French footballer Lilian Thuram talks about his longstanding interest in the history of slavery, about the positive function of national identity, and why it is too soon to write off the French model of integration.

Pluralism by default

by Mykola Riabchuk

Like liquid levels in communicating vessels, the attitudes of government and people will remain level as long as they are connected by regular elections. Mykola Riabchuk on Ukraine's democratic development since the early 1990s and the future of the new coalition government.

The disposal of democracy

by Christian Höller, Jacques Rancière

While the western democratic system still serves a prototypical function for the rest of the world, internally it is faced with a range of challenges. The most serious of these, says Jacques Rancière, is an attack from a power elite that has nominated itself the "true guardian of democratic values".

Hans Küng: The Globalization of Ethics

Asian and Western values are not nearly as far apart as many assume. On the contrary, core values, including the principle of humanity, the Golden Rule of Reciprocity, and ethical injunctions against killing, stealing, lying, and abusing sexuality, are shared by all of the world's major religions.

Žižek on Critchley

by Jeremy

Funnily enough and coming in quite timely, Slavoj Žižek has a piece in the 15 November issue of London Review of Books which discusses resistance and why Critchley’s position is problematic. He says: The response of some critics on the postmodern Left to this predicament is to call for a new politics of resistance. Those who still [...]

Carnegie Mellon Study Ranks Most Informative Blogs

The mathematical geniuses at Carnegie Mellon have used complex mathematics to answer the following question: if you could only read 100 of the millions of blogs on the Internet and you wanted to keep up with what the blogosphere is talking about, which blogs should you read? Well, guess what? Our sister site, BloggersBlog.com is number 8 on the list! Congratulations, guys!

The list is an interesting one. There are political blogs from both the right and left, at least one gossip blog and other blogs that span the spectrum. Here are the top 20:

You can see list of all 100 of the top blogs here.

Violence and embodiment, James R Mensch

by James R Mensch

Some years ago, a striking exhibition of photographs made its rounds through the galleries. I remember seeing it in Brno, in the Czech Republic. Its subject was the ravages of the civil war in Sierra Leon-in particular, the amputations inflicted on the people there. One particular photograph held my attention: a woman without hands holding her child. She was clearly a victim of physical violence. But what she suffered was something more than that.

Extimité: On Žižek and Race

by ash sharma

Call for Papers - Special issue of International Journal of Žižek Studies http://zizekstudies.org Guest Editors: Ashwani Sharma (ash.disorient@gmail.com) and Valerie Hill (v.hill@coventry.ac.uk) The notion of race is routinely invoked in contemporary academia while at the same time its analysis is dissipated across a range of disciplines and topics so that it seems it has either [...]

Erkan's field diary

"Tips for academic job applications...