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Richard Rorty And Moral Progress In Global Relations, Eduard Jordaan Aug 2006

Richard Rorty And Moral Progress In Global Relations, Eduard Jordaan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Richard Rorty's navigation of the pitfalls of the cosmopolitan-communitarian debate, concern with human suffering, recognition of the contingency of communal identities and relationships, and his endorsement of liberal societies, by definition inclusive and always in search of a greater justice, make it appear as though his thought can guide us towards greater concern for the world's poor. However, this article questions the progressive potential of Rorty's thought. Obstacles to such (global) moral progress include Rorty's unquestioned statism and his focus on internal outsiders who are suffering and/or oppressed, instead of external outsiders beyond national borders; his insistence on a public-private …


Religion And Spaces Of Technology: Constructing And Contesting Nation, Transnation, And Place, Lily Kong May 2006

Religion And Spaces Of Technology: Constructing And Contesting Nation, Transnation, And Place, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this paper, I focus on one particular technological development that has come to influence religious practice in significant ways-religious broadcasting. Whereas computer-mediated communications now garner growing research attention, I have chosen to remember the influence of the older technology of broadcasting for its continued influence on myriad lives. In bringing this focus to bear on another major phenomenon, that of trans nationalism, I have come to understand how religious broadcasting does not contribute in a straightforward, linear fashion to perpetuating transnational identities and communities, but is instead implicated in the assertion of the national in the face of transnational …


Impact Of War And Military Service On Income Inequality In Northern Vietnam, Bussarawan Teerawichitchainan Mar 2006

Impact Of War And Military Service On Income Inequality In Northern Vietnam, Bussarawan Teerawichitchainan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

During the 1940s-1970s Vietnam experienced nearly continuous wars. Military service was almost a rite of passage for young men growing up during these decades. Evidence indicates that families during wartime viewed military service as a locus for upward mobility, as the socialist regime promised veterans various incentives, including educational benefits, employment preference, and Communist Party membership. While this series of wars over the span of three decades has left a profound imprint on the early life course trajectories of men in Vietnam, there is surprisingly little research detailing the long-term consequences of military service. Based on the Vietnam Longitudinal Survey, …


Affinities In The Socio-Political Thought Of Rorty And Levinas, Eduard Jordaan Mar 2006

Affinities In The Socio-Political Thought Of Rorty And Levinas, Eduard Jordaan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article considers the affinities in the socio-political thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Rorty. The writings of both display considerable concern for the suffering of others. Both authors note the importance of a self-critical subject becoming more aware of its own injustice as very important for recognizing our responsibilities to others. Furthermore, both stress the importance of recognizing the other outside of the usual, objectifying categories, since it is the uniqueness of the other that reminds us of our responsibility for the other. Both writers view the liberal state as the best political forum in which to realize a …


Wittgenstein, Moorean Absurdity And Its Disappearance From Speech, John N. Williams Mar 2006

Wittgenstein, Moorean Absurdity And Its Disappearance From Speech, John N. Williams

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

G. E. Moore famously observed that to say, I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don't believe that I did would be absurd. Why should it be absurd of me to say something about myself that might be true of me? Moore suggested an answer to this, but as I will show, one that fails. Wittgenstein was greatly impressed by Moore's discovery of a class of absurd but possibly true assertions because he saw that it illuminates the logic of assertion. Wittgenstein suggests a promising relation of assertion to belief in terms of the idea that one expresses …


Music And Moral Geographies: Constructions Of "Nation" And Identity In Singapore, Lily Kong Feb 2006

Music And Moral Geographies: Constructions Of "Nation" And Identity In Singapore, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this paper, I attempt to pull together sociological and geographical perspectives in the study of music to understand the ways in which pop and rock music are socio-cultural products with political and moral meanings and implications. I examine state engineering of moral panics, focusing on a case study of pop and rock music in post-independence Singapore. Such engineering is aimed at political and ideological ends, in particular, "nation"- building outcomes. In engineering moral panics through both discursive and legislative acts, the contours of a moral geography are delineated at various spatial scales. First, at the scale of the national …


Moore's Paradoxes And Conscious Belief, John N. Williams Feb 2006

Moore's Paradoxes And Conscious Belief, John N. Williams

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

For Moore, it is a paradox that although I would be absurd in asserting that (it is raining but I don’t believe it is) or that (it is raining but I believe it isn’t), such assertions might be true. But I would be also absurd in judging that the contents of such assertions are true. I argue for the strategy of explaining the absurdity of Moorean assertion in terms of conscious Moorean belief. Only in this way may the pathology of Moorean absurdity be adequately explained in terms of self-contradiction. David Rosenthal disagrees with this strategy. Ironically, his higher-order thought …


Rights Of Culture, Rights Of Conscience, Chandran Kukathas Jan 2006

Rights Of Culture, Rights Of Conscience, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this contribution I take up a particularly troubling issue in the theory of human rights. It is the issue of intervention to defend or uphold — or re-assert and re-establish — human rights. The issue is a troubling one because intervention in the affairs of others is always something we should be wary of, not least because history is full of unhappy episodes of intervention, from the Spanish in the Americas to the Chinese in Tibet. Indeed, so difficult and complex are the issues raised that one might be tempted in a discussion of human rights simply to separate …


Hayek And Liberalism, Chandran Kukathas Jan 2006

Hayek And Liberalism, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

F. A. Hayek occupies a peculiar place in the history of twentiethcentury liberalism. His influence has, in many respects, been enormous. The Road to Serfdom, his first political work, not onlyattracted popular attention in the west but also circulated widely(in samizdat form) in the intellectual underground of Eastern Europeduring the years between the end of the war and the revolutions of1989. His critique of central planning has been thoroughly vindicated, if not by the demise of communist economic systems, thenat least by the recognition by socialists of many stripes of theimportance of market processes.1 Books and articles on his thoughtcontinue …


Punishment: The Supposed Justifications Revisited, John N. Williams Jan 2006

Punishment: The Supposed Justifications Revisited, John N. Williams

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Review of Punishment: The Supposed Justifications Revisited by Ted Honderich, Pluto Press, 2006, ISBN: 9780745321318


Southeast Asian Warfare, 1300-1900, Handbook Of Oriental Studies, Section Three: South-East Asia, Volume 16 By Michael W. Charney [Book Review], Tobias Frederik Rettig Jan 2006

Southeast Asian Warfare, 1300-1900, Handbook Of Oriental Studies, Section Three: South-East Asia, Volume 16 By Michael W. Charney [Book Review], Tobias Frederik Rettig

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.