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Abstract
Unions’ presence and influence in the United States continue to atrophy. One key reason for this decline is the difficulties in certifying via the National Labor Relations Act. Consequently, labor-oriented scholars have developed proposals to overhaul and/or supplement this process. One of the most far-reaching is the ‘Clean Slate’. We contend that, though a welcome advance, ‘Clean Slate’ is a necessary but insufficient law reform to revive unions. Accordingly, we suggest a complementary policy, the union default, to the ‘Clean Slate’. With a union default, ‘Clean Slate’ would produce a much swifter and more dramatic resurgence in union membership and resources, sparking a badly needed virtuous upward spiral.
Abstract
This text comprises three distinct sections. In the initial part, we give an overview of some specificities of Croatian, i.e., national philosophy. In the subsequent section, five Croatian women philosophers are represented from the perspective of their contributions to Croatian philosophy; we offer an overview of their works and evaluate their overall contributions to Croatian philosophy. Finally, in the concluding section, we provide an explanation for the notably heightened significance of Croatian women philosophers in advancing the exploration of national philosophy in comparison to their male counterparts.
Abstract
This article analyzes the interactions of artists, Mexico’s Communist Party, or the Partido Comunista Mexicano (pcm), and the Mexican state within the context of Mexico’s vibrant post-revolutionary era. Although during these early years the Party’s official membership numbers remained relatively minimal, this article argues that the extraordinary influence of Mexico’s creative participants on the politics of the period was significant. During the 1920s the pcm derived a great deal of prestige from its association with art and the muralists, including Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and as a result Mexico’s lively political and artistic scene attracted the attention of writers, photographers, artists, and intellectuals from all over the world. Art and politics intertwined as artists played major roles in political affairs, and politicians appropriated the arts to transmit the “official” national history. Indeed, during these exhilarating years, the artists and the pcm built a powerful coalition, and one whose influence endured long beyond the 1920s.
Abstract
The article examines the conceptualization of the struggle of Ukrainian women for the right to higher education by the Ukrainian historian Liudmyla Smoliar. In the book The Past for the Sake of the Future, she analyzed this topic in a socio-political and cultural context. The researcher noted that under the influence of the social movement of the early 1860s, women were allowed to study at the universities of Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa. Achievements and victories of the pioneers of this field were interspersed with obstacles and new prohibitions. Economic dependence on parents, and then on husbands, outdated legal norms, and political discrimination forced women to look for ways of self-realization. Summarizing the circumstances in which women had to assert their right to education, the researcher concluded that women gradually achieved convincing success, overcoming numerous obstacles at each stage of the arduous struggle for their rights to higher education.
Abstract
In the late Middle Ages, Christine de Pizan contributed decisively to the development of Renaissance humanist ideas, which later resulted in the principle of the Enlightenment. In The Book of the City of Ladies, she laid the foundation for establishing a self-determined way of thinking that did not rely on authorities in the search for truth, but on the individual mind and one’s own experience as primary sources of knowledge—she urged people to have the courage to use their own senses. This now famous appeal is mainly and primarily associated with Kant and the Enlightenment, although de Pizan had already formulated a similar postulate 380 years earlier. The study of de Pizan also provides evidence that ideas of (early) female thinkers are partly integrated into the (philosophical) work of later male thinkers and sold as their own sole intellectual property. Only by determining the role of women in (philosophical) history do such facts become clear.
Abstract
Mahāmayūrī, the Great Wisdom Peacock King, is typically depicted in East Asian art with multiple arms and seated atop a peacock mount. Mahāmayūrī mural paintings suddenly appear in eight of the Mogao and Yulin caves during the tenth century. Taking into account that the earliest translations of the Mahāmayūrī dhāraṇī sūtra were executed between the fourth and eighth centuries and that textual accounts record Mahāmayūrī imagery in Chinese art as early as the seventh and eighth centuries, the late appearance of the motif at Dunhuang invites further examination. This paper argues that the Mahāmayūrī image cult not only was transmitted to Dunhuang from Khotan, but also that it appeared primarily in cave shrines that were associated with the Cao clan, who were the local rulers of Dunhuang. During the tenth century, the Cao clan engaged in marriage alliances with the ruling clan of Khotan. The patronage by the Cao clan of a motif associated with the Khotanese would have demonstrated the alliance between the two clans in the face of increasing instability in Central Asia: dual threats from the Karakhanids to the west and the Uyghurs to the east. In this manner, my paper demonstrates that the impact of war and political instability on Silk Road imagery was as profound as that of the trade and the tribute system.
Abstract
Archaeological remains of bamboo and wooden slips of the Chinese classics are not only found in China. Slips of the Analects of Confucius have been discovered in Korea. Slips of the Thousand Character Classic, the Analects, and other Chinese classics have been unearthed in Japan. Bamboo slips of the Analects in Korea are the result of Han dynasty promotion of administrative documents on the frontier. Later wooden slips in Korea bear witness to the promotion of Confucianism and the continuation of foreign exchanges. Wooden slips in Japan signal the further spread of Chinese-character culture. From a broader East Asian perspective, slips of Chinese classics serve as carriers of knowledge and skills, of Confucianism, and of conceptions of government. This chapter explores the many ways Chinese culture was localized outside of China through the spread of Chinese classics in the form of bamboo and wooden slips.
Abstract
As the meeting place between east and west, Dunhuang not only was a hub for finance and trade but also lay at the intersection between Chinese and foreign cultural exchange. The manuscripts from the Dunhuang library cave contain books and scrolls that were left behind by non-locals who came from east to west. There are also manuscripts that were brought back by Dunhuang natives who traveled between the east and west. These “non-local texts” are the bearers of cultural exchange between Dunhuang and other regions; a number of them are the result of the convergence of Chinese culture and outlying civilizations. As such, they also provide historical testimony of the integration of eastern and western cultures in Dunhuang and their influence upon the population of Dunhuang. In the past, scholars have mostly examined Dunhuang during certain historical periods or textual exchanges with certain regions, paying close attention to contacts between Dunhuang and Chang’an, Sichuan, Tibet, and so forth. However, few have entirely counted or grasped the non-local texts from the Dunhuang manuscript corpus. To address this lacuna, this essay attempts to systematically collect and categorize these texts, analyze their distribution as well as evolution across time and space, and simultaneously try to investigate their contents and manner of introduction to Dunhuang. Doing so will hopefully help us to understand the relationship between this group of manuscripts and Dunhuang from a holistic perspective.