درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The theoretical vagueness of a concept such as genius loci (spirit of the place) makes often feel unsatisfied. To avoid the widespread more rhetorical trend to attributing a spirit to every place - a trend already discernible in the progressive secularisation from the Greek world (an uncanny daimon) to the Roman world (a familiar genius) – and/or to explaining it as the outcome of creative human planning (especially architectural-urban), my paper states that a place has its specific genius only if it radiates a specific and particularly intense-authoritative atmosphere. That is, when the place is pervaded by a quasi-objective feeling that affects the perceiver and finds in their felt (or lived) body its precise sounding board. Just as there are different types of atmospheres (prototypic, derivative, spurious) and atmospheric encounters, there are therefore different types of genius loci, also depending on one's conception of space, here always understood as lived space, i.e. qualitative-anisotropic, and not in a physical-geometric (isotropic) sense. Contrary to the today’s prevailing projectivist-constructionist explanation (culturalist as well as neuroscientific) and the tendency to explain every affective quality inherent in the external world as a subjective projection, i.e. according to an hydraulic model following the Platonic “invention” of the soul, a “pathic aesthetics” based on a neo-phenomenological approach means with genius loci, in the authentic and original sense of the term, a lifewordly qualitative-emotional experience: in brief a spatialised atmospheric feeling that can sometimes be protected, maybe also improved but never arbitrarily created.

In this essay I examine Hegel’s critique of England and France in his own day, and I argue that this critique sheds light on what he would say about constitutional states in the twenty-first century. Hegel’s critique is based on the normative “idea” of freedom he sets out in his Philosophy of Right (1820). This idea, which in Hegel’s view determines what rights and institutions are necessary for true freedom, gives a central role to what he calls “corporations” — business or trade associations, but also local communities and towns — in the free, rational state. The purpose of these corporations is twofold: first, to render economic activity cooperative and “ethical”, and so to prevent the emergence of systematic poverty, and second, to send delegates to the legislature who represent legitimate interests in civil society, rather than just numbers of people. Hegel argues, however, that corporations disappeared or were abolished in England and France and that this led to extreme poverty in England and to the “liberal” idea in France that political authority should derive from the individual will (an idea that in turn sets the “people” permanently against government). I argue that poverty and individualistic “liberalism” remain problems in the twenty-first century, and that a Hegelian solution to these problems would be to reintroduce corporations (or their equivalent) something that Hegel himself advocated in the 1820s. Hegel’s alternative to unrestrained capitalism and liberalism both of which he thinks undermine true freedom and right is thus not, as Marx recommends, to abolish the system of free production and exchange altogether, but to imbue citizens with an ethical concern for one another in their economic and political life an ethical concern that is grounded in corporations, associations and other communities.

South Asian ethnic minorities (SAEMs) represent a growing population in Hong Kong public education. However, schools struggle to offer them fair and equitable education. One frequently mentioned, but rarely studied component in their performance is teachers’ lower expectations. This article reports on a qualitative case study to examine ethnically Chinese teachers’ expectations of South Asian students in a public primary school in Hong Kong. Five Chinese teachers were interviewed, with observations in three of these teachers’ classrooms. Results indicate teachers have lower expectations. Several influencing factors were identified, including perceptions of cultural differences between Chinese teachers and South Asian ethnic minorities’ families and inadequate training of teachers in Chinese as a second language and incorporating diversified learning strategies into the curriculum. This is one of the first studies specifically focused on exploring in greater details primary teachers’ expectations about South Asian students in Hong Kong.