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Then as now, mass protest was a powerful weapon deployed by enraged citizens who felt they had nowhere else to turn but the streets. Thirty years later, it’s clear how far Korean democracy has advanced. Then, South Korea was a dictatorship, protests were outlawed and the threat of torture, imprisonment and martial law ever-present.

Students have long been at the vanguard of South Korea’s robust history of protest, drawing on deep-rooted Confucian traditions that elevated scholars as guardians of morality.

Yonsei produced its own martyr, 21-year-old Lee Han-yol, who died after a tear-gas canister hit him in the head.

The prevailing view within the discipline is that scholars should set aside moral values and political concerns in favour of detached enquiry into the mechanics of how the political world functions.

But I have yet to be convinced by the idea that the study of politics can be apolitical and value-neutral. Our choice of research topics will inevitably reflect our own political and moral priorities, and the way in which that research is framed and conducted is bound to reflect assumptions which – whether held consciously, semi-consciously or unconsciously – remain of a moral and political nature.

the social psychologist Sheena Iyengar asked 100 American and Japanese college students to take a piece of paper. On one side, she had them write down the decisions in life they would like to make for themselves. On the other, they wrote the decisions they would like to pass on to others.

The Americans desired choice in four times more domains than the Japanese.

Americans now have more choices over more things than any other culture in human history. We can choose between a broader array of foods, media sources, lifestyles and identities. We have more freedom to live out our own sexual identities and more religious and nonreligious options to express our spiritual natures.

The vast majority of philosophy departments in the United States offer courses only on philosophy derived from Europe and the English-speaking world. For example, of the 118 doctoral programs in philosophy in the United States and Canada, only 10 percent have a specialist in Chinese philosophy as part of their regular faculty. Most philosophy departments also offer no courses on Africana, Indian, Islamic, Jewish, Latin American, Native American or other non-European traditions. Indeed, of the top 50 philosophy doctoral programs in the English-speaking world, only 15 percent have any regular faculty members who teach any non-Western philosophy.

Given the importance of non-European traditions in both the history of world philosophy and in the contemporary world, and given the increasing numbers of students in our colleges and universities from non-European backgrounds, this is astonishing. No other humanities discipline demonstrates this systematic neglect of most of the civilizations in its domain. The present situation is hard to justify morally, politically, epistemically or as good educational and research training practice.

While a few philosophy departments have made their curriculums more diverse, and while the American Philosophical Association has slowly broadened the representation of the world’s philosophical traditions on its programs, progress has been minimal.

Empathy seems to be a quality you can never overdo. It’s like a megavitamin of emotionally relating: the more you display, the better a human you are.

In his last book, Just Babies, he argued humans are born moral, no religion required.

Telling someone empathy is overrated is akin to stating puppies are useless and ugly.

Cohen outlined a vision of 'Net-enabled scholarly publishing that I can only think to call the aggregation model: editorial committees scanning the 'Net to find the most interesting scholarly content in a given field or discipline, and highlighting it through websites and e-mail blasts that hearken back to the early days when weblogs were literally just collections of links with one- or two-sentence summaries attached. (An example, edited by Cohen and some of his associates: Digital Humanities Now.) Some of that work consists of traditional books and articles, but much of it consists of blog posts, online debates, etc. This model gives us scholarly work from the bottom up, instead of generating published scholarly work by tossing a piece into the random crapshoot of putatively blind peer-review and crossing your fingers to see what happens. It also gives us scholarly work that can be certified as such by the collective deliberation of the community, which "votes" for pieces and ideas by reading them, recirculating them, linking to them, and other signs of interest and approval that can be easily tracked with traffic-tracing tools. And then, on top of that editorial aggregation -- Cohen made a great point that this kind of aggregation shouldn't be fully automated, because automated tools reward "loudmouths" and popular voices that just get retweeted a lot; human editors can do a lot to surface novel insights and new voices -- an open-access journal that curates the best of those linked items into published pieces, perhaps with some revisions and peer review/commentary.

I have been arguing for years that academic activity is distinctive and that it is wrong, both descriptively and normatively, to mix it up with other kinds of activity, especially with politics. In response, I am often asked how a discussion, either in a class or at a conference like this one, could be kept purely academic if the subject matter on the table is itself inherently political. The answer is really quite simple:  Political subject matter could be the starting point of an intellectual inquiry in the course of which the political urgency originally attached to it is replaced by the academic urgency of getting something right, where “right” means accurately described or analyzed or rendered more problematic. (In the academic world not reaching a resolution is a good thing.)

The urgency presiding over the occasion was not the urgency of doing something, but of understanding something, and everyone agreed that the project of understanding was an endless one and that the best we could do in two days would be to expose areas of concern that had not yet been recognized or adequately formulated. The comment heard most often at the end of a session was, “ You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

that’s what we do when we’re doing the job properly — talking (or writing about) issues without ever coming up with a policy proposal or with an argument for supporting a party or a candidate.

the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy

I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated.

The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals.

Ancient Egyptians did not speak to posterity only through hieroglyphs. Those elaborate pictographs were the elite script for recording the lives and triumphs of pharaohs in their tombs and on the monumental stones along the Nile. But almost from the beginning, people in everyday life spoke a different language and wrote a different script, a simpler one that evolved from the earliest hieroglyphs.

Now, scholars at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago have completed almost 40 years of research and published online the final entries of a 2,000-page dictionary that more than doubles the thousands of known Demotic words.

Janet H. Johnson, an Egyptologist at the university’s Oriental Institute who has devoted much of her career to editing the Chicago Demotic Dictionary, called it “an indispensable tool for reconstructing the social, political and cultural life of ancient Egypt during a fascinating period,” when the land was usually dominated by foreigners — first Persians, then Greeks and finally Romans.

What would a new full-fledged pictorial language—not the hieroglyphics of old, but a language built to suit the social media-mentality of “right here, right now, this is who I am, who I’m with, and what I’m up to”—look like?

He tried to make a handful of minced meat stick to a skewer, and said, sardonically, “See here, true Sharia has finally arrived in Swat.”

2009, the Pakistani Army launched an offensive to drive the Taliban out of Swat—and forced Fazlullah across the border, into Afghanistan. These days, the valley is relatively peaceful, and Pakistani tourists have returned in droves.

Mehsud, who had been “killed” by American drone strikes on at least two previous occasions, was actually killed by another drone strike at the start of November—transforming him overnight, in the eyes of Pakistani politicians and commentators, from a mass murderer into a marty

The fact that many of our self-protective delusions are built into the way the brain works is no justification for not trying to override them. Knowing how dissonance works helps us identify our own inclinations to perpetuate errors -- and protect ourselves from those who can’t. Or won’t.Related LinksWhat Historians Can Learn from the Social Sciences and Sciences /* * * CONFIGURATION VARIABLES: EDIT BEFORE PASTING INTO YOUR WEBPAGE * * */ var disqus_shortname = 'hnndev'; // required: replace example with your forum shortname /* * * DON'T EDIT BELOW THIS LINE * * */ (function() { var dsq = document.createElement('script'); dsq.type = 'text/javascript'; dsq.async = true; dsq.src = '//' + disqus_shortname + '.disqus.com/embed.js'; (document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(dsq); })(); Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. News Breaking News Historians DC Breaking News Historians DC ‘Scottsboro Boys’ pardoned in Alabama ‘November 22, 1963’ U-Boat discovered off the coast of Indonesia Vatican publicly unveils bone fragments said to belong to St. Peter Pictured: the 'real site' of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon Historian: Taiwan can use WWII legacy to improve standing with China 'I Take Long Walks': The Emotional Lives of Holocaust Scholars Chinese historian: Xi Jinping a master of "neo-authoritarianism" History Comes to Life With Tweets From Past Celtic Paths, Illuminated by a Sundial try{for(var lastpass_iter=0; lastpass_iter < document.forms.length; lastpass_iter++){ var lastpass_f = document.forms[lastpass_iter]; if(typeof(lastpass_f.lpsubmitorig2)=="undefined"){ lastpass_f.lpsubmitorig2 = lastpass_f.submit; lastpass_f.submit = function(){ var form=this; var customEvent = document.createEvent("Event"); customEvent.initEvent("lpCustomEvent", true, true); var d = document.getElementById("hiddenlpsubmitdiv"); for(var i = 0; i < document.forms.length; i++){ if(document.forms[i]==form){ d.innerText=i; } } d.dispatchEvent(customEvent); form.lpsubmitorig2(); } } }}catch(e){}

at last, history has gotten into bed with psychological science, and it’s a happy match. History gives us the data of, in Barbara Tuchman’s splendid words, our march of folly -- repeated examples of human beings unable and unwilling to learn from mistakes, let alone to admit them. Cognitive science shows us why

Our brains, which have allowed us to travel into outer space, have a whole bunch of design flaws, which is why we have so much breathtaking bumbling here on Earth.

people who suspect conspiracies aren’t really skeptics. Like the rest of us, they’re selective doubters. They favor a worldview, which they uncritically defend. But their worldview isn’t about God, values, freedom, or equality. It’s about the omnipotence of elites.

the prevalence of such belief, documented in surveys, has forced scholars to take it more seriously. Conspiracy theory psychology is becoming an empirical field with a broader mission: to understand why so many people embrace this way of interpreting history.

“People low in trust of others are likely to believe that others are colluding against them,” the authors proposed. This sort of distrust, in other words, favors a certain kind of belief. It makes you more susceptible, not less, to claims of conspiracy.

for example, the main story is about Superman needing to accept and embrace his awesomeness; Wonder Woman is mostly there to advise and comfort and tell him his values are great before giving him the kiss that awakens him to his destiny

especially frustrating because, initially, the whole point of Wonder Woman was that the world needed her and not Superman.

was a psychologist and a committed feminist, and he conceived Wonder Woman as a superior replacement for the Man of Steel. In a 1944 article for The American Scholar, he noted that, "Superman and his innumerable followers satisfy the universal human longing to be stronger than all opposing obstacles."&nbsp; He added that "the wish to be super-strong is a healthy wish, a vital, compelling, power-producing desire."

Even the most fanatical pedant must admit that usage is the ultimate arbiter of linguistic propriety. That is to say, a word means a certain thing because significant numbers of people take it to mean a certain thing. An informal process has evolved to monitor any shift in definition. At one end of the spectrum we meet words that will, from time to time, be “mistakenly” used in a way that does not conform to the dictionary definition. A chap might write “limpid” when he means “flaccid”. This still counts as an error. At the other end, we encounter words that, after decades of squabbling, have had their meaning formally transformed. Classical scholars will tell you that, derived from a term used by the Roman military, “decimate” used to mean the killing of one in 10 of any accused group. Now, we take it to mean the same as “annihilate” (which itself used to mean “make null and void”). The really interesting, contentious words can be found in the middle section of the spectrum.

Puett's course&nbsp;Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory&nbsp;has become the third most popular course at the university. The only classes with higher enrollment are Intro to Economics and Intro to Computer Science.

the class fulfills one of Harvard's more challenging core requirements, Ethical Reasoning. It's clear, though, that students are also lured in by Puett's bold promise: “This course will change your life.”

Puett uses Chinese philosophy as a way to give undergraduates concrete, counter-intuitive, and even revolutionary ideas, which teach them how to live a better life.&nbsp;

Fame, riches and pleasure beyond imagination. Sound great? He went on to write:“I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: They amount to 14.”Abd al-Rahman’s problem wasn’t happiness, as he believed — it was unhappiness

Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but they are not actually opposites.

Circumstances are certainly important. No doubt Abd al-Rahman could point to a few in his life. But paradoxically, a better explanation for his unhappiness may have been his own search for well-being. And the same might go for you.Continue reading the main story

Mooney uses two studies to argue that conservative religious belief can trigger climate change denial — namely, a chart created by Josh Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education and new study conducted by David Konisky and Matthew Arbuckle of Georgetown and the University of Cincinnati, respectively.

Although the exact definition of “conservative religious beliefs” is actively debated among religion scholars, these attributes fall squarely under Mooney’s own definition of church-going conservatives.

Perhaps most importantly for lawmakers, the survey also found that majorities of all major American religious groups — including 82 percent of Jewish Americans, 76 percent of black Protestants, and 69 percent of Hispanic Catholics — agreed that dealing with climate change now will help prevent future economic problems.

To better understand the roots of racial division in America, think about this:The human brain seems to be wired so that it categorizes people by race in the first one-fifth of a second after seeing a face. Brain scans show that even when people are told to sort people by gender, the brain still groups people by race.

Racial bias also begins astonishingly early: Even infants often show a preference for their own racial group. In one study, 3-month-old white infants were shown photos of faces of white adults and black adults; they preferred the faces of whites. For 3-month-old black infants living in Africa, it was the reverse.

Scholars suggest that in evolutionary times we became hard-wired to make instantaneous judgments about whether someone is in our “in group” or not — because that could be lifesaving. A child who didn’t prefer his or her own group might have been at risk of being clubbed to death.

My aim is not to spare students from a difficult subject, but to call attention to the real problems we are causing by misdirecting precious resources.

one in four ninth graders fail to finish high school. In South Carolina, 34 percent fell away in 2008-9, according to national data released last year; for Nevada, it was 45 percent. Most of the educators I’ve talked with cite algebra as the major academic reason.

Algebra is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white. In New Mexico, 43 percent of white students fell below “proficient,” along with 39 percent in Tennessee