After the political fragmentation of the “Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms” period, the Northern Song consolidated much of the lands under these regional states into a larger polity in a process often described as “reunification.” But this “reunification,” judged against the domain of the Tang dynasty, was incomplete. The “Sixteen Prefectures” to the northeast were ceded to the Liao, and this became a vexing issue for Song emperors and officials. But the northeast was not the only region once under Tang rule that did not enter the Song domain. In this article, I discuss the area to the northwest of the Song, much of which was eventually governed by the Tangut Xia state. This area, roughly the modern provinces of Ningxia and Gansu, featured prominently in Northern Song political discussions, national geographical treatises, and national and regional maps. By analyzing the treatment of the northwest in these diverse genres of representation, I demonstrate a spectrum in the perceptions of the northwest. It was sometimes seen as little different from areas under Song rule; in other cases, it was treated as “beyond the sphere of civilization” (huawai). Such ambiguity is visualized in many Song cartographers who placed this area between two segments of the Great Wall. For Song emperors and officials, the northwest sat uncomfortably in their imaginations of the world, not easily dismissed and forgotten, yet irrecoverable.

The academic subfields of ‘science and religion’ and ‘Islamic sciences’ have witnessed significant developments in recent decades. Despite historians discrediting outdated narratives, persistent ideas within the public sphere prompt the need for a comprehensive ‘big picture’. This paper examines the historiographical developments in the fields of ‘science and religion’ and ‘Islamic sciences’, emphasizing the necessity for a ‘big picture’ that acknowledges the intricate histories of these areas. It traces the evolution of both fields, challenging the ‘conflict thesis’ and the ‘Golden Age’ narrative, and advocating for interdisciplinary perspectives that are global. This paper aims to advocate for an approach defining ‘science’ and ‘religion’ within their temporal and geographical contexts, to foster a deeper understanding of their intertwined histories.

As a collection of methods oriented toward the artefacts of human expression and the minds that shaped those expressions, intellectual history seems well placed to mobilize the category of the aesthetic, yet the aesthetic is rarely a focus on methodological discussions. The special forum that this article introduces explores what an “aesthetic approach” to intellectual history might look like. It focuses on the work of leading twentieth-century liberal Isaiah Berlin (1909–97), whose amorphous role in the history of intellectual history means that his work offers a parallax view on important questions of method and approach. In introducing this special forum, this article situates Isaiah Berlin’s distinctive approach and varied work as a historian of ideas and defender of liberalism within several larger contexts. One is Berlin’s response to tendencies in post-World War II British philosophy, and his turn to the history of ideas—an understanding of this area of study as requiring essentially aesthetic qualities of judgment, imagination, pattern recognition, and empathetic entry into the perspectives of others. A second is the development of other, more influential approaches to the history of ideas, to which Berlin’s approach is briefly contrasted. A third is the ideological struggles of the Cold War; in this last connection, we explore the affinities between Berlin’s awareness, and affirmation, of the aesthetic and the ethical in his articulation of liberalism.

This article examines the role of state-owned firms in economic growth. While some scholars denigrate state firms, most analysts of East Asian development have noted their importance. To date, however, little work has been done on how state firms operate and how they have actually contributed to industrial development and economic growth. Looking closely at postwar Taiwan as a newly industrializing country and the case of Taiwan Machinery Manufacturing Corporation (TMMC), this article argues that state enterprises resolved coordination failures and provided manufacturing capacity to infant industries. Drawing on company archives and state records, I argue that TMMC helped drive growth through the provision of manufacturing machinery, equipment, parts, repairs, and upgrading. By supplying firms with the necessary technology and materials to modernize production and be competitive on the global market, I show how TMMC helped facilitate Taiwan’s economic miracle.

Exploring the fundamental constituents of the matter around us and in the Universe, as well as their interactions, is among the premier goals of physics. Investigating ultrarelativistic collisions in particle accelerators has delivered answers to these questions many times in the past decades. In this article we focus on the research aimed at recreating the matter that filled the Universe in the first microsecond after the Big Bang – but this time in collisions of heavy ions. In particular, we discuss the technique called femtoscopy, which provides us with a tool to understand the space–time structure of particle creation in heavy-ion collisions. We use Lévy-stable distributions to investigate this structure and explore its dependence on particle momentum and collision energy.

This paper explores the intense bond formed between two Qing women, Li Ti and Huang Xunying, as well as their double suicide. The sheer survival of the rich personal and family narratives (in both poetry and prose) surrounding their relationship and suicides represents a startling discovery. By actively resisting the restrictions imposed by the patriarchal family and social order and explicitly defining an unbreakable union marked by moral commitment to and spiritual connection with each other, Li Ti and Huang embody the concept of queerness in today’s usage. The two women’s double suicide, furthermore, posed an extreme form of social protest and an individual quest for freedom. Despite being historically conditioned and ideologically mediated, the excavated primary sources, such as Li Ti’s own poems, challenge not only the norms of their time and place, but also our scholarly consensus about women’s lives in China’s past.

We have increasingly sophisticated ways of acquiring and communicating knowledge, yet, paradoxically, we are currently facing an unprecedented global ignorance crisis that affects our personal and societal well-being, as well as the stability of our democracies. There are two key triggers to this crisis, i.e. two crucial obstacles to learning: first, the widespread sharing of disinformation, which, in conjunction with an overly trusting audience, contributes to widely spread false beliefs, and correspondingly reckless political and social behaviour. At the same time, though, and at least as critical, is the prevalence of knowledge resistance and distrust in expertise. What we need to solve this high-stakes puzzle is a social epistemological framework that is able to explain the complex mechanisms underlying these surprising and unprecedented epistemic phenomena. This article will aim to sketch the contours of such a framework.

The work of Ronald Dworkin was central to the development of twentieth-century anglophone legal philosophy. This article offers the first discussion of a previously unknown and unpublished book manuscript by Dworkin which shows that he initially grounded his early legal thought in a wide-ranging methodological framework centered on ordinary language philosophy. Amidst heated debates over the draft for the Vietnam War, Dworkin developed a modified version of ordinary language analysis which, he contended, facilitated a critical stance towards what he called “conventional morality.” In this light, the widely acknowledged influence of the legal process school on Dworkin's early work appears as a transition from an earlier engagement with ordinary language philosophy. I conclude by tracing how Dworkin shifted towards the legal process school and how this reshaped the theoretical ambitions of his legal thought.

This paper explores the international higher education (IHE) fever gripping China's middle-class families. Drawing on data gathered from 69 qualitative interviews with Chinese middle-class international students whose education is financially supported by their families, the paper points out that the desire for IHE is influenced by the pursuit of the “normative biography,” a term conceptualized by the authors to refer to the societal expectations that prescribe the specific life milestones and sequences that young middle-class adults should follow on their life trajectories. IHE is perceived as an important pathway to help such young adults meet these social expectations. Moreover, parental support for IHE is not only an educational investment but also assists offspring in conforming to the normative biography. This paper enriches the understanding of how educational practices are influenced by broader sociocultural contexts in contemporary China.

In this article, I provide a brief account of my first decade of involvement in European science policy, of what I believe are the key structural issues in that landscape, and where I propose possible adjustments to address these issues.

Truth is a property of our statements and of our thoughts, but also what these aim at, and a norm for our thinking in general. But how to understand this normative tie between belief and truth? Norms by themselves seem unable to motivate or to guide us. These difficulties are stated, and the answer given is that the norm of belief is actually knowledge, which explains why we value it, and how it can also be a value.