In search of liberal Tsarism: the historiography of autocratic decline

The idea that the autocracy might have successfully modernized itself has, in recent years, spread widely beyond academic circles. However, a look at traditional and recent historiography shows that very few historians support this line. Even those who argue that Russia itself was developing rapidly have seen little prospect of the autocracy surviving the process. Equally, those who argue that radical socialist revolution might have been avoided tend to suggest, often by implication rather than in an explicit fashion, that a democratic, capitalist, bourgeois, and constitutional revolution was the alternative path. Thus it was not so much a question of tsarism or revolution but rather what kind of revolution was Russia facing

Reconciliation, trauma and the native born

How should non-Indigenous Australians reconcile with Indigenous people? The Aboriginal Reconciliation Council urges newcomers to view the land through the eyes of the Indigenous owners. Keith Windschuttle insists that the narrative of frontier violence has been greatly exaggerated. Mainstream country musicians reconcile their place in Australia by a kind of belonging-in-parallel justified by hard rural work while Indigenous musicians more commonly celebrate what can be celebrated, and set aside the rest. Do we need a knowledge of inter-racial history for genuine reconciliation

Harmony and modality

It is argued that the meaning of the modal connectives must be given inferentially, by the rules for the assertion of formulae containing them, and not semantically by reference to possible worlds. Further, harmony confers transparency on the inferentialist account of meaning, when the introduction-rule specifies both necessary and sufficient conditions for assertion, and the elimination-rule does no more than exhibit the consequences of the meaning so conferred. Hence, harmony is not to be identified with normalization, since the standard modal natural deduction rules, though normalizable, are not in this sense harmonious. Harmonious rules for modality have lately been formulated, using labelled deductive systems