Moral particularism is often conceived as the view that there are no moral principles. However, its most fêted accounts focus almost exclusively on rules regarding actions and their features. Such action-centred particularism is, I argue, compatible with generalism at the level of character traits. The resulting view is a form of particularist virtue ethics. This endorses directives of the form ‘Be X’ but rejects any implication that the relevant X-ness must therefore always count in favour of an action.

The aesthetic appreciation of animals in China is different from that in the West. In this paper, I identify these differences by tracing the various definitions of the word ‘animal’ in Chinese, an...

This article examines Russian realist landscape paintings of the Peredvižniki. It demonstrates how in the course of the formation of a national identity during the late nineteenth century, an originally ideology-free space was politically charged and in the course of decades has been incorporated through various measures and media into the collective memory. In this way, the topos of the ‘Russian Landscape’ became lieu de mémoire for Russianness that transcends social order. Through identification with supposedly Russian scenery, which knows no (...) regional or national borders, love of the motherland can be created and strengthened. In their various reproductions, these landscape images developed into a kind of world parallel to the world of everyday experience in the Stalin era. The ideology of Russian landscape painting is now experiencing a new level of appreciation in the West, the effect of which is a shift in focus in their evaluation, from national to universal criteria. (shrink)