Drawing from Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte, this paper explores how and why China’s linguistic revolutions took place alongside the country’s quest for scientific, economic and political modernity. When discussing the contributions made by translation of Western texts to China’s modernization process, scholars have been focusing on content issues. They have overlooked how translation, _through effecting changes in the Chinese language, has transformed the Chinese people’s Weltanschauung at a fundamental level—only with that transformation did China become truly ready for modernity_. For example, tenses (...) did not exist in classical Chinese. But given the prominence of the temporal dimension in Western languages, time markers were gradually invented for the Chinese language as intellectuals engaged in translations of Western texts. These time markers brought a linear concept of time to Chinese society, and only with that new way of experiencing time could “the modern” become conceivable for the Chinese people. I examine how the _time consciousness gave the Chinese a new concept of the future and laid the path for China’s modernization_, and elaborate the subject at hand via an analysis of two waves of temporalization of the Chinese language. (shrink)

While discussions of the debate between Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg over ‘secularisation’ focus primarily on the methodological utility of the concept, the difference between them was also one of the philosophical commitments and substantive claims about modernity. This difference is not always obvious. One way of bringing it out is to address the different contexts in which they produced their most famous statements about secularisation. But another, and one that will be pursued here, is to consider the critical dialogue (...) that both thinkers engaged in with Nietzsche. Put briefly, while Löwith thought that Nietzsche misunderstood the ancients, Blumenberg thought that he misunderstood the moderns. For Löwith, Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return is not Greek, but an aggressive countergospel that owes much to the Christian culture it seeks to oppose; for Blumenberg, Nietzsche assumes, wrongly, that the self-belittlement of man by theology has been succeeded by the self-belittlement of man by science. In addition, Blumenberg – unlike both Nietzsche and Löwith – thinks that he can mount a robust defence of both modern science and progress. (shrink)

Why do we buy houses as opposed to renting one? This question, in its simplistic formulation captures, inter alia, some of the most fundamental emotions of temporal values that we impose on ourselv...