Critical realism, championed by its proponents as the most promising post-positivist social science paradigm, has gained significant influence in the last few decades. This paper provides a critical evaluation of the critical realism movement in the hope of facilitating more fruitful dialogues between its proponents and rivalling schools of sociologists. Two concerns are raised about contemporary critical realism. First, critical realism is not the only philosophical school against positivism and not necessarily the best. Second, critical realists exaggerate the importance of (...) critical realism to social science and conflate philosophy of science with sociological theories. (shrink)

The intellectual debates on wise entrepreneurship behavior such as decision making tend to focus on the relationship between economic rationality and morality, while overlooking the important role affect plays. To fill in this gap, this paper proposes a theoretical framework based on the Confucian concepts of ren and yi and studies their practical manifestation in qing and li 1 for decision making. Drawing from 32 in-depth interviews and 52 vignettes with Chinese SME entrepreneurs, this study has found that qing plays (...) an essential role in decision making. Chinese entrepreneurs had to deal with the dilemma relating to qing and li 1 holistically to reach a balanced outcome in their everyday business practices. As a major contribution, this study extends the study of Confucian ethics by highlighting ren-yi as an important perspective for understanding Chinese entrepreneurial decision making and also for promoting the affective dimensions for entrepreneurial ethical decision making in general. (shrink)

Why do many societies moralize apparently harmless pleasures, such as lust, gluttony, alcohol, drugs, and even music and dance? Why do they erect temperance, asceticism, sobriety, modesty, and piety as cardinal moral virtues? According to existing theories, this puritanical morality cannot be reduced to concerns for harm and fairness: It must emerge from cognitive systems that did not evolve for cooperation (e.g., disgust-based “purity” concerns). Here, we argue that, despite appearances, puritanical morality is no exception to the cooperative function of (...) moral cognition. It emerges in response to a key feature of cooperation, namely that cooperation is (ultimately) a long-term strategy, requiring (proximately) the self-control of appetites for immediate gratification. Puritanical moralizations condemn behaviors which, although inherently harmless, are perceived as indirectly facilitating uncooperative behaviors, by impairing the self-control required to refrain from cheating. Drinking, drugs, immodest clothing, and unruly music and dance are condemned as stimulating short-term impulses, thus facilitating uncooperative behaviors (e.g., violence, adultery, free-riding). Overindulgence in harmless bodily pleasures (e.g., masturbation, gluttony) is perceived as making people slave to their urges, thus altering abilities to resist future antisocial temptations. Daily self-discipline, ascetic temperance, and pious ritual observance are perceived as cultivating the self-control required to honor prosocial obligations. We review psychological, historical, and ethnographic evidence supporting this account. We use this theory to explain the fall of puritanism in western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies, and discuss the cultural evolution of puritanical norms. Explaining puritanical norms does not require adding mechanisms unrelated to cooperation in our models of the moral mind. (shrink)

Meritocracy claims to reward the meritorious with more resources, thereby achieving social efficiency and justice in a level playground. This article argues that the rise of meritocracy in a society is the institutional consequence of adopting progressive humanism, an ideal-type worldview that advocates the harmonious co-realization of individual achievement and social contribution. However, meritocracy is a self-defeating illusion because, even in a level playground, it only rewards conspicuous and wasteful display of ‘merit’ rather than genuine contributions to society. Similar to (...) the promise of an afterlife to Catholicism, the illusion of meritocracy constitutes an indispensable theodicy to progressive humanism. For societies holding such worldviews, meritocracy is a necessary illusion that cannot be dispelled by institutional reforms or political movements. (shrink)

This paper proposes that an important method for understanding the ethics of Japanese management is the systematic study of its Confucian traditions and the writings of Confucius. Inconsistencies and dysfunction in Japanese ethical and managerial behavior can be attributed to contradictions in Confucius' writings and inconsistencies between the Confucian code and modern realities. Attention needs to be directed to modern Confucian philosophy since, historically Confucian thought has been an early warning system for impending change.

MOST MODERN PEOPLE think it is obvious why people become modern. For them, a more interesting and important puzzle is why some people fail to embrace modern ideas. Why do people in traditional societies often seem unable or unwilling to aspire to a better life for themselves and their children? Why do they fail to see the benefi ts of education, equal rights, democracy, and a rational approach to decisionmaking? What is the glue that makes them adhere to superstition, religion, (...) and obligations to family and tribe even if it means accepting a life of insecurity and poverty? The “kin infl uence hypothesis” (Newson et al. 2005) suggests an explanation both for why people become modern and for why modern ideas are often slow to be accepted by a population. The hypothesis is based on the understanding gained by social-psychological research of how cultural norms change. It takes a Darwinian approach to explaining human behavior and recognizes that much of the cultural change associated with modernization is a progressive abandonment of values and norms that encourage people to pursue what evolutionary theorists refer to as “reproductive success.”1 The kin infl uence hypothesis proposes that the cascade of cultural changes associated with modernization is the result of the momentous change in the human social environment that occurs early in economic development. For most of human evolutionary history, the norms of all cultures must have prescribed behavior that, on balance, enhanced the genetic fi tness of their members. If this were not the case, then, as Lumsden and Wilson (1981) and Alexander (1979) rightly pointed out, evolutionary biologists would be unable to explain how humans evolved the uniquely human capacity for learning and imitation that makes culture possible. Nor could we explain how an African ape came to be the world’s dominant organism. With economic development, however, people begin to abandon the beliefs and values that encourage fi tness-enhancing behavior.. (shrink)

Willingness and readiness of people to do their jobs are among the key factors of a successful enterprise. In XXI century intellectual human labour is gaining unprecedented value and is being developed actively. The demand for intellectual labour calls forth an increasing number of jobs and professions that require an extensive preparation, a large number of working places, high level of integration of joint human efforts, growth of social welfare. These trends are becoming ever more pervasive and are spreading widely (...) in service industries, and that explains the rapid development of the latter when compared to the traditional areas of human activity. In its turn, it heightens the need for staff in service companies, supported by significant personnel turnover and a certain shortage of skilled professionals. These circumstances determine the need for developing a new concept of fostering staff motivation at the enterprises in the sphere of services. In order to reach the stated purpose while conducting our research into tourism and hospitality industry, as well as retail chains, we have examined the problems that arise in the process of staff motivation, and studied the foreign practice of motivating staff in hotels. The obtained analysis results enabled us to work out practical recommendations on improvement of the mechanism of tangible and intangible rewards in service companies, which are based on external and internal motivational factors. Additional attention in the article is paid to the statement that financial incentives should be based on key performance indicators (KPI). We give a detailed consideration to the classification of internal motivation incentives of the staff according to the terms of their realization, and give a schematic representation of the performance dynamics of the internal motivation model in service businesses. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn Sinicized Asia, justice, conceptualized and institutionalized in its current form on a Western mold is part of a singular and ancient Confucian legal tradition.In this paper, it will be argued that Confucians initially articulated the concept of justice in relation to their own explanation of the world and their ideal, which distinguishes and rewards men’s actions according to their merits and social condition.It will be shown that Confucius’s thinking is primarily political and suggests ways of harmoniously organizing and reforming (...) society in which justice is conceived both as a principle of government, a principle of social conduct and one of the essential virtues, or a ‘moral sense’ that everyone must possess, while, in practice, Confucian justice will put forward the imperatives of retributive justice. This, despite its philosophical aversion for sanctions and for what upsets harmony. (shrink)

: The semantic fields and root metaphors of "fate" in Classical Greece and pre-Buddhist China are surveyed here. The Chinese material focuses on the Warring States, the Han, and the reinvention of the earlier lexicon in contemporary Chinese terms for such concepts as risk, randomness, and (statistical) chance. The Greek study focuses on Homer, Parmenides, the problem of fate and necessity, Platonic daimons, and the "On Fate" topos in Hellenistic Greece. The study ends with a brief comparative metaphorology of metaphors (...) for the action of fate including command, division or allotment, and wheel or cycles of change. (shrink)

This essay sheds new light on Korean democracy after democratization. It examines how the notion of ‘transcendental collectivism’, associated with familial bonds and the concept of chŏng, led to an emphasis on citizen‐empowerment. This participatory perspective replaced the militant elite‐led activism of the transitional period, which was underpinned by a Confucian ‘transcendental individualism’ predicated on the concept of ren. The argument is based on a detailed case study of a recent episode of citizen action. The article shows how the search (...) for a new democratic citizenship that was capable of overcoming the parochial regionalism that has bedeviled Korean politics for decades, led ordinary (especially young) Korean citizens to come up with a new national democratic civic ethos that corresponded to the changed political environment. This new ethos was uri‐responsibility, a uniquely Korean view of collective moral responsibility. After examining uri‐responsibility and comparing it with Kantian‐liberal accounts of responsibility, its strong democratic implications for Korea are explored. (shrink)

Using both Confucian texts and the work of American pragmatist John Dewey, this book offers a distinctly Confucian model of democracy.

This paper is based on four assumptions concerning the analysis of the construction of collective identities. First, such construction, like power and economic relations, is an analytically autonomous basic component of the construction of social life. Second, such constructions have been going on in all human societies throughout history. Third, all such patterns of collective identity have been continually constructed from some basic yet continually changing building blocks, codes or themes - especially those of primordiality, civility and `sacredness'. The paper (...) focuses on the different patterns of modern nation states in the framework of the more general approach to the construction of collective identities. This analysis of different modern nation states indicates that despite common characteristics, there developed great differences in their construction; in the analysis of such differences it is very important to take into account the historical and civilizational backgrounds of the respective societies. (shrink)

John Caiazza's essay raises important controversial issues regarding the contemporary debates between science and religion. His arguments are largely presented in a dichotomous and rather adversarial mode with which I strongly disagree. Unable to present a detailed counterargument in this brief reflection, I ask, What is being spoken about, and who is speaking? What is meant by science and religion here? Neither term can be taken as a unified, essentialist category; both comprise many historical layers, possess numerous internal complexities, and (...) invite a diversity of interpretations. I refer to the science of China, India, and the ancient Near East, all of which have fed into modern science, so that the sciences cannot be restricted to those of the modern West. Nor can religion be limited to the religious beliefs and practices of Western Christianity. I discuss the position/location/context of the author‐ Caiazza's as well as my own‐ after introducing Hans‐Georg Gadamer's idea of the “fusion of horizons,” which provides a rich vein for enhancing the debate between science and religion. To expand the respective horizons of their dialogue it will be important to move away from an adversarial, exclusionary spirit to a more collaborative and communicative framework that allows for the development of new ideals, new questions, new ways of knowing, and an ethical and socially responsible stance more centered on human needs and concerns. We may have to build an altogether new Athens and Jerusalem for this. (shrink)

After a century of its retreat from political and social stages in East Asia, Confucianism eventually found its revival together with the economic industrialization in the region. The awakening consciousness of the traditional Confucian values leads to a reconsideration of their implication on a modern society. Despite the criticism on the actual relevance of Confucianism and modernization, there are precious elements within the Confucian values which provide the relevance of Confucianism to the future, such as an ethic of responsibility and (...) the understanding of the humanistic meaning of life. (shrink)

This paper investigates the differences between ancient Greek and modern ethical naturalism, through the account of the whole classical tradition provided by Cicero in De finibus bonorum et malorum. Ever since Hume’s remarks on the topic, it is usually held that derivations of normative claims from factual claims require some kind of proper justification. It ́s a the presence of such justifications in the Epicurean, Stoic, and Academic-Peripatetic ethical theories (as portrayed in De finibus), and, after a negative conclusion, I (...) argue that we should conceive of this issue within a social-historical perspective: The radical difference between ancient and modern naturalistic ethics is due (in Weber’s terms) to the rationalization processes that generated the modern outlook on nature. (shrink)

The aim of the essay is to demonstrate that the contact of European philosophy with Chinese thought in the second half of the 17th and 18th century influenced the rise and development of secularism, which became a distinctive feature of the Western Enlightenment. The first part examines how knowing the history of China and Confucian ethics has questioned biblical chronology and undermined faith as a necessary condition of morality. These allegations were afterwards countered by reinterpreting Confucianism as crypto-monotheism. I will (...) argue this debate has contributed to the birth of secular philosophy of history, which put an end to the Enlightenment Sinophilism. Throughout those changes in the image of China, nothing but an image was discussed: as it would be presented on a basis of the thought of Wang Fuzhi and other representatives of Chinese kaozheng考證 movement, the encounter with the contemporaries of the Westerners would have opened a real dialogue. (shrink)

Modern science and technology originated in Western Europe within a specific culture, but they have now been adopted and developed by several Eastern countries as well. We analyze the features of Western culture that may explain the rise of modern science with its associated economic development. A comparative analysis of Eastern cultures will then help us evaluate how far could contemporary science be successfully integrated within very different cultures. Without denying the role of social and political institutions, we would like (...) to investigate the influence of Western and Eastern cultural thought patterns on the respective development of Europe and East Asia. In this way, we try to estimate the importance of the cultural framework for the development of science and technology. (shrink)

In the traditional Chinese conception, ‘things’ (wu 物) serve as the fundamental ‘components’ of order. Moreover, it is through things and their changes that humans can grasp moral and political norms based on the notion of resonance (ganying 感應). This implies that human society and the world of things are necessarily interconnected. In opposition to this view of order Xiong Bolong 熊伯龍 (1617–1670) in his work Wuhe ji 無何集 (Collected Passages on Being without Causes) critiqued the notion of resonance and (...) arrived at a more ‘disenchanted’ approach to ‘things’ by incorporating the idea of contingency from Wang Chong’s 王充 (27–c. 97) philosophical thought. However, Xiong’s view of order full of contingency does not entirely diverge from the traditional mainstream Chinese view, because in his world of thought, a belief in the underlying necessity of a perfect order within the holistic arrangement of myriad things including humans remained. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that there are ample resources in the English-speaking academic community to enable philosophers who cannot read Chinese to work with material from the Western Han dynasty in their research or teaching. It discusses three kinds of resources, with the aim of developing a community of philosophers engaged in a sustained conversation about Western Han thought. These resources are histories that describe various aspects of the Han dynasty, translations of key texts, and intellectual (...) histories that examine specific thinkers or texts from the Han. This article also provides a detailed example of one way in which Western Han texts demonstrate the diversity of Chinese philosophy with regard to value conflicts. (shrink)

Fengshui (also called Chinese geomancy) is a pre-modern tradition rooted in Chinese civilization. Chinese civilization is pre-modern and practice-oriented due to the domination of political power in China. In contrast, Western civilization is modernized. It witnessed the development of religion in ancient times, and the growth of science through reason (logic) and experiment in modern times. It is both rational and transcendental. It seems that Fengshui is an intermediate between science and religion. It is not science although its focus is (...) on this world, for it does not seek knowledge and truth. It is not religion although it is mystical, for it does not seek transcendence and good. It is not only superstition (or magic), but also a mystical trade that centers on secular benefits. (shrink)

Grounded in the use of the visual, Chinese thought and language operate within a wide spectrum that includes calligraphy, poetry, literature, painting, and garden-landscapes. In languages of phonetic signifiers, the spectrum is deliberately controlled to be narrower, excluding the visual from language and delegating it to iconology. These linguistic-cultural strategies have an ancient past and produce far-reaching consequences in thought and artefacts, with garden-landscapes being one of the most substantial outcomes. Garden-landscapes are China’s equivalent to Greek architecture, leading us to (...) both a repositioning of Chinese thought and a new framework of architecture. In this sense, the city, serving the function of thought in the expanded medium of conceptual and material units of meanings (figures), incorporates things into intellectual orders. This is perhaps the most important feature of Chinese thought and one that is the first to be obscured when it is rendered in scholarship in Indo-European languages. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 489-528.

Channeling affinities with certain motifs of Daoism, Walter Benjamin renews a form of dialectical thought that diffuses ideological notions of progress and grants minimal weight to the ontological distinction of the Subject. In fleeting yet pivotal moments of contact with Chinese aesthetics, Benjamin moves attention toward the practice of ‘thinking by way of resemblance’ – a phenomenon he variously enacts. Calling forth resonances within late-capitalist modernity, he retrieves from Daoist literature a notion of dialectical reversal freed from progressive synthesis, as (...) well as image-repertoires of self-forgetting, which he understands to be irreducible to reification. The Daoist imaginary offers Benjamin resources for breaking open the anthropocentric closure of Hellenic accounts of mimesis. He theorizes similitude more capaciously as something that can flash up across temporally discontinuous phenomena – without deferring to predetermined categories of Being. Benjamin thus recasts resemblance – regarded by Enlightenment rationality as an impoverished mode of cognition – as a medium of historical apprehension that resists the occlusion of transience by the ontology of the victors. (shrink)

The basic problem of development is the very concept of it. Since the dawn of modern China development has gone from being seen as nothing to something; more recently, under the guidance of Marxism, the conceptualization of it has fully drawn on experiences and lessons from Western modernization and the quintessence of outstanding traditional Chinese culture, namely ‘zhong he wei yu, an suo sui sheng’ (literally meaning that ‘the world will be set in a proper order and life will be (...) nourished when the condition of the ‘harmonious mean’ is reached, and all beings will fulfill their lives once they get comfortable with their positions’). As a result, the Sinicized Marxist concept of development has formed, which differs from that of the West and takes the being of humans as its core standpoint. The concept of development from the perspective of being emphasizes that being is the basic content of development, regards co-existence as a realistic basis of development, and aims at the pursuit of a happy, well-being life as the ultimate goal. The Sinicized Marxist concept of development is not only of great significance to the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, but also of great value to the development of Marxism and the progress of contemporary mankind. (shrink)

In contrast to the individualistically focused paradigm, this article suggests that persuasion is a relationship- and context-specific phenomenon. The article analyses how interpersonal and mass persuasion operates in Chinese daily life. The key concepts of filial piety and guanxi as a major feature of persuasion in the public sphere are thoroughly analysed. It is argued that persuasion is indispensable in dialogical relationships between the self and other, and between the individual and society; yet at the same time it is indigenous (...) to the socio-cultural context. (shrink)

Beginning with a discussion of adaptations of François Jullien’s understanding of ‘potential born of disposition’ and ‘silent transformation’ in two recent analyses of capitalist contemporaneity (by Bennett and Dufourmantelle), this essay argues that as a philosophical tool, ‘China’ bears within it a rich and underanalysed genealogy that reframes critical theory’s approach to nature and its objects in a new geopolitical context. The remainder of the essay then unpacks the intellectual history and textual philology of one earlier and pivotal moment of (...) critical theory’s entanglement with ‘China’: Walter Benjamin’s transformation of ‘non-action’, or wu wei, into a complex for thinking through possibilities of what he might, with Jullien, call not-being in debt to Being. (shrink)

Religion is considered a cornerstone of business ethics, yet the values held dear by a religion, when professed by business organizations serving heterogeneous market segments in secularized societies, can generate conflict and resistance. In this paper, we report findings from a study of stakeholder reactions to the renaming of an Italian public hospital. After the construction of new facilities, the hospital was renamed for the recently canonized Roman Catholic Pope John XXIII. Contrary to expectations, we found no evidence of public (...) criticism surrounding the name change. A fine-grained analysis of a sample of 734 respondents belonging to different stakeholder groups revealed that consumers predominantly supported the name change, while employees were often critical and concerned about possible religious influences on medical practice and scientific research. Moving beyond our empirical setting, we propose a process model of brand-religion alignment inspired by McCracken’s : 71–84, 1986) meaning transfer model, which considers both the alignment process and its reception by relevant audiences. The study also presents managerial implications useful for those brand managers who wish to create effective, respectful links with religion. (shrink)

Weber’s claim that Calvinism eliminated magic from the world, inserted into The Protestant Ethic in 1920 and arising out of research reported in The Sociology of Religion, entails a sociological but also a theological proposition identified in this article. Weber’s conceptualization of magic permits his examination of the economic ethics of the world religions. Non-European cases, including China, are examined by Weber to confirm his Protestant Ethic argument regarding modern capitalism. He holds that Confucian rationality, associated with bureaucratic order, is (...) compromised by its tolerance of magic. Weber contrasts this with the Calvinist rejection of magic. Weber’s claims regarding Calvinist demagicalization are made without regard to the Reformation Calvinist obsession with satanic witchcraft, in which the efficacy of magic is accepted as real. The distance between Calvinism and Confucianism, essential to Weber’s argument, is thus narrowed. (shrink)

China has always served Western thinkers as a lens through which to project convenient contrasts and exemplars for their self-aggrandizement and self-realization. Weber’s treatment in The Religion of China is no exception. Weber’s purpose in this text is to demonstrate the exclusive provision in Europe of the conditions for the development of modern or industrial capitalism. To achieve this purpose Weber presents a distorted vision of both Confucianism and Daoism, even against the limited sinological material at his disposal. The discussion (...) of Chinese ‘mentality’, as Weber calls it in The Religion of China, functions in terms of European categories drawn from his discussion of historical and classical cases that are alien to Chinese developments but which serve the purpose of his argument. Indeed, the details of his earlier work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, are similarly distorted by Weber in The Religion of China to permit him to more forcefully demonstrate the unsuitability of Confucianism to inculcate a sense of calling parallel to the Protestant ideal of vocation discussed in the Protestant Ethic. The paper shall both discuss Weber’s sinological sources and his use of them. It shall also show that late-imperial Chinese entrepreneurial activity was capitalistic in its institutional form and that the absence of industrial capitalism in China during the Qing dynasty was a consequence of demographic and political factors rather than resulting from the absence of religious values. (shrink)

This contribution examines Arrighi’s effort in Adam Smith in Beijing to understand the trajectory of China’s political economy and the effects of that trajectory on the current reforms and changes in China. This article discusses these reforms from the perspective of China’s ’internal’ dynamics and suggests that Arrighi’s argument has been developed without proper reference to China’s complex realities. As an alternative, the contribution proposes a research-agenda that could better account for these realities.

The present study explored the moderation effect of education on the relationship between the perception of social equality and social trust and individuals’ subjective well-being in rural China. Data were derived from the nationally representative cross-sectional Chinese General Social Survey. After handling missingness, 5,911 eligible participants from the 2015 wave were included in the model. We used logistic regression to test the hypotheses. We first tested the effect of the perception of social equality and social trust on SWB. Then we (...) added an interaction term to test the moderation effect of education in this relationship. The results show that education had a significant moderating effect on the association between general social trust and SWB. While had no significant effect on the association between the perception of social equality, special social trust and SWB. The perception of social equality had significant effects in both groups. The relationship between special social trust and SWB in both groups was not significant. For the more educated group, general social trust had a significant and positive effect on SWB. (shrink)

Despite his strong commitment to the ideal of _wuwei_ statecraft, Mencius advanced a distinct yet cohesive theory of Confucian _youwei_ statecraft that can serve the ideal of _wuwei_, first by means of the principled application of individual and social responsibility under unfavorable socioeconomic conditions, and second by offering a concrete public policy (i.e. the well-field system) that contributes to a decent socioeconomic condition on which the society can be self-governing and where individuals (and families) can fully exercise their individual moral (...) and socioeconomic responsibility. My central claim is that Confucian _wuwei_ statecraft has a practical and social background, namely, a socioeoconomically and morally self-governing civil society. (shrink)

Many sociologists have drawn attention to the puzzling absence of a detailed discussion of religion in Elias’s investigation of the European civilizing process. Elias did not develop a sociology of religion, but he did not overlook the importance of beliefs in the ‘spirit world’ in the history of human societies. In his writings such convictions were described as fantasy images that could be contrasted with ‘reality-congruent’ knowledge claims. Elias placed fantasy–reality balances, whether religious or secular, at the centre of the (...) analysis of how societies have dealt with collective fears that arise in response to largely uncontrolled conditions. He located religious orientations within a broader framework of analysis regarding fantasy–reality balances in the first human groups and in current state-organized societies. Elias stressed how balances changed in ‘civilized’ societies with the rise of the natural sciences. But his writings emphasized the continuing influence of fantasy images in technologically sophisticated societies, particularly in the context of national and international power struggles. His analysis of how fantasy images acquired considerable influence under conditions of fear is important for studies of social responses to global challenges including climate change. Connections with Weber’s sociology of religion point the way to theoretically informed empirical research on balances between fantasy and reality-congruence in a tumultuous and unpredictable era. (shrink)

This paper challenges the idea that there are essential and unbridgeable differences that separate the cultural traditions of China and Europe. The focus is on the belief that there is no transcendence in Chinese thought and the cluster of notions around this thesis, which have often been used in support of the thesis of essential differences. The conclusion is that this thesis is mistaken and that the multifarious traditions of China and Europe share many central features and can also mutually (...) enrich one another. Together, they offer rich resources to a global ethic suited for the needs of our time. *. (shrink)

The rise of modern science took place in Western Europe, and one may ask why this was the case. We analyze the roots of modern science by replacing scientific ideas within the framework of Western culture, notably the twin heritage of biblical thought and Greek philosophy. We also investigate Eastern traditions so as to highlight Western beliefs by comparison, and to argue for their relevance to contemporary science. Classical Western conceptions that fostered the rise of science are now largely obsolete, (...) and Eastern thought might be a source of new insights. (shrink)

The philosophy of Confucius has often been accused of lacking classical definitions of its core concepts. However, as I shall argue, Confucius systematically used nonclassical definitions—to be precise, operational ones. The notion of operational definition comes from Percy Bridgman’s The Logic of Modern Physics and means that the definiendum is defined by a set of operations that results in determining the meaning of the term in question. In the case of Confucian argumentation, operational definitions are mostly nominal and, in contrast (...) to unambiguous methods of measurement, also context-dependent. This results in there being various yet not mutually inconsistent definitions of one term, and in “paradigmatic examples” playing a crucial role. As I show, this mode of defining things had major implications for the content of Confucius’ thought. In fact, many of its forms could be traced back to other Chinese philosophers, including those of non-Confucian provenance. (shrink)

Weiming’s notion of transcendence in terms both of its legitimacy as an interpretation of Confucianism and of its viability as an answer to modern challenges. An examination of Tu’s hermeneutical assumptions in his Zhongyong commentary leads to a discussion of his locating transcendence in the subjectivity of the junzi, the profound person. Calling the self-cultivation self-knowledge, Tu makes explicit the religious character of the xin, the basis of self-cultivation, and its transcendent character, because it is endowed from heaven. However, because (...) the xin is irreducibly human, this transcendence is also immanentized. From the xin a fiduciary community is formed, hence the covenantal nature of Confucian religiousness. The essay ends with the question: Because Tu does not elaborate on cultivating a community’s intersubjectivity, does it make the realization of the transcendent xin a deferred potentiality, without mooring in the actual formation of human community? (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the different understandings of “harmony”, which are rooted in ancient Greek and Chinese thought, can be recapitulated in the name of “dialectic harmony” and “ambiguous harmony” regarding the representation of the beautiful. The different understandings of the concept of harmony lead to at least two kinds of aesthetic value as well as ideality – harmony in conciliation and harmony in diversity. Through an explication of the original meaning and relation between the concept of harmony (...) and beauty, we can learn more about the cosmo-metaphysical origins in Western and Eastern aesthetics, with which we may gain insights for future aesthetics discourse. (shrink)

Hick’s pluralist assumption has remained the most knowable model of religious pluralism in the last few decades. Many have, from the perspectives of various major world religions, questioned his notion that the teachings of all religions are derived from the same Absolute Truth and that salvific-end is one, yet little attention has been paid to the traditions that he graded as unauthentic and non-valuable according to his soteriological and ethical criteriology. The purpose of this thesis was to demonstrate the exclusiveness (...) of Hick’s model by describing a tradition called “Chinese Folk Religion” that does not fit into his definition of ‘authentic religion’. As the study suggested, his understanding of the world religious situation is over-generalised and simplified, and his particular criteriology does not treat all traditions fairly or pluralistically. As a response, this thesis proposed a more inclusive theory that also integrates the currently disregarded tradition into the interpretation. (shrink)