Based on publications addressing post-secularity in international contexts, this article identifies four basic interpretive positions manifest within our post-secular age: resistant post-secular secularists, strategic post-secular secularists, engaged post-secular intellectuals, and engaged post-secular religious intellectuals. Subsequently, an article addressing governance and religious studies in mainland China published by Zhuo Xinping in 2010 is assessed, indicating how Zhuo serves as an engaged post-secular intellectual position, charging Chinese Marxist officials to adopt a strategic post-secular secularist position. Finally, it is shown how in a (...) major volume on philosophical studies in China published in 2008 by Li Jingyuan a strategic post-secularist position is manifest. (shrink)

In the Mengzi there is a hypothetical situation relating how the ancient sage-king Shun 舜 would respond if his father had committed murder. This has recently become a source of debate among Chinese philosophers. Here we will apply arguments made by Johannes de silentio (Kierkegaard's pseudonym) about the “teleological suspension of the ethical” related to the action of the biblical Abraham, and link them up to alternative interpretations of the actions of Shun. This challenges the current and traditional interpretations of (...) his actions, suggesting how this new approach can overcome ethical quandaries related to the Mengzian account of Shun's behavior. (shrink)

After introducing the unusual situations that shaped the lives of Zhang Zai and Paul Tillich, we present details from two major writings of these seminal figures: Zhang's Western Inscription and Tillich's sermon, “The Depth of Existence.” In this process we present new English renderings of selected passages of Zhang's influential essay, and illustrate how Tillich's essay manifests onto-hermeneutic claims related to change and transformation that have not always been highlighted in his work. As a consequence, we reveal how both men's (...) writings provoke some unusual metaethical and ethical reflections, while also sharing important values and standards revealed through this comparative study. (shrink)

In this review of Fan Ruiping’s book, I am concerned first of all about how representative his account of Confucianism/Ruism is in relationship to the multiform traditions associated with that teaching through more than two thousand years of its existence. Fan emphasizes pre-imperial forms of Confucian traditions, but neglects many alternatives from later sources. Secondly, his account of “familism” lends itself to questions related to the problem of revenge that is associated with traditional Confucianism. This raises further ethical doubts about (...) the effectiveness of his reconstructed Confucianism within contemporary Chinese society. Finally, his “familism” appears to focus on extended family structures, but whether this is suitable and relevant for the structures of modern family transformations in mainland China is questioned. (shrink)

In the Mengzi there is a hypothetical situation relating how the ancient sage-king Shun would respond if his father had committed murder. This has recently become a source of debate among Chinese philosophers. Here we will apply arguments made by Johannes de silentio about the “teleological suspension of the ethical” related to the action of the biblical Abraham, and link them up to alternative interpretations of the actions of Shun. This challenges the current and traditional interpretations of his actions, suggesting (...) how this new approach can overcome ethical quandaries related to the Mengzian account of Shun’s behavior. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Principles New Principle Learning Feng's Histories of Chinese Philosophy and New Principle Learning Problems of a Modern Confucian Rationalist.

In light of developments in Chung-ying Cheng’s onto-hermeneutic philosophy during the years after his dialogue with Hans-Georg Gadamer took place in Heidelberg in May 2000, I explore several new issues related to Cheng’s understanding of Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy. First of all, I argue that Cheng has not addressed the vital concept of the “inner word” in Gadamer’s Truth and Method, and point toward some of its fecund hermeneutic significance, especially with regard to its characterization of Sprache/Language and its dynamics within (...) human understanding. Secondly, I underscore the fact that Cheng have not understood the profound impact of Christian philosophical writings in Gadamer’s work, particularly in his claim that Christian ontology offers an alternative to ancient Greek ontologies that are “categorically significant.” Finally, I describe and analyze the development of a new theistic understanding of reality within Cheng’s post-dialogue publications, suggesting ways of critically advancing his claims in the light of Gadamer’s account of the “inner word” and the Christian ontological claims grounded in the logos-theology as presented in the prologue to the Gospel of John. (shrink)

This volume is devoted to studying the emergence and flourishing of new humanistically informed developments in philosophical hermeneutics within contemporary Chinese philosophy. By means of some articles published previously in the Journal of Chinese Philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s, questions about the nature of philosophical understanding and the diversity of hermeneutic options in Chinese indigenous teachings – including Ruist (“Confucian”), Daoist, and Chinese Buddhist realms of exploration – are reintroduced. Following these seminal essays, a number of new pieces written (...) by philosophers and sinologists active in evaluating basic orientations toward philosophical understanding in China are presented. Some offer new insights into the confluence of Gadamerian and Ruist approaches to philosophy, while others employ more critical methods to indicate why serious hermeneutic inquiries into these indigenous traditions and their most representative texts reveal significant challenges for the informed reader. The focus of this volume centers on issues arising in early Ruist and Daoist texts – the Analects and the Zhuangzi – and then moves to examine hermeneutic claims asserted in the synthetic philosophical efforts of Zhu Xi (1130-1200). A sequel dealing with modern and contemporary themes in Chinese hermeneutics will appear in the March 2007 issue of the Journal of Chinese Philosophy. (shrink)

After introducing some scholarship on the value of Mao Qiling's (1623–1713) works, we present an account of canonization processes in order to understand the hermeneutic context of Mao's battle with the Cheng-Zhu orthodoxy. His work is an attempt to decanonizing Zhu Xi's Four Books, preferring instead an alternative relying on the Old Texts of the Taixue《太學》/Daxue《大學》 and Zhongyong 《中庸》. Mao argues against Zhu Xi's textual changes and interpretations on a number of bases, producing a hermeneutics of suspicion against the Cheng-Zhu (...) orthodoxy. Instead, Mao offers an alternative account of the sagely way, following precedents of Wang Yangming. (shrink)

A critical summary and reflective assessment of the Chinese account of the dialogue that occurred between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Chung-ying Cheng in Heidelberg in May 2000 is presented for the first time in English within this article. It ends with an account of the ontological nature of Sprache/language as both philosophers deal with this key term in Gadamerian philosophic hermeneutics.

This book presents a number of contemporary philosophical issues from a wide range of Chinese philosophical texts, figures, and sub-traditions that are usually not addressed in English studies of Chinese philosophical traditions.

The subject of this issue is Zhao Fusan (b. 1926), a Shanghaiborn Christian pastor and intellectual who has lived in exile since the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. As a scholar of world religions and vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Zhao in the mid-1980s authored a sympathetic Marxian interpretation of the role of religion (translated in this issue) that has had a lasting impact in the PRC. In exile, Zhao's major projects (sampled in this issue) have (...) included Chinese editions of important works on early Christianity and the intellectual and cultural history of Europe. (shrink)

After introducing the unusual situations that shaped the lives of Zhang Zai and Paul Tillich, we present details from two major writings of these seminal figures: Zhang’s Western Inscription and Tillich’s sermon, “The Depth of Existence.” In this process we present new English renderings of selected passages of Zhang’s influential essay, and illustrate how Tillich’s essay manifests onto-hermeneutic claims related to change and transformation that have not always been highlighted in his work. As a consequence, we reveal how both men’s (...) writings provoke some unusual metaethical and ethical reflections, while also sharing important values and standards revealed through this comparative study. (shrink)

This book is a collection of articles on different aspects of university education in China since the late nineteenth century, addressing how far the ideal of modern university education, which has gradually been developed in the West since the age of European Enlightenment, was adopted or transformed by Chinese universities.

This rejoinder focuses on a few points of disagreement that I have with Li Chenyang, Ronnie Littlejohn, and Lauren Pfister regarding their critical comments on my book Reconstructionist Confucianism. In response to Pfister’s concerns, I point out that my book attempts to base on classical, rather than other, Confucian sources in order to reconstruct the Confucian virtue-based, ritual-guided, and family-oriented view of life for contemporary society. In appreciating Littlejohn’s suggestion on Confucian environmentalism, I contend that a kind (...) of Grand View Garden as we find in the Dream of Red Mansion would be a typical Confucian garden, manifesting the Confucian ideal of a family-oriented way of life that holds in harmonious relations with the rest of nature under the direction of the cosmic principles. Finally, I offer detailed replies to Li’s series of challenges to my view on li 禮, arguing for the essential constitutive nature of the Confucian rituals. (shrink)

This essay extends the observations made in E. Johanna Hartelius’ The rhetoric of expertise about the nature of expertise in digital contexts. I argue that digital media introduce a scale of communication—many-to-many—that reshapes how the invention of knowledge occurs. By examining how knowledge production on Wikipedia occurs, I illustrate how many-to-many communication introduces a new model of “participatory expertise.” This model of participatory expertise challenges traditional information routines by elevating procedural expertise over subject matter expertise and opening up knowledge production (...) to the many. Additionally, by hosting multiperspectival conversations on Wikipedia, the participatory model of expertise introduces epistemic turbulence into traditionally tranquil encyclopedia culture. (shrink)

This book focuses on the phenomena of inertia and gravitation, one objective being to shed some new light on the basic laws of gravitational interaction and the fundamental nature and structures of spacetime. Chapter 1 is devoted to an extensive, partly new analysis of the law of inertia. The underlying mathematical and geometrical structure of Newtonian spacetime is presented from a four-dimensional point of view, and some historical difficulties and controversies - in particular the concepts of free particles and straight (...) lines - are critically analyzed, while connections to projective geometry are also explored. The relativistic extensions of the law of gravitation and its intriguing consequences are studied in Chapter 2. This is achieved, following the works of Weyl, Ehlers, Pirani and Schild, by adopting a point of view of the combined conformal and projective structure of spacetime. Specifically, Mach's fundamental critique of Newton's concepts of 'absolute space' and 'absolute time' was a decisive motivation for Einstein's development of general relativity, and his equivalence principle provided a new perspective on inertia. In Chapter 3 the very special mathematical structure of Einstein's field equations is analyzed, and some of their remarkable physical predictions are presented. By analyzing different types of dragging phenomena, Chapter 4 reviews to what extent the equivalence principle is realized in general relativity - a question intimately connected to the 'new force' of gravitomagnetism, which was theoretically predicted by Einstein and Thirring but which was only recently experimentally confirmed and is thus of current interest. (shrink)

A quoi ressemblerait une société vraiment féministe? L'identité, la sexualité, l'amour et la parentalité se vivraient sans contrainte ni injonction. La réponse aux crimes serait la réparation et non l'exclusion. L'attention au soin changerait notre relation au travail. L'écoféminisme nous ferait entrer dans une relation non prédatrice à la nature. Les théoriciennes féministes ont développé, depuis des siècles, suffisamment d'outils pour modifier en profondeur chaque pan de la société, au-delà des relations femmes-hommes. Appliquer un programme féministe à la société, c'est (...) redéfinir le sens d'aimer, d'éduquer, de juger, de produire, de vivre même. Dans cet essai, qui entrecroise vulgarisation des pensées féministes et récit intime, je vous propose des solutions pour répondre aux urgences de l'époque et bâtir un futur désirable. La bonne nouvelle, c'est que ce futur est déjà là. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Abstract In this paper I probe the kinds of views about selfhood that inform our understanding of sincerity and authenticity and argue that the terms have separate, but related, boundaries. Borrowing Harry Frankfurt's notion of wholeheartedness, I argue that authenticity is a form of alignment or consistency within the self, which requires self-knowledge and intentionality in order to be actualized. Sincerity involves representing oneself truthfully to others but does not depend on the presence of authenticity. I contrast sincerity and authenticity (...) in depth using literary examples. In the final section, I call into question the assumptions underwriting the distinction between sincerity and authenticity and introduce the category of ?shtick,? which plays with both. I conclude that, although authenticity and sincerity stand in a complex relation to one another, that relation is neither one of synonymity, as might have been the case in the Renaissance, nor of sufficient condition, as Polonius famously claims. (shrink)

Critical thinking is considered to be a central epistemic aim of education. The claim may be about skills, but also about the state of justified belief. In opposition to this latter view, Alvin Goldman claimed that justification is only a means to true belief and that the only fundamental epistemic aim of education is true belief. Harvey Siegel’s response defended the view that justified belief is in fact a fundamental epistemic aim of education. In a recent article, Alessia Marabini and (...) Luca Moretti analyse Siegel’s arguments, reject all of them, and provide two new ones. I defend one of Siegel’s arguments against their objection, raise some doubts about one of their own arguments, and give an additional argument against Goldman’s view. (shrink)

In the last two decades few topics in philosophy of science have received as much attention as mechanistic explanation. A significant motivation for these accounts is that scientists frequently use the term “mechanism” in their explanations of biological phenomena. While scientists appeal to a variety of causal concepts in their explanations, many philosophers argue or assume that all of these concepts are well understood with the single notion of mechanism. This reveals a significant problem with mainstream mechanistic accounts– although philosophers (...) use the term “mechanism” interchangeably with other causal concepts, this is not something that scientists always do. This paper analyses two causal concepts in biology–the notions of “mechanism” and “pathway”–and how they figure in biological explanation. I argue that these concepts have unique features, that they are associated with distinct strategies of causal investigation, and that they figure in importantly different types of explanation. (shrink)