Through the 1980s Confucian studies in the United States tended to present Confucianism as compatible with liberal democratic values. Since the 1990s, after the rise of China as a global power, Confucianism is increasingly defended as a political alternative to liberal and democratic values. This essay argues that Confucianism is not compatible with liberal democratic values, and that the rise of political Confucianism opposed to liberal democracy is a return to a more authentic Confucianism. Furthermore, it is argued that the (...) defense of this undemocratic and illiberal Confucianism in the West, notably by Stephen C. Angle and Daniel A. Bell, reflects and reveals the precarious state of democracy in our present historical moment. (shrink)

Michael Bonnett has long attempted to rehabilitate the concept of nature, thereby challenging us to reconsider its profound implications for diverse educational issues. Castigating both ‘postmodern’ and ‘scientistic’ accounts of nature for failing to appreciate that nature is at once transcendent and normative, Bonnett proposes his phenomenology-inspired view of nature as the ‘self-arising’, which is bound up with the notion of ‘our experience of nature’. Despite its enormous strengths, however, Bonnett’s argument might obscure the ways in which the real issue (...) involved in nature is addressed: the issue of our nature, which enables our experience of nature in the first place. In this paper, after reviewing Bonnett’s view of nature and considering his criticism of Richard Rorty’s assault on the reality of nature, I will try to show how the Aristotelian notion of second nature that John McDowell has reanimated can supplement Bonnett’s project and render plausible the idea that the naturalness of our sensibility is unique to human beings; through this approach, the issue of human nature can be located in discussions of nature at large and, connectedly, brought again within the scope of the philosophical study of education in the present-day intellectual climate that increasingly marginalises non-scientific, intellectual endeavours. I will also briefly reflect on the relevance of the notion of second nature to Stephen Boulter’s recently proposed idea of ‘education from a biological point of view’. (shrink)

Rorty saw the course of philosophy in the twentieth century as an effort to part from two major philosophical trends, namely historicism and naturalism, only to inevitably return at the end of a tortuous path to these very same tendencies. If we can concede without major objections Rorty’s diagnosis of the trends in contemporary continental and analytical philosophy, which seem to reveal the exhaustion of modern philosophy, based as it has been on epistemology, we must, on the other hand, examine (...) carefully the three main questions that this diagnosis leaves open: How does Rorty reconcile continental idealist subjectivism with materialistic behaviorism? Is it really inevitable that philosophy blinded by Geist are unable to question prevalent beliefs? Finally, is the acceptance of a liberalism that is not able to give reasons for itself the most effective and pragmatic liberalism? In answering these questions, it may not be possible to avoid a non-dogmatic, but pragmatic, metaphysics: a vocabulary of vocabularies that allows Rorty to speak of the problems of justice in Plato and Rawls, of the soul in Aristotle and Descartes, of the dystopias in Moro and Orwell. On pragmatic terms, perhaps a modest version of a metaphysic’s “vocabulary” turns out to be as legitimate and practical as any other vocabulary. (shrink)