Introduction
Rent from DeepDyve- Introduction
This special issue of Philosophy East and West is dedicated to the inaugural meeting of the World Consortium for Research in Confucian Cultures, convened at the University of Hawai‘i and the East-West Center, October 8-12, 2014, on the theme “Confucian Values in a Changing World Cultural Order,” to explore the contributions of Confucian thought to world culture. The conference brought together leading scholars from partner institutions around the world to explore critically the meaning and value of Confucian culture in the twenty-first century. The purpose of this initial meeting was to address the questions “What is the contemporary form of ‘Confucian’ culture?” “What are its historical failings and limitations?” and “What does it have to offer for a new world order?” How must Confucian culture be reformed in our generation if it is to become an international resource for positive change?
One feature at the inaugural conference was a special panel dedicated to the philosophy of Li Zehou 李泽厚, one of the most renowned and influential philosophers of our time. Professor Li was born in Hunan, China in June 1930. He graduated from the Department of Philosophy, Peking University in 1954. From 1955 he became a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
In the great debate on aesthetics that engrossed Chinese academia in 1956, Professor Li distinguished himself by offering his own ideas as he criticized those of leading Chinese philosophers and aestheticians. His career, like that of all Chinese intellectuals, became dormant during the social upheaval and political repression of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). He regained national prominence with the publication of several major works in 1979. For the next decade, his writings captivated a generation of intellectuals. He was acknowledged as “the teacher of youth” and enjoyed a national reputation comparable to that of Raymond Williams in England and Jean-Paul Sartre in France. His scholarly reputation has received international recognition not merely for itself but because of the prominent role Li has played in inspiring an intellectual development in China that led to the democracy movement in the 1980s. Professor Yu Ying-shih of Princeton has written, “Through [End Page 699] these books he emancipated a whole generation of young Chinese intellectuals from Communist ideology.” In 1992, he moved to the United States, where he now resides.
At the inaugural Consortium conference, it was decided that we would convene an international conference on a topic of general interest every second year. The next meeting will be convened at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, on July 23 to 28, 2016, on the theme, “Confucianism as a Philosophy of Education for the Contemporary World.”
It was also decided at the Consortium conference for member institutions to host a smaller, more focused conference during the interim years on a particular prominent figure or issue. “Li Zehou and Confucian Philosophy” is the first of these conferences, and it will be followed in November 2017 with a meeting hosted by Kyoto University and the University of Tokyo on “Confucian Modernities: The Japanese Experience.”
Background and Overview
The last quarter century has brought remarkable progress across a broad spectrum of domains. The recent worldwide recession notwithstanding, global wealth has increased at historically unprecedented rates. Medical advances have made life expectancies around the world the highest in history. The internet and smartphone revolutions have made information almost miraculously accessible to an ever-increasing portion of the world’s people. And democracy movements across North Africa and the Middle East have raised hopes for the ideals of universal suffrage and human rights.
Yet, alongside these undeniably positive effects of the processes of contemporary industrialization and globalization, there have come widening gaps of wealth, income, resource use, and risk. Recognition has dawned that human activity is capable of adversely affecting planetary-scale phenomena such as the climate. The manufacturing and consumption booms fueling global economic growth have accelerated environmental degradation, including urban environments; transportation advances have accentuated likelihoods of global pandemics; development-heightened appetites for energy have made recourse to high-risk fuel extraction and power-generating technologies matters of...
