Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;The thesis is a comparison of Chinese and Western, Confucian and Christian, ideas and values. Its central focus is on caritas as the primary Christian virtue, and ren as the primary Confucian virtue. The comparison deals eventually with the way in which these virtues are read by Aquinas and Zhu Xi, and situated within their philosophies as a whole. Aquinas and Zhu Xi are in read in relation to their traditions, in order to identify the tensions and presuppositions that are incorporated in their work. Attention is also given to the problems of reading historical texts, and texts from different cultural traditions, both in terms of the hermeneutic issues at work in such reading, and the possible significance that such reading might have for contemporary culture