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Confucianism between Tradition and Modernity, Religion, and Secularization: Questions to Tu Weiming

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The article discusses central assumptions of Tu Weiming’s program of overcoming the “enlightenment mentality” and throws a critical light on his conceptions of religious or spiritual Confucianism, of a Confucian modernity, and of the “multiple modernities” theory in general. It defends a unitary rather than multiple concept of modernity in terms of the realization of a morally controlled “principle of free subjectivity” and tries to show how Confucianism, understood as a secular ethics, could contribute to this goal.

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Roetz, H. Confucianism between Tradition and Modernity, Religion, and Secularization: Questions to Tu Weiming. Dao 7, 367–380 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11712-008-9086-5

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