: The Confucian relational concept of the person has been proposed as an epistemically more cogent and ethically more attractive alternative to that of liberal individualism. Two arguments are raised against this proposal without defending liberal individualism. Ethically, Confucianism is vitiated by certain unattractive features that cannot be removed without reducing the Confucian relational concept of the person to an abstract and not very helpful notion of human relatedness. Epistemically, Confucianism commits the essentialist fallacy of treating its own concept of (...) human relations as reflecting the nature of things. In view of these limitations, the Confucian relational concept of the person does not provide a viable framework for dealing with social issues including bioethics. (shrink)
In two recent papers, Mr Robert Young maintains that all attempts by philosophers to bolster the-violation-of-law concept of miracles are bound to fail and propounds what he claims to be a novel non-reductivist concept of miracles which avoids the conceptual difficulties of the violation-model. His view of miracles is of god being ‘an active agent-factor in the set of factors which actually was causally operative’ [p. 123] in an event dubbed a miracle. God is put in among ‘the plurality of (...) causes’ [p. 122, S p. 33] that could determine the event, but if he acts in a miracle, then ‘his presence…alters the outcome from what it would have been if, contrary to fact , he had not been present’ [p. 122]. Young claims that his concept ‘is neither a violation of … laws nor is it a coincidental occurrence religiously interpreted’ [p. 122, S p. 33], and so it avoids the difficulties, which he thinks are faced by the violation-model, of having an intelligible notion of an occurrence of the physically impossible, and also the reductivism inherent in taking mere coincidences as miracles. He also suggests a procedure of settling the epistemological issue regarding particular alleged miracles, an inquiry he thinks he has made possible by having first given a sense to miracles. [p. 126]. (shrink)
Ji Kang was a noted thinker, man of letters, and musician of the period of the Three Kingdoms and of the state of Cao-Wei. His thought possessed very salient characteristics of the spirit of those times. Since the decline of the Han dynasty, owing to the turmoil of the society and internal developments within Chinese thought, the classical scholarship [jing xue] of the earlier and latter Han dynasties had gradually but steadily begun to lose its role and ability to maintain (...) orthodox dominance over thought. In the period after the Eastern Han, some keen-thinking people started afresh and began to explore once again and reevaluate the real value and meaning of humanity and that of the world as a whole. This kind of exploration led to an intellectual return to the world itself , or, a return to "nature." One might say that the exaltation of "nature" was the spirit of the age for the Wei-Jin period—its zeitgeist, if you will. One could also go on to say that this spirit reached its peak of development in the ideas of Ruan Ji and Ji Kang. Ruan Ji and Ji Kang both considered nature [ziran] to be the supreme existence and the highest law and principle. They believed that: "Heaven and Earth [tiandi] are born of nature [ziran], then all things [wanwu] are born of Heaven and Earth.". (shrink)
