This essay aims to explore the meaning of freedom from a comparative perspective, focusing on critical comparisons between the discourses of liberalism and Neo-Confucianism. In so doing, my specific purpose is to characterize one of the possible, and perhaps the most plausible, presentations of Confucian liberalism as a perfectionist form of Hegelian liberalism. The contents are organized into three major sections.To begin with, thanks largely to Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” and Chang Fo-ch’üan’s Tzu-yu yü jen-ch’üan, an asymmetry emerged (...) in conceptualizing negative and positive freedom in the Chinese context; this development suggests that whereas negative.. (shrink)

Counter to ‘political meritocracy’, the goal of this article is to present a different approach to incorporating the Confucian political ideal into an ethical modification of liberal democracy, nam...

This is the first book-length study to provide a structured interpretation of the significance of Michael Oakeshott's critique of the Enlightenment. By seeing the thinker as a 'sceptical idealist’ posing a serious challenge to the intellectual positions informed by the Enlightenment, this book attempts to resolve some of the issues debated by Oakeshott scholars. The author argues that Oakeshott’s famous critique of philosophisme and Rationalism in fact expresses a sense of the crisis of philosophical modernity. Moreover, notwithstanding some recent interpretations, (...) throughout his intellectual career Oakeshott has never altered his analysis of these two themes: philosophy as the persistent re-establishment of completeness by transcending abstractness, and the modes of experience as self-consistent worlds of discourse. To apply this philosophy in his moral and political writings, Oakeshott has redressed an imbalance in favour of the Enlightenment ethical position — ‘the sovereignty of technique’, ‘demonstrative moral truth’, ’the politics of faith’ and ‘enterprise association’ — by revitalising the importance of ‘traditional knowledge’, ‘conversation’, ‘intimation’, ‘the politics of scepticism’ and ‘civil association’. Oakeshott is neither a doctrinal liberal nor a dogmatic conservative, but a philosophical sceptic. Moreover, Oakeshott’s contribution to history not only lies in his effort to transcend the Enlightenment historiographical position — by separating the historical from the naturalised conception of History on which so-called ‘scientific history’ rests — but also in his idealistic solution for the ‘temporal dilemma’ and the ‘epistemic tension’ in history that have long bothered philosophers. (shrink)

Although they hold different political positions, Oakeshott and Dunn actually share in common a sceptical reading of the human condition and the nature of politics. There are, however, two sceptical traditions within the British context that they seem, respectively, to have followed: the Humean autonomy of practice and the Lockean quest for guidance. It is hoped that by tracing their sources back to Hume and Locke, Oakeshott's and Dunn's conflicting views on the theory of practical reason, namely the detachment view (...) versus the engagement view, can be well explicated, and that the differentia between the `right' and the `left' can be philosophically reconsidered. (shrink)

Offers a renovated form of Confucian liberalism that forges a reconciliation between the two extremes of anti-Confucian liberalism and anti-liberal Confucianism.

Unlike Tang Junyi 唐君毅, who gave a high appraisal of the British Idealists or British Hegelians, mainly including T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Bernard Bosanquet, Mou Zongsan 牟宗三 only occasionally mentions these names. The fact that Mou did not go deeper into the traditions of Idealism, however, does not, it appears to me, necessarily prevent us from seeking a family resemblance between the New Confucianism and British Idealism. For one thing, as Mou confesses, it was through Tang's talking (...) about Bradley's "reconciliatory dialectic" that Mou came to realize the gist of dialectical thinking and the importance of Hegel's philosophy.1 Besides, as we... (shrink)