The Chinese Enlightenment

The Chinese Enlightenment
Author: Vera Schwarcz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 422
Release: 1986
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520050273

It is widely accepted, both inside China and in the West, that contemporary Chinese history begins with the May Fourth Movement. Vera Schwarcz's imaginative new study provides China scholars and historians with an analysis of what makes that event a turning point in the intellectual, spiritual, cultural and political life of twentieth-century China.

Oriental Enlightenment

Oriental Enlightenment
Author: J.J. Clarke
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2002-09-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1134784732

What is the place of Eastern thought - Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Confucianism - in the Western intellectual tradition? Oriental Enlightenment shows how, despite current talk of 'globalization', there is still a reluctance to accept that the West could have borrowed anything of significance from the East, and explores a critique of the 'orientalist' view that we must regard any study of the East through the lens of Western colonialism and domination. Oriental Enlightenment provides a lucid introduction to the fascination Eastern thought has exerted on Western minds since the Renaissance.

Rethinking China's Rise

Rethinking China's Rise
Author: Jilin Xu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2018-07-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108470750

A vision of contemporary China from the inside, Xu's essays offer a liberal reaction to the complexity of China's rise.

Discovering China

Discovering China
Author: Julia Ching
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 252
Release: 1992
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781878822147

Studies of the reaction of European thinkers of the Enlightenment - Leibniz, Wolff, Hegel, Kant, et al -to Chinese culture and ideas.

Moral Enlightenment

Moral Enlightenment
Author: Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 320
Release: 1992
Genre: History
ISBN:

Eighteenth-century Europe, commonly referred to as the Age of Enlightenment, witnessed a growing interest in China on the part of many great thinkers, inspired by reports of the Jesuit missionaries. The German philosophers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and Christian Wolff (1679-1754) were among the admirers of Chinese thought and civilization. Leibniz contribution to the Western understanding of China was mainly metaphysical and religious. His younger contemporary and friend Wolff focused on Chinese ethics, concentrating on the practical morality and political ideals of Confucius. Julia Ching and Willard G. Oxtoby present English translations of important texts related to China by Leibniz and Wolff, accompanied by two introductory essays on the philosophical and historical context. The epilogue sketches the reversal of the European opinion on China in the succeeding centuries, as reflected in the writings of Kant and Hegel.

What Is Enlightenment

What Is Enlightenment
Author: Wei Zhang
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 139
Release: 2010-05-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438431074

What is enlightenment? Wei Zhang brings together the fabled consideration of enlightenment by Kant, his contemporaries, and modern respondents such as Habermas and Foucault with the question "What is Chinese enlightenment?" Kant and his peers began a discussion of the notion of enlightenment in the pages of the Berlinische Monatsschrift when that newspaper's editor posed the question "Was ist Aufklärung?" in 1784. Chinese intellectuals began a similar consideration in the wake of the May Fourth cultural movement of 1919, which marked a self-conscious break from the feudal past and a new engagement with the West. Zhang asks to what extent European enlightenment can be regarded as purely philosophical and isolated from political events and, alternately, to what extent the Chinese enlightenment can be split into separate political and intellectual discourses. Her work yields a new set of conceptual questions and practical issues and provides new energy to the dialogue on political and cultural modernity. In cross-cultural context, Zhang finds the answers to the question "What is enlightenment?" are multiple, pluralistic, dynamic, and self-renewing.

Confucian Perspectives on Learning and Self-Transformation

Confucian Perspectives on Learning and Self-Transformation
Author: Roland Reichenbach
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2020-05-18
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3030400786

This book bridges the regions of East Asia and the West by offering a detailed and critical inquiry of educational concepts of the East Asian tradition. It provides educational thinkers and practitioners with alternative resources and perspectives for their educational thinking, to enrich their educational languages and to promote the recognition of educational thoughts from different cultures and traditions across a global world. The key notions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian philosophy directly concern the ideals, processes and challenges of learning, education and self-transformation, which can be seen as the western equivalences of liberal education, including the German concept of Bildung. All the topics in the book are of fundamental interest across diverse cultures, giving a voice to a set of long-lasting and yet differentiated cultural traditions of learning and education, and thereby creating a common space for critical philosophical reflection of one's own educational tradition and practice. The book is especially timely, given that the vocabularies in educational discourse today have been dominantly “West centred” for a long time, even while the whole world has become more and more diverse across races, religions and cultures. It offers a great opportunity to philosophers of education for their cross-cultural understanding and self-understanding of educational ideas and practices on both personal and institutional levels.

Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age

Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age
Author: Heiner Roetz
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 1993-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780791416495

Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age describes the formative period of Chinese culture--the last centuries of the Zhou dynasty--as an early epoch of enlightenment. It comprehensively reconstructs the ethical discourse as thought gradually became emancipated from tradition and institutions. Rather than presenting a chronology of different thinkers and works, this book discusses the systematic aspects of moral philosophies. Based on original texts, Roetz focuses on filial piety; the conflict between the family and the state; the legitimating of the political order; the virtues of loyalty, friendship, and harmony; concepts of justice; the principle of humaneness and its different readings; the Golden Rule; the moral person; the autonomous self, motivation, decision and conscience; and various attempts to ground morality in religion, human nature, or reason. These topics are arranged in such a way that the genetic structure and the logical development of the moral reasoning becomes apparent. From this detached perspective, conventional morality is either rejected or critically reestablished under the restraint of new abstract and universal norms. This makes the Chinese developments part of the ancient worldwide movement of enlightenment of the axial age.

Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949

Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949
Author: Thomas Fröhlich
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2020-05-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004426523

Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949 offers a panoramic study of Chinese reflections on “progress,” its multifaceted expressions, contesting interpretations, highly optimistic implications, but also the criticism it encountered.