Where does Neo-Confucianism—a movement that from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries profoundly influenced the way people understood the world and responded to it—fit into our story of China’s history?
This interpretive, at times polemical, inquiry into the Neo-Confucian engagement with the literati as the social and political elite, local society, and the imperial state during the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties is also a reflection on the role of the middle period in China’s history. The book argues that as Neo-Confucians put their philosophy of learning into practice in local society, they justified a new social ideal in which society at the local level was led by the literati with state recognition and support. The later imperial order, in which the state accepted local elite leadership as necessary to its own existence, survived even after Neo-Confucianism lost its hold on the center of intellectual culture in the seventeenth century but continued as the foundation of local education. It is the contention of this book that Neo-Confucianism made that order possible.
Before the Cultural Revolution, Ai Ssu-ch’i (1910–1966) was one of Communist China’s foremost Marxist philosophers, second only to Chairman Mao himself. Ai was attracted to Marxism-Leninism as a young student in China and Japan, and wrote numerous books and articles seeking to explain the complexities of the philosophy in language everyone could understand. His writings were enormously popular during the 1930s and 1940s, and went through many printings despite continuous harassment from Kuomintang censors.
This volume is the first full-length study of Ai Ssu-ch’i. In spite of his popularity, Ai has largely been ignored in recent histories of the Chinese Communist movement, because his importance lies in his function as a popularizer rather than as an original thinker. However, it can be shown that Mao and other leaders of the movement were influenced by him, and his writings and translations certainly helped to attract many young Chinese intellectuals to the Communist cause.
The recent flood of reminiscence literature in China has reserved a special place of prominence for Ai Ssu-ch’i. This is not only because he was so admired by Mao, but also because he devoted his life so enthusiastically and wholeheartedly to the Party. Joshua Fogel traces the pattern of this devotion via Ai’s crucial role in spreading Marxist-Leninist thought among Chinese intellectuals.
Central to Burns's analysis is Motoori Norinaga’s Kojikiden, arguably the most important intellectual work of Japan's early modern period. Burns situates the Kojikiden as one in a series of attempts to analyze and interpret the mythohistories dating from the early eighth century, the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. Norinaga saw these texts as keys to an original, authentic, and idyllic Japan that existed before being tainted by "flawed" foreign influences, notably Confucianism and Buddhism. Hailed in the nineteenth century as the begetter of a new national consciousness, Norinaga's Kojikiden was later condemned by some as a source of Japan's twentieth-century descent into militarism, war, and defeat. Burns looks in depth at three kokugaku writers—Ueda Akinari, Fujitani Mitsue, and Tachibana Moribe—who contested Norinaga's interpretations and produced competing readings of the mythohistories that offered new theories of community as the basis for Japanese social and cultural identity. Though relegated to the footnotes by a later generation of scholars, these writers were quite influential in their day, and by recovering their arguments, Burns reveals kokugaku as a complex debate—involving history, language, and subjectivity—with repercussions extending well into the modern era.
Remembering Paradise studies three major eighteenth-century nativist scholars in Japan: Kada no Azumamaro, Kamo no Mabuchi, and the celebrated Motoori Norinaga. Peter Nosco demonstrates that these scholars, frequently depicted as the formulators of rabid xenophobia, were intellectuals engaged in a quest for meaning, wholeness, and solace in what they perceived to be disordered times. He traces the emergence and development of their philosophies, identifying elements of continuity into the eighteenth century from the singular Confucian-nativist discourse of the seventeenth century. He also describes the rupture between nativism and Confucianism at the start of the eighteenth century and the quest for ancient, distinctly Japanese values.
The emphasis on patriotism and nostalgia in the works of these three scholars may have relevance to the kind of nationalism emerging in Japan in the 1980s, manifested in a renewed interest in visiting one's home place and in the history and culture of the seventeenth through mid-nineteenth centuries. The current fusion of nationalism and nostalgia can perhaps be better understood through Nosco's analysis of comparable sentiments that were important in earlier times.
Kokugaku, or nativism, was one of the most important intellectual movements from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century in Japan, and its worldview continues to be influential today. This scholarly endeavor represented an attempt to use Japanese antiquity to revitalize what many saw as a society in decline. One important figure in this movement was Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843), a center of controversy in his own lifetime. Even though Atsutane's version of nativism came to be the standard form, many modern scholars dismiss him because of his scholarly shortcomings.
The primary goal of this book is to restore historicity to the study of nativism by recognizing Atsutane's role in the creation and perpetuation of an intellectual tradition that remains a significant part of Japanese history and culture. Arguing that conflict among scholars and intellectuals begets ideas, Mark McNally shows that nativism was rife with internal competition. The mid-nineteenth-century suppression of this multiplicity of views led to the emergence of what we now think of as "nativism." By focusing on the competition among the rival strands of nativism, McNally demonstrates that nativism resulted not from Atsutane's conscious attempt to formulate a new intellectual tradition but from his greater political skills at putting his views across.
Agreeing with Marx that ontology is production and production is ontology, Nishida in these three essays—"Expressive Activity" (1925), "The Standpoint of Active Intuition" (1935), and "Human Being" (1938)—addresses sense and reason, language and thought, intuition and appropriation, ultimately arguing that in this concept of production, ideality and materiality are neither mutually exclusive nor oppositional but, rather, coimmanent. Nishida's forceful articulation of the radical nature of Marx's theory of production is, Haver contends, particularly timely in today's speculation-driven global economy. Nishida's reading of Marx, which points to the inseparability of immaterial intellectual labor and material manual labor, provokes a reconsideration of Marxism's utility for making sense of—and resisting—the logic of contemporary capitalism.
The distinguished Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, in this summary of his own work, examines the status of Arab thought in the late twentieth century. Al-Jabri rejects what he calls the current polarization of Arab thought between an imported modernism that disregards Arab tradition and a fundamentalism that would reconstruct the present in the image of an idealized past.
Both past and present intellectual currents are examined. Al-Jabri first questions the current philosophical positions of the liberals, the Marxists, and the fundamentalists. Then he turns to history, exploring Arab philosophy in the tenth and twelfth centuries, a time of political and ideological struggle. In the writings of Ibn Hazm and Averroës, he identifies the beginnings of Arab rationalism, a rationalism he traces through the innovative fourteenth–century work of Ibn Khaldun.
Al-Jabri offers both Western readers and his own compatriots a radical new approach to Arab thought, one that finds in the past the roots of an open, critical rationalism which he sees as emerging in the Arab world today.
An influential thinker’s fascinating reflections and meditations on reacclimating to his native Senegal as a young academic after years of study abroad
The call to morning prayer. A group run at daybreak along the Corniche in Dakar. A young woman shedding tears on a beach as her friends take a boat to Europe. In African Meditations, paths to enlightenment collide with tales of loss and ruminations, musical gatherings, and the everyday sights and sounds of life in West Africa as a young philosopher and creative writer seeks to establish himself as a teacher upon his return to Senegal, his homeland, after years of study abroad.
A unique contemporary portrait of an influential, multicultural thinker on a spiritual quest across continents—reflecting on his multiple literary influences along with French, African Francophone, and Senegalese tribal cultural roots in a homeland with a predominantly Muslim culture—African Meditations is a seamless blend of autobiography, journal entries, and fiction; aphorisms and brief narrative sketches; humor and Zen reflections.
Taking us from Saint-Louis to Dakar, Felwine Sarr encounters the rhythms of everyday life as well as its disruptions such as teachers’ strikes and power outages while traversing a semi-surrealistic landscape. As he reacclimates to his native country after a life in France, we get candid glimpses, both vibrant and hopeful, sublime and mundane, into his Zen journey to resecure a foothold in his roots and to navigate academia, even while gleaning something of the good life, of joy, amid the struggles of life in Senegal.
Epistemic logic is the branch of philosophical thought that seeks to formalize the discourse about knowledge. Its object is to articulate and clarify the general principles of reasoning about claims to and attributions of knowledge. This comprehensive survey of the topic offers the first systematic account of the subject as it has developed in the journal literature over recent decades.
Rescher gives an overview of the discipline by setting out the general principles for reasoning about such matters as propositional knowledge and interrogative knowledge. Aimed at graduate students and specialists, Epistemic Logic elucidates both Rescher's pragmatic view of knowledge and the field in general.
Offering a new edition of Dewey’s 1916 collection of essays
This critical edition of John Dewey’s 1916 collection of writings on logic, Essays in Experimental Logic—in which Dewey presents his concept of logic as the theory of inquiry and his unique and innovative development of the relationship of inquiry to experience—is the first scholarly reprint of the work in one volume since 1954. Essays in Experimental Logic, edited by D. Micah Hester and Robert B. Talisse, uses the authoritative texts from the Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953 (published by Southern Illinois University Press) and includes as well articles from leading journals representing various contemporary schools of philosophy that criticized Dewey’s experimentalism.
Culling materials from six volumes of the chronologically arranged Collected Works, this single-volume edition of Essays marks a crucial point in Dewey’s intellectual development: one in which Dewey critically engages idealistic and intuitionist theorists and lays the groundwork for his mature theory of inquiry. The text includes a new introduction by renowned Dewey scholar Tom Burke that places Essays in philosophical and historical context. In addition to the original essays, Essays in Experimental Logic also features five critical essays by Dewey’s contemporaries, including Bertrand Russell, Wendell T. Bush, R. F. Alfred Hoernlé, H. T. Costello, and C. S. Peirce.