Briefe Deutscher Philosophen An Ernst Mach

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Organic Virtue: Reading Mencius with Rousseau

Both Rousseau and Mencius espouse a process-oriented morality that is attuned to nature. Rousseau maintains that human beings exit the realm of nature as soon as the process of civilization begins, necessitating the need for morality. Because he views the ‘natural’ human being as the pre-social and independent protohuman, the attempt to recapture the lost harmony of the state of nature will always fall short and the process of becoming moral is an endless task. Mencius, however, views nature as a dynamic process suggesting that morality demands a conscious participation in and extension of nature's rhythms. Artifice and nature are not as sharply demarcated as in the thought of Rousseau because morality is the particularly human way of integrating into the cosmos, by extending and channelling the flow of qi.     

卢梭与晚清革命话语

在晚清的历史社会空间 ,革命话语日益膨胀。后经卢梭及思想的刺激 ,革命变得“浪漫化” ,革命的内涵出现单一化、绝对化。这是在社会危机压制下激进化心态的泛化 ,是由社会阶层的对抗、两极化思维模式促成行动的极端化以及公共舆论的推波助澜等因素促成的。它一方面使社会处于亢奋状态 ,从而激发了民众的乐观主义精神与意志主义 ;另一方面却增加社会发展的成本 ,提高政治现代化的代价 ,使社会缺乏长期的合作、妥协与宽容精神 ,出现认同危机等。在晚清的革命话语中 ,卢梭试图为社会建构“政权规则”的思想被抛弃了。     

Rousseau on Armour-Propre: T. O'Hagan

This paper was not available at the time of going to press. It will be published in a future volume of the Proceedings of The Aristotelian Society.     

现代伦理学:在康德与卢梭之间

本文为纪念康德逝世 2 0 0周年而作 ,反省的主要问题是现代意义上的各种伦理学的核心形态可能是什么。文章分析了康德所受卢梭影响的性质 ,以及两者之间仍然存在的巨大差别 ,指出现代意义上的规范伦理学的基本位置大致还是处在康德与卢梭之间。     

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft on the imagination

The article compares Rousseau’s and Wollstonecraft’s views on the imagination. It is argued that though Wollstonecraft was evidently influenced by Rousseau, there are significant differences between their views. These differences are grounded in their different views on the faculty of reason and its relation to the passions. Whereas Rousseau characterizes reason as a derivative faculty, grounded in the more primary faculty of perfectibility, Wollstonecraft perceives reason as the faculty defining human nature. It is argued that contrary to what is often assumed, Wollstonecraft’s conception of the imagination is not primarily characterized by its Romantic features, but rather by the close affinity she posits between reason and the imagination. This close affinity has several consequences. One consequence is that she is less worried than Rousseau about the imagination wandering without external constrains, because she believes in reason’s ability to guide the imagination by choosing its objects. Ultimately the difference between Rousseau’s and Wollstonecraft’s views on the imagination helps us understand why she was a passionate philosopher of the Enlightenment while he was one of its first, perceptive and most articulate critics.     

Redeeming Love:Rousseau and Eighteenth-Century Moral Philosophy

This essay employs Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) as a vehicle to explore love in eighteenth-century French moral philosophy and theological ethics. The relation between love of self and love of God was understood variously and produced contrasting models of the relation between the public and the private. Rousseau, perhaps more than any other figure in the eighteenth century, wrestled with the complex, competing traditions of love, and in doing so he probed and articulated the tension between and the harmony of life alone and life together. Using as ideal types a set of historical models of private and public vice and virtue, the author describes Rousseau's three contradictory proposals for dealing with the corruption of social institutions and the human heart and discloses their underlying cohesion.