"理"能否活动? --李退溪对朱子理气论的诠释

李退溪是朝鲜性理学之巨擘,其学以朱子学为宗。他曾撰文严厉批评王阳明。在李退溪与奇高峰关于“四端七情”的辩论中,双方均援引朱子的文献作为论据,且自认为忠于朱子的观点。然究其实,李退溪对孟子“四端”说的诠释预设了一套与朱子性理学系统不同的义理架构,虽然合乎孟子的文本,但却脱离了朱子的基本立场。这其中最关键的问题是：“理”能否活动?在朱子的性理学中,理是气之所以然,只存有而不活动。本文根据相关文献证明：李退溪在诠释朱子的理气论时有意无意地赋予理一种活动性,而逸出了朱子性理学的架构。     

中国传统哲学范式的现代转型

中国传统哲学范式在历史上经历了从古典范式、近代范式到现代范式的转型,“哲学范式转型”意味着哲学重心的转移和透视问题的角度发生了根本的变迁。20世纪上半叶,可以称为传统哲学范式向现代转型的最初阶段。应当说,传统哲学范式的转型是与历史事件分不开的。传统哲学范式向现代的转型得益于五四新文化运动。它有两个基本的转型路向：首先表现为由意识形态向学术资源或知识形态的转型。这种转型突出地表现为现代新儒学对传统儒学范式进行了新的思考和变革,确立了它的现代形态。其次是为传统哲学范式向现代的转型做了准备,表现在对传统哲学进行了深入的思考和清理,并以新的哲学思想(西方哲学、马克思主义哲学)对传统哲学的整体框架给以全面审视。20世纪初的传统哲学范式的转型是中国哲学史上的一次重大飞跃。自此以后,传统哲学从语言表述到问题视阈,从内容到方法都进入了一个崭新的时期。     

Moral Dilemmas in Chinese Philosophy: A Case Study of the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Lienü Zhuan</Emphasis>

From classical antiquity to contemporary times, challenging situations of dilemmatic or paradoxical nature continue to fascinate both scholars and the casual reader. Although Western literature provides a fruitful source of philosophical discussion on the circumstances under which a morally competent agent faces incompatible moral requirements, Sinology has rarely accepted the idea of moral dilemmas in Chinese philosophy in general and Confucianism in particular. The present paper explores moral and morally motivated dilemmas in Liu Xiang’s 劉向 Lienü Zhuan 列女傳 and the philosophical strategies employed for their resolution within the framework of the Confucian tradition, emphasizing similarities with Western traditions such as Greek tragedy or Thomistic philosophy.     

论易儒道交融的中国古代和谐美思想

中国古代美学属于古典主义美学,在美的形态上主张和谐美。这同儒道两家的哲学思想、伦理思想和美学思想的互相离异和互相吸收密切相关。从儒家早期的经典文本《周易》和先秦儒家各大流派的相关论述中可以看到,儒家偏重人的哲学,突出人的主动性,着眼于人对社会的认识,强调善与美的统一。而从老子到庄子的道家学派代表人物的相关言论中则可以看出,道家则偏重于自然哲学,突出自然的合规律性,着眼于人对自然的认识,强调真与美的统一。儒道两家各有偏重又相互补充,相反相成地融合为共同的和谐美的思想。     

Confucian Moral Cultivation,Longevity, and Public Policy

By investigating the link between the Confucian ideal of longevity and moral cultivation, I argue that Confucian moral cultivation is founded on the ideal of harmony, and, in this connection, it promotes a holistic, healthy life, of which longevity is an important component. My argument is internal to Confucianism, in the sense that it aims to show these concepts are coherently constructed within the Confucian philosophical framework; I do not go beyond the Confucian framework to prove its validity. Finally, I show that if these Confucian beliefs are true, they have serious implications for public policy-making in contemporary societies.     

Way of post-confucianism: Transformation and genealogy

After Neo-Confucianism, the study of contemporary Confucianism became more diverse. Its original uniformity was replaced by diversity. During this time, however, Post-Confucianism became increasingly prominent. Post-Confucianism comes from a post-modernist context and was influenced by a post-modernist ideological mode, and so its appearance was inevitable. It was also closely linked to significant philosophical issues after the change in times, and therefore questioned and challenged Neo-Confucianism which was based on a pattern of modernity. Post-Confucianism represents a new trend in the contemporary development of Confucianism. From a cultural point of view, this essay systematically investigates three internationally renowned schools of Post-Confucianism and their backgrounds, noting their similarities and differences, examining their significance, and determining their meaning. By doing so, it intends to outline an intelligible framework for this academic trend and highlight the significance of Post-Confucianism for the development of contemporary Confucianism.     

Naturalising deconstruction

Most contemporary readings of Derrida’s work situate it within a transcendental tradition of philosophical enquiry explicitly critical of naturalistic accounts of knowledge and mind. I argue that Derrida provides the naturalist with some of the philosophical resources needed to rebut transcendental critiques of naturalism, in particular the phenomenological critiques which derive from Husserl’s philosophy. I do this by showing: a) that Derrida’s account of temporality as differance undermines phenomenological accounts of the meaning of naturalistic theories and assumptions; and b) that it is itself both usable and interpretable within the naturalistic framework of current cognitive science.     

How Is an Analytic Approach to Chinese Philosophy Possible? — An Observation from Perspective of Methodology

How to apply an analytic approach to Chinese philosophy has been a controversial issue in the field of the modern Chinese philosophy. The key to such an application is using an analytical approach. Various forms of analysis are used in modern philosophy. The term “analytic approach” refers to both conceptual and semantic analyses by which to analyze meaning and apply philosophical concepts, so as to interpret a different significance of these philosophical concepts. Beginning with the challenge of the analytic approach as applied to Chinese philosophy, it is necessary to address the line of holism and transcendental argument in terms of philosophical methodology. The former provides us with a framework of analysis of particular problems, while the latter helps us clarify the major difference between a philosophical argument and other arguments for knowledge. Chinese philosophy must greatly emphasize the importance of philosophical methodology, so as to reconstruct the framework of Chinese philosophy as it stands today.     

Change,Contradiction, and Overconfidence: Chinese Philosophy and Cognitive Peculiarities of Asians

This article discusses philosophical influence, especially the influence made by Confucianism and Daoism, on the way Asian people see and understand the world. Recently, Richard Nisbett drew a connection between Chinese philosophy (Confucianism and Daoism) and the cognitive profiles of the people who live in Asian countries where Confucianism and Daoism are strong social and cultural traditions. He argues that there is a peculiar way that Asians think and perceive things and this cognitive pattern is influenced by a group of principles derived from Chinese philosophy. This article critically analyzes Nisbett’s explanation, his emphasis on the principle of change in particular, and provides an alternative explanation of the connection between Chinese philosophy and cognitive peculiarities of Asians. Asians combine and integrate opposite viewpoints not because they believe that things change in all unexpected directions, but because they see the world as a big system with interrelated and mutually influencing components.     

试论荀子哲学的特质及其对儒家道统之意义

荀子哲学作为一个经验论的形态,为儒学的发展开启了一个新的哲学范式。就儒学而言,荀学经验论所带来的并不是对“道”的离弃和背叛,而是学问进路与方法的创新。从“道统”的角度说,荀学与孟学的关系是:“道”同而“术”不同。     

Selfhood and Fiduciary Community: A Smithian Reading of Tu Weiming’s Confucian Humanism

Tu Weiming, as a leading spokesman for contemporary New Confucianism, has been reinterpreting the Confucian tradition in the face of the challenges of modernity. Tu takes selfhood as his starting point, emphasizing the importance of cultivating the human mind-and-heart as a deepening and broadening process to realize the anthropocosmic dao. He highlights the concept of a “fiduciary community” and advocates that, because of it, Confucianism remains a dynamic “inclusive humanism.” Tu’s mode of thinking tallies well with Wilfred C. Smith’s vision of religion, specifically the latter’s exposition of faith as a universal human quality and proposal of “corporate critical self-consciousness.” This article details the theories of both scholars, highlights their similarities, and contrasts their differences. It argues that Smith’s world theology provides a heuristic framework through which one understands how Tu has advanced his Confucian humanism from a Chinese philosophical or cultural tradition to the midst of world religions.     

On The Universal and Local Aspects of Confucianism

To counter the tendency of making Confucianism “localized” and thereby turning Confucianism research into research of local social history, the author criticizes this tendency and thinks it is unilateral to emphasize or stress the importance of a small unit’s locality, but ignore the oneness of the distribution of Confucianism and the universality of Confucian thought. The thesis emphasizes that the main schools of Confucianism in the Song and Ming Dynasties are all not local ones and cannot be reduced to reflections of some local need and social structure. The author points out that we need to self-examine the following phenomena: aggrandizing the function of local social structure to culture and thought, coming down academic schools to reflections of local social benefits, opposing this kind of research to the research of thought itself, thus rejecting philosophical research and analysis of thought itself.     

《周易正义》的注疏特色

从形式上来说,唐代的注疏之学,是在南北朝的义疏之学的基础上发展而来的。至唐初孔颖达注疏《周易正义》时,受了南北朝义疏的影响,即以一家之注为底本,兼采诸经、诸家之说。而从内容方面来说,《周易正义》则以儒为宗,兼采老庄之说,并掺杂佛风,同时,重义理而不废象数,是儒家思想主导下儒、释、道三家合流、象数与义理互融的结果,在学术上显示了兼容并包的盛唐气象。     

Scaling-up skilled intentionality to linguistic thought

Cognition has traditionally been understood in terms of internal mental representations, and computational operations carried out on internal mental representations. Radical approaches propose to reconceive cognition in terms of agent-environment dynamics. An outstanding challenge for such a philosophical project is how to scale-up from perception and action to cases of what is typically called ‘higher-order’ cognition such as linguistic thought, the case we focus on in this paper. Perception and action are naturally described in terms of agent-environment dynamics, but can a person’s thoughts about absent, abstract or counterfactual states of affairs also be accounted for in such terms? We argue such a question will seem pressing so long as one fails to appreciate how richly resourceful the human ecological niche is in terms of the affordances it provides. The explanatory work that is supposedly done by mental representations in a philosophical analysis of cognition, can instead be done by looking outside of the head to the environment structured by sociomaterial practices, and the affordances it makes available. Once one recognizes how much of the human ecological niche has become structured by activities of talking and writing, this should take away at least some of the motivation for understanding linguistic thinking in terms of content-bearing internal representations. We’ll argue that people can think about absent, abstract or counterfactual because of their skills for engaging with what we will call “enlanguaged affordances”. We make use of the phenomenological analysis of speech in Merleau-Ponty to show how the multiple affordances an individual is ready to engage with in a particular situation will typically include enlanguaged affordances.

     

Toward a Gongfu Reconstruction of Confucianism —Responses to Comments by Huang Yong,Fan Ruiping,and Wang Qingjie

Responding to comments of my recent book, Understanding the Analects of Confucius, by Huang Yong, Fan Ruiping, and Wang Qingjie, this paper looks to highlight one of its major features—that it is a contemporary continuation of the Chinese tradition of doing commentary both as a way of allowing classic texts to unfold their rich meanings in the context of different times, and as a way for the commentator to express his or her own views. It strives to explain how a gongfu reconstruction of Confucianism can explain the apparent inconsistency between advocating rule-like instructions next to its encouragement of the art of flexibility, and to reveal what is more fundamental about Confucianism—rather than a system of rigid moral rules, it is an art of life. This gongfu interpretation would lead to the view that Confucianism does not depend on metaphysical truths as its justification, although it does need to hold metaphysical views as a way of affirming its values, which are justified through the excellence of life to which they lead. While the gongfu approach more accurately reflects Confucius’ own philosophical orientation, and it is therefore used to determine technical details such as what interpretations to put into translation of a text and what interpretations to list in the annotations as alternatives, it is, in the author’s humble view, also a unique contribution that the Chinese tradition can offer to world philosophy.     

Confucianism as canonic culture

The present article is inspired by Liu's ( 2017 ) idea on how Asian philosophy can, in general, and Confucianism, in particular, contribute to psychological science and practice. We first clarify potential misunderstandings of Liu's ( 2017 ) paper as a theoretical argument for indigenous psychology or as a debate on philosophy or the philosophy of science. To interpret and develop Liu's idea, we then conceptualize the concept of culture as canonic (abstract, philosophical and as it appears in classical books or articles) vs. popular (concrete, experiential and as it appears in people's daily lives). Further, since Liu's main point is about canonic rather than popular culture, we focus on canonic culture and propose three principles of it, namely the principle of diversity, the principle of hermeneutics and the principle of inspiration. These principles respectively reveal the characteristics, the interpretation process and the beneficial function of a canonic culture like Confucianism.     

The relationship between faith and evidence in St. Augustine

There has been much debate in both theological and philosophical circles over the matter of evidentialism—that is, whether an individual must augment or supplement their belief in God with evidences supportive of that belief. However, what has been (for the most part) lacking is a discussion which endeavors to integrate theological and philosophical desiderata. In this paper I will suggest that the framework for such a discussion can be found in the work of St. Augustine—in particular, in the way he holds together his belief in the sufficiency and necessity of faith and his ample use of evidences for belief in God.     

Two Types of Refutation in Philosophical Argumentation

In this paper, I highlight the significance of practices of refutation in philosophical inquiry, that is, practices of showing that a claim, person or theory is wrong. I present and contrast two prominent approaches to philosophical refutation: refutation in ancient Greek dialectic (elenchus), in its Socratic variant as described in Plato’s dialogues, and as described in Aristotle’s logical texts; and the practice of providing counterexamples to putative definitions familiar from twentieth century analytic philosophy, focusing on the so-called Gettier problem. Moreover, I discuss Lakatos’ method of proofs and refutations, as it offers insightful observations on the dynamics between arguments, refutations, and counterexamples. Overall, I argue that dialectic, in particular in its Socratic variant, is especially suitable for the philosophical purpose of questioning the obvious, as it invites reflection on one’s own doxastic commitments and on the tensions and inconsistencies within one’s set of beliefs. By contrast, the counterexample-based approach to philosophical refutation can give rise to philosophical theorizing that is overly focused on hairsplitting disputes, thus becoming alienated from the relevant human experiences. Insofar as philosophical inquiry treads the fine line between questioning the obvious while still seeking to say something significant about human experiences, perhaps a certain amount of what Lakatos describes as ‘monster-barring’—a rejection of overly fanciful, artificial putative counterexamples—has its place in philosophical argumentation.

     

Extending the Dynamics of Reason

What I call the dynamics of reason is a post-Kuhnian approach to the history and philosophy of science articulating a relativized and historicized version of the Kantian conception of the rationality and objectivity of the modern physical sciences. I here discuss two extensions of this approach. I argue that, although the relativized standards of rationality in question change over time, the particular way in which they do this still preserves the trans-historical rationality of the entire process. I also make a beginning in extending my historical narrative from purely intellectual history (both philosophical and scientific) to the wider cultural context.