Editor's AbstractThis essay presents Mainland New Confucianism (MNC) as diverse but distinctive, as still in a process of maturation but already with a clear direction. According to Chen, MNC is a rejection of the twin modernist narratives of the left (revolution) and the right (enlightenment) in favor of a narrative that downplays the ruptures associated with the May Fourth Movement and instead seeks to reconnect to China's past values and traditions.

According to Karl Popper’s critical rationalism, criticism is the only way we have of systematically detecting and learning from our mistakes so as to get nearer to the truth. Meanwhile, it is arguable that the emphasis of Confucianism on creating a hierarchical and harmonious society can easily lead to submission rather than opposition, producing a conformist rather than critical mind. A question arises here as to whether Confucianism tends to denigrate criticism and thus run counter to (...) critical rationalism. In this paper, I first argue that Confucianism prizes criticism and critical discussion, for which ample justification can be found in Confucian classics. Then I compare Confucianism with critical rationalism and assess the compatibility between them. (shrink)

Explores the rich potential of Confucianism in American and Chinese classrooms of the twenty-first century. This is one of the first books to explicitly address twenty-first-century education from a Confucian perspective. The contributors focus on why Confucianism is relevant to both American and Chinese education, how Confucian pedagogical principles can be applied to diverse sociocultural settings, and what the social and moral functions of a Confucianism-based education are. Prominent scholars explore a wide-range of research areas and methods, (...) such as K–12 and college teaching; conceptual comparisons; case studies; and discourse analysis, that reflect the depth and breadth of Confucian ideas, and the divergent contexts in which Confucian principles and practices may be applied. This book not only enriches the research literature on Confucianism from an interdisciplinary perspective, but also offers fresh insights into Confucianism’s continuing relevance and its compatibility with the latest research-based pedagogical practices. (shrink)

Taking into account recent pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches to irony, the present study investigates irony as a discursive resource Greek parliamentarians employ to fulfill their institutional roles and to negotiate verbal rules of conduct in highly institutionalized and confrontational debates. It is suggested that, besides criticism, parliamentary irony is used to sharpen attacks against the Opposition, to elicit vivid reactions from the audience and disaffiliate from, or align with, participants, to restore parliamentary order, and to establish cohesive ties between (...) successive parliamentary speeches. Moreover, the recorded reactions to irony reveal that irony is considered a common and ‘legitimate’ discursive practice in the Greek parliament and is not negatively evaluated by Greek MPs. Such findings highlight the significance of contextual parameters for the sociolinguistic analysis of pragmatic phenomena and lead to a critical evaluation of those previous results which are based on the study of decontextualized and/or fictional ironical utterances and exchanges. (shrink)

Criticising someone’s conduct is a disaffiliative action that can attract recipient objections, particularly in the form of defensive detailing by which the recipient volunteers extenuating circumstances that undermine the criticism. In Therapeutic Community meetings for clients with drug addiction, support staff regularly criticise clients’ behaviours that violate therapeutic principles or norms of conduct. This study examines cases where, rather than criticising a client’s behaviour directly, TC staff members do so indirectly through an anecdote: a case illustrating the inappropriateness of (...) the type of conduct of which the client’s behaviour is an instantiation. TC staff members design the anecdote to convey a principle or norm of conduct which the client has putatively violated, and they systematically pursue endorsement of that principle by the client. By constructing the anecdote as an exemplary case, distanced from the individual client’s personal experience, TC staff members make it an empirically unverifiable, self-evident, and therefore hard to challenge, illustration of a norm. (shrink)

Dena Goodman here offers a fresh explanation of how critical theory broke out of the mold of an earlier tradition of discourse—the mirror for princes genre—and shaped its own course in the eighteenth century. Criticism in Action provides a historical analysis of French Enlightenment texts as actions and as the focus of critical activity in which writers and their potential readers participate. Goodman approaches texts as forces that shape the thinking and acting of the individuals engaged in the (...) act of reading and presents new interpretations of major Enlightenment texts by Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot. (shrink)

Abstract.Klaus Günther's (1988) book developed the distinction between two kinds of discourse, the foundation discourse and the application discourse. In an article (Günther 1989a) following the publication of the book, he used this basic distinction as the starting point for a criticism of the special case‐thesis as defended by Robert Alexy (1978, 32ff., 263ff.; Alexy 1989, 16ff., 213ff.). The aim of this article is to criticize this criticism in its turn and to show that the (...) special case‐thesis does not need the reformulation which Günther proposes. It should be clear from the outset that this concerns an internal discussion in the field of discourse theory; certain discourse‐theoretical premises are taken for granted. In order to understand Giinther's criticism I will first give a brief account of the distinction he has made. (shrink)

"A major transformation in thought took place during the Southern Sung (1127-1279). A new version of Confucian teaching, Tao-hsueh Confucianism (what modern scholars sometimes refer to as Neo-Confucianism), became state orthodoxy, a privileged status which it retained until the twentieth century." "Existing studies of the new Confucianism generally depict a single line of development to and from Chu Hsi (1130-1200), the greatest theoretician of the tradition. In this study of unprecedented scope, however, Hoyt Cleveland Tillman offers an (...) integrated intellectual history of the development of Tao-hsueh Confucianism which for the first time places Chu Hsi within the context of his contemporaries. Tillman's methodological strategy allows a rich, complex picture of the Tao-hsueh movement to emerge - one that is sure to transform the field of Sung Confucianism." "To reconstruct the evolution of the Tao-hsueh group, Tillman studies a number of Confucians from four distinct periods, reflecting the basic diversity that existed among them. His discussion is deeply grounded in political and philosophical history and in research on the social networks that joined the members of the Tao-hsueh group. Within this framework, he provides a vivid account of the changing scope of the movement, tracing its development into a "fellowship" and at times a political faction and demonstrating its movement from diversity to gradually increasing exclusiveness, particularly under the influence of Chu Hsi. Close attention is given to confrontational writings and debates within the group, which covered such issues as humaneness, the function of the mind, uses of the Book of Changes, social welfare programs, teaching methods, expediency, and the grounds for knowledge and authority." "A superbly erudite work, Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi's Ascendancy is an invaluable contribution to the study of the history of Confucian thought in China."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

This paper describes the discourses underlying nursing teachers’ talk about their own norm‐critical competence. Norm criticism is an approach that promotes awareness and criticism of the norms and power structures that exert an excluding effect in society in general and in the healthcare encounter in particular. Given the unequal relationships that can exist in healthcare, for example relationships shaped by racism, sexism and classism, a norm‐critical approach to nursing education would help illuminate these matters. The studied empirical material (...) consisted of focus group interviews. Nursing teachers discussed their norm‐critical competence based on the university course “Norm‐Aware Caring” in which they had recently participated. Through a critical discourse analysis, three discourses were identified in their talk, all of which had the potential to disrupt traditional, normative nursing education. However, in all three discourses there was an underlying discourse of normality, clearly positioning the teachers as exemplifying the “normal.” The binary constructed between normality and otherness contradicts a basic tenet of the norm‐critical approach and may hamper the development of genuine norm‐critical competence in nursing education. (shrink)

If we try to arrive at the simplest and most universally valid definition of the representation of reality in literature, we may dispense with grammatical features such as verisimilitude or with genres such as realism, since these are not universal categories. Their applicability depends on historical circumstances or authorial intent. The most economic and general definition, however, must at least include the following two features. First, any representation presupposes the existence of its object outside of the text and preexistent to (...) it. Readers feel, and critics pronounce, that the text’s significance depends on this objective exteriority, even though this significance may entail destroying the commonplace acceptance of the object; indeed, negating something still presupposes that something. Second, the reader’s response to the mimesis consists in a rationalization tending to verify and complete the mimesis and to expand on it sensory terms . The metalanguage of criticism accordingly prolongs and continues the text’s mimetic discourse, and critics evaluate representation in terms of its precision and suggestive power. Both processes—presupposition and rationalization alike—assume that referentiality is the basic semantic mechanism of the literary mimesis.There are, however, literary representations almost devoid of descriptive content, or so vague and so skimpy that their object cannot be analyzed or rationalized in sensory terms. Criticism is hard put to explain why readers feel compelled to evaluate them. And yet these texts not only lend themselves to interpretation but they are especially apt to trigger and control the reader’s hermeneutic behavior. In short, the represented object eschews referentiality yet refuses to vanish altogether, becoming instead the verbal vehicle of an interpretive activity that ends up by making the object subservient to the subject.1 1. See Roland Barthes et al., Littérature et réalité , esp. my paper, pp. 81-118, on the referential fallacy. Michael Riffaterre, University Professor at Columbia University, is the editor of Romantic Review. He is presently working on a book about Anthony Trollope . His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Syllepsis,” appeared in the Summer 1980 issue. (shrink)

Questions could and should be raised about the political profile of English Romanticism both in particular and in general. Wordsworth’s poetry is especially useful to me here because of the way in which, through formal discontinuities, it dramatizes political conflicts. Reacting against these discontinuities, aesthetically minded critics have simply tended to leave out of the canon those poems which have the greatest capacity to help us become aware of a political poetics. In this respect it may well be that Wordsworth (...) is the most stylistically perverse of the Romantic poets. Not the most difficult to read, necessarily—Percy Bysshe Shelley’s breath-suspending songs and William Blake’s determination to produce “variety in every line” with the aim of unfettering poetry surely make more aggressive and obvious demands on the reader.1 But in these cases we can be reasonably sure that the difficulties are part of a conscious and coherent intention to set imagination to work in kindling sparks from ashes. Wordsworth also set out to do this, and we can agree that he did so with some success in some poems. But critics from Samuel Taylor Coleridge onward have rightly questioned the unity of Wordsworth’s canon in this respect. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge notices the “inconstancy of the style,” an unevenness and a general inability to satisfy the demands of “good poetry” conceived as something possessing an organic form.2 This concern with a wholeness and consistency of artifice is more Coleridge’s than Wordsworth’s, and it seems to me that it is precisely the disjunctions in the poems that embody some of their most original and historically urgent meanings. The blemishes recorded by Coleridge—alternating and dissimilar states of feeling, overminuteness in description, and obsession with “accidental circumstances” , overuse of the dramatic mode, disproportion of thought to event, and so forth—can in fact serve as eloquent signals for discerning the complexities of the poems as they address a historical crisis in consensus embodied exactly in the unstable vehicle of the Wordsworthian speaker.3 3. I have explored the “formal” implications of this crisis in Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry , and the terms of its historical discourse in Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real . David Simpson is professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry , Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real , and Fetishism and Imagination: Dickens, Melville, Conrad and editor of German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel. (shrink)

In Confucianism as Religion: Controversies and Consequences, Yong Chen takes an interesting approach to the subject of Confucian religiosity: he concentrates on analyzing the intellectual and academic debate about the question of whether Confucianism is a religion and highlights its cultural as well as socio-political implications for contemporary China, assuming that this debate coincided with a transition from the predominance of Confucian paradigms to those of modernity. Without this paradigmatic shift, argues Chen, the past and ongoing controversy about (...) Confucian religiosity could not be fully appreciated.To verify his assumption, the author first examines the Chinese reception of the Western concept of... (shrink)

After a century of its retreat from political and social stages in East Asia, Confucianism eventually found its revival together with the economic industrialization in the region. The awakening consciousness of the traditional Confucian values leads to a reconsideration of their implication on a modern society. Despite the criticism on the actual relevance of Confucianism and modernization, there are precious elements within the Confucian values which provide the relevance of Confucianism to the future, such as an (...) ethic of responsibility and the understanding of the humanistic meaning of life. (shrink)

Just over a decade-and-a-half ago, a roundtable discussion published in the pages of October worried that the periodic renewal of critical discourses had slowed to a standstill and that art criticism was faced with obsolescence. Such an obsolescence should be understood in a broadly Hegelian manner: the danger is not that art criticism would disappear from the cultural field, but that it will continue—although drained of its previous necessity. Such fears perhaps run the risk of exaggeration, yet this (...) article shall suggest that there seems a sense in which the field of art criticism has contracted in recent years. Self-reflexivity in art and the popularization of “para-curatorial” approaches, for instance, often underpin the artwork discursively before the arrival of art criticism upon the scene. To be sure, such circumstances are viewable positively as interdisciplinary dialogical opportunities, but the negative flipside here is that art criticism’s potential contribution becomes increasingly minimized. From another angle, critics such as Isabelle Graw have contended that the economic-cultural regime of post-Fordism, with its attention on intellectual labor and knowledge production, might actually hold possibilities for the contemporary art critic—but even here, I argue, art criticism becomes contracted, albeit in the other meaning of the word. (shrink)

This study examines the structure of violence within familial relationships and its justification in Confucianism. While violence is inherently evil in its essential context, certain forms of violence can be structurally justified depending on the context and the relationship between the subject and object. In Eastern traditions, the concept of ‘righteous killing’ (義殺) has existed since ancient times. Violence related to family members shows multilayered dynamics, particularly due to the unique concept of ‘filial piety’ (孝) which functions beyond blood (...) relations as a political grammar. This research attempts to examine how violence by or against parents has been justified through various logic and pretexts in Confucian discourse. In China and Joseon, there were moral aberrations where people mutilated their own or their children’s bodies, or killed others in revenge for their parents, all in the name of filial piety. How does Confucian discourse justify these unfilial attempts that occur in the process of performing filial duty? Is the Confucian justification of violence related to filial piety valid or meaningful? Through examining cases of family-related violence in China and Joseon, this study aims to investigate how violence derived from the performance of filial piety or the embodiment of righteousness was justified or denied within Confucianism. (shrink)

The ethic of care has often been opposed to the ethic of justice as offering a different and even a contradictory approach to moral problems. This article argues that, from the perspective of the discourse ethic, both approaches are complementary in a very fundamental sense, since each one applies to one of two stages of moral reasoning that are as different as they are interconnected. It argues, in particular, that while justice is concerned with the justification and elaboration of (...) norms, care is concerned with finding a solution for specific moral situations. The article then places considerations of care at the centre of ideal discourse and subordinates the importance of rational understanding and moral justification to intuitive communication. (shrink)

Judith Shklar, David Runciman, and others argue against what they see as excessive criticism of political hypocrisy. Such arguments often assume that communicating in an authentic manner is an impossible political ideal. This article challenges the characterization of authenticity as an unrealistic ideal and makes the case that its value can be grounded in a certain political realism sensitive to the threats posed by representative democracy. First, by analyzing authenticity’s demands for political discourse, I show that authenticity has (...) greater flexibility than many assume in accommodating practices common to politics, such as deception, concealment, and persuasion through rhetoric. Second, I argue that a concern for authenticity in political discourse represents a virtue, not a distraction, for representative democracy. Authenticity takes on heightened importance when the public seeks information on how representatives will act in contexts where the public is absent and unable to influence decisions. Furthermore, given the psychological mechanisms behind hypocrisy, public criticism is a sensible response for trying to limit political hypocrisy. From the perspective of democratic theory and psychology, the public has compelling reasons to value authenticity in political discourse. (shrink)

This essay engages with some theoretical issues emerging from Amy Allen’s book The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. It begins by situating Allen’s work within the broader relationship between critical theory and progress, a relationship traditionally carried on by the practice of self-criticism – an immanent and reflexive endeavour that seeks to expose internal odds, paradoxes and pitfalls of concepts and transform them from the inside. Drawing on post-colonial studies and Foucauldian genealogy, Allen’s book (...) contributes to and enriches such distinctive feature of critical theory in its engagement with the language of progress and development. However, this essay attempts to raise two main critical remarks/open questions regarding Allen’s pars construens, specifically her claim for a negativistic meta-normative contextualism and the dismissal of backward-looking progress. Whilst Allen’s explicit intention is to avoid delivering an “abstract negation of modern morality”, her normative solutions, in both instances, risks being overly one-sided and undetermined, and eventually preserving little of that inheritance. The guiding idea of such critical analysis is the advocacy of self-criticism as an immanent task and discourse ethics as the framework for an emancipative dialogue with the subalterns and colonised subjects. (shrink)

Proponemos analizar el alcance de las nociones roigeanas de "teoría y crítica" como categorías epistemológicas para un humanismo crítico latinoamericano desde una lectura alternativa de Teoría y crítica del pensamiento latinoamericano. Indagamos de qué forma estas categorías involucran la legitimidad del discurso filosófico, decisiones en torno del problema del sujeto y de la verdad y modos de entender la historia. Mostramos cómo Roig opera una ruptura, en el marco de lo que él denomina una ampliación metodológica en el campo del (...) quehacer filosófico, al imbricar conceptualizaciones epistemológicas con ejercicios reflexivos en los que el filosofar explora la experiencia vital, construye sus propias fuentes y se abre a una dimensión axiológica. En el marco de este desarrollo, Roig revisa el "legado", incorpora otras voces e interviene críticamente la estructura axiológica de los discursos y analiza sus formas de reconocimiento. Buscamos mostrar las herramientas teóricas y críticas que ofrece este libro en particular para discutir las condiciones y posibilidades del saber filosófico como saber práctico social, situado y liberador y los términos de los humanismos que supone o interpela. We propose to analyze the scope of Roig´s notions, "theory and criticism", as epistemological categories to reach a critical humanism of Latin America, based on the book Teoría y crítica del pensamiento latinoamericano, as an alternative reading. We evaluate how these categories involve the legitimacy of philosophical discourse, and the decisions taken on the subject´s problem, the truth and the possible ways to understand history. We also show how Roig, in the framework of what he identifies as methodological amplification within the field of philosophy´s task, fixes a rupture when interweaving epistemological concepts with reflective exercises in which the art of philosophy explores the vital experience, builds and rebuilds its own sources and opens up to an axiological dimension. In this framework, Roig revises the "legacy", adds other voices, handles critically the axiological structure of discourses and analyzes its ways of recognition. We aim to present the theoretical and critical tools of this book, especially to discuss the conditions and possibilities of the philosophical knowledge taken as practical, social, established and as liberator; and to discuss the terms of humanisms that the philosophical knowledge presents or interpellates. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article discusses some common narratives found in discourses on national identity in Russia and Japan, and their temporal transformations reflecting the needs of a nation as it becomes a colonial empire. National identity discourse is examined from the viewpoint of national antagonism arising from an external threat. Russian and Japanese intellectuals, with their vastly different historical and cultural heritage, have dwelled upon similar issues pertaining to modernization of the state and adoption or rejection of foreign ideas and ways (...) of life. There are several themes in Russian and Japanese discourses on national identity that share a significant overlap, particularly themes of national uniqueness and a ‘special path’, deterministic worldviews, imperial cosmopolitanism/messianism and criticism of ‘Western’ philosophical systems and concepts. This article elucidates the shared aspects of these narratives and philosophical inquiries in Russia and Japan and puts them into a historical context. (shrink)

In his Reflection Revisited, James Swindal interprets Habermas’s formal pragmatics as recasting the traditional philosophy of reflection in intersubjective, augmentation-theoretic terms. In this review essay, I consider some aspects of Swindal’s interpretation for situated moral criticism. I focus in particular on Swindal’s claim that moral discourse must be preceded by meta-discourses in which actors discuss issues related to the initiation of moral discourse. Although I reject Swindal’s arguments for the necessity of such meta-discourses, I provide further arguments (...) for their theoretical possibility and practical desirability for a contextualized critical social theory. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the normative power of cultural values within Chinese-European relations. It proposes that dialogue between European and Chinese stakeholders within educational, cultural, sociological, and philosophical institutions is of the utmost importance in paving a possible way for overcoming the current political crisis. European engagement with Chinese thought in early modernity and the recent reception of early Western liberalism in China both show that there is potential for a non-exclusionary assessment of the “other” in both political cultures. (...) European policy should be aware of its historic potential for critical engagement with Chinese political history. (shrink)

This chapter sheds new light on the interaction between Chinese Buddhism and Confucianism by exploring and comparing the thoughts of the ninth century Huayan-Chan Buddhist Zongmi 宗密 and the twentieth century Neo-Confucian Mou Zongsan 牟宗三. It reveals the structural parallel between their opposing theories: both hold a doctrine of true mind as the central component, and both are influenced by the tathāgatagarbha 如來藏 doctrine of The Awakening of Faith. The former uses them to synthesize Huayan and Chan Buddhist soteriology; (...) the latter assimilates them into his framework of Neo-Confucian moral metaphysics. Seen as a response to Zongmi’s criticism of Confucian metaphysics in general, and the shortcomings of the mandate of heaven and the lack of causal theory in particular, Mou stresses the universality of the Confucian Dao, which is supported by the Song Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi’s unified ontological principle. Rather than appealing to the mandate of heaven, Mou makes clear in following Wang Yangming that the Confucian Dao can be manifested by the sage through his infinite intellectual mind, which is immanent in every human being, so as to solve the problem of the highest good without postulating a transcendent god nor appealing to the karmic causality. Mou’s response, supplemented by other Neo-Confucian theories such as Xiong Shili’s and Tang Junyi’s, is a prominent example of how Confucian tradition meets the challenge of Chinese Buddhism while absorbing Buddhist influence. However, the author also points out that Mou’s Neo-Confucian philosophy provides a possibility of defending Chinese Buddhism in face of the critique raised by Critical Buddhism. (shrink)

On the Rhetoric of Defining Confucianism as a Religion tackles the perennially controversial question of whether Confucianism is a religion and proposes a holistic and contextual approach to the issue.

If any emergent historical criticism will tend by its own choice toward inclusiveness and eclecticism, it is also likely to be constrained by more subtle forms of complicity with the theoretical subculture within which it seeks its audience. It is not in principle impossible that we might choose to set going an initiative that is very different indeed from the methods and approaches already in place. But is nonetheless clear that we must be aware, in some propaedeutic way, of (...) the predispositions for or against such change that are latent in the horizons of the field as they are presently conceived and transmitted. An account of these predispositions will take up most of the following essay. Whether or not the particular texts I shall discuss constitute anything as firm as an establishment in the absolute sense does not matter much: they neither sum up the ongoing careers of their particular authors, in the diachronic sense, nor do they represent any simple totality in the critical culture of the late 1960s. All we need here is the weaker assumption: that these writings by Derrida, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Macherey do offer, by virtue of their very notoriety, evidence of the priorities within the discipline that have afforded them their reputations in the first place. Thus, while they do not in themselves prohibit the emergence of alternatives, they do give us clues about the residual pressures that might constrain those alternatives, and they signal the questions that the historical party must respond to if it is to be recognized as making an important contribution to a debate. My argument will be that the influential critics of the late 1960s have made it very hard indeed to find a place for history, so much so that the avowedly Marxist alternative set forth by Jameson finds itself making disabling concessions to those very influences. I do not claim to describe the entire range of options and alternatives, and indeed offer no discussion of the most excitingly contested field of all, that represented by contemporary feminisms. I mean instead to demonstrate, through a reading of those methodologies that have become authoritative, that the status of historical inquiry has been so eroded that its reactive renaissance, in whatever form, threatens to remain merely gestural and generic. “History” promises thus to function as legitimating any reference to a context beyond literature exclusively conceived, whether it be one of discourse, biography, political or material circumstance. In particular, given the current popularity of discourse analysis, it seems likely that for many practitioners the historical method will remain founded in covertly idealist reconstructions. David Simpson is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of various books and essays, most recently The Politics of American English, 1776-1850 and Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement. (shrink)

Confucian scholars should satisfy two conditions insofar as they think their theories enable Confucianism to make contributions to liberal politics and social policy. The liberal accommodation condition stipulates that the theory in question should accommodate as many reasonable conceptions of the good and religious doctrines as possible while the intelligibility condition stipulates that the theory must have a recognizable Confucian character. By and large, Joseph Chan’s Confucian perfectionism is able to satisfy the above two conditions. However, contrary to Chan (...) and many other Confucian scholars, I argue that any active promotion of Confucianism will violate the liberal accommodation condition. I propose the “wide view of moderate perfectionism,” which enables Confucianism to shed light on a wide range of political and social issues without promoting Confucianism actively. Thus, I present a new approach to the long-standing question of how Confucianism may improve political and social development in a liberal society. (shrink)

Stanisław Brzozowski was active as philosopher and literary critic for only a few years at the turn of the twentieth century, yet his writings are still inspire contemporary thinkers and critics. In every important phase of the development of Polish literary criticism, Polish intellectuals have acknowledged Brzozowski as a writer who had the courage and critical acumen to confront modernity and examine closely contemporary trends of thought from the perspective of social and individual life. This continued presence of the (...) celebrated critic cannot but be interesting for the researcher who is led to ask, what is so intriguing in Brzozowski’s work, why do successive generations of critics and intellectuals return to Brzozowski? Drawing on many important interpretations of Brzozowski’s work (Burek, Głowiński, Nycz), I want to show that in Brzozowski’s work it is possible to find everything contemporary criticism and thought needs, because his books contain, in nuce , projects and strategies which can be (and are) used in different ways by critics representing different ideologies and worldviews. Brzozowski worked out, or rather attempted to work out, ideas which are a source of modern critical projects but in addition his work comprises a repertoire of possibilities which contemporary critical thought can turn to its advantage. Brzozowski’s work can be also treated as a performative act, calling forth the reader’s response, in this way shedding new light on it. I also show that “performative consciousness” is both close to Brzozowski’s practice of writing and deeply rooted in his philosophical conviction. Brzozowski can be considered a representative of modernist, critical literature, in which reading and writing become a mode of experience, a privileged social discourse, and a “leaven,” an act and an activity. (shrink)

To understand critical activity, one must reflect on where this activity takes place - on the institutions of criticism that sustain it. Referred to by some as the ‘natural habitat’ of intellectuals, journals, as the institutionalized sites of theoretical discourse, are often overlooked. Examining the rise of the ‘review’ form of journal publication, from the early eighteenth to the early twenty-first centuries, this ground-breaking book offers a concentrated critique of the review form of journal publication as a medium (...) for political thought and action, as a decisive site for political judgment by the state’s conservers and critics. (shrink)

Although Les Philosophes was an ordinary comedy, and Palissot was far from the caliber of Molière or Voltaire, it successfully consolidated conservative criticisms of the philosophes within a satirical framework, enjoying a successful three-month run in 1760. The reason behind its success was that it was at the center of a debate between the Enlightenment philosophers and the Counter-Enlightenment figures. In addition to being an example of 18th-century French comédie, the play serves as a valuable source for understanding the key (...) points of conservative discourse of the time. While Palissot seemed to focus on attacking individual philosophes’ personalities, he paired these attacks with conceptual critiques, and directed the most of his criticism primarily at Diderot and Rousseau. The play remains significant for two reasons: First, it captures almost all of the concerns and arguments of the conservative reaction to the Enlightenment. Second, it sheds light on Enlightenment thinkers' personal and intellectual struggles. This paper examines Palissot’s Les Philosophes not as a mere literary dispute but as a rich text that reveals the Counter-Enlightenment discourse that emerged in the second half of the 18th century. (shrink)

Confucianism is a kind of humanism. Confucian humanism presupposes, however, a divisive act that separates human and nonhuman. This paper shows that the split between the human and the nonhuman is central to Mencius' moral psychology, and it argues that Confucianism is an anthropological machine in the sense of the term used by Giorgio Agamben. I consider the main points of early Daoist critique of Confucian humanism. A comparative analysis of Herman Melville's novella 'Bartleby the Scrivener' reveals the (...) limitation of the moral will in Mencius. Finally, I refer to an incident that recently captured the imagination of Chinese netizens, and shows the contested influence of Confucian humanism in contemporary China. (shrink)

The paper challenges the traditional assumption that the fragments of ‘Anonymus Iamblichi’ are best understood and interpreted against the intellectual and cultural background of the so-called ‘sophistic movement’. I begin by suggesting that we can distinguish, in the fragments, between two separate ‘discourses’ concerning nomos and its role in human life: an abstract ‘sophistic’ discourse, centered around the defense of nomos against the antinomian champions of natural pleonexia, and another, less abstract and more polemical discourse on nomos, which (...) is aimed at the author’s contemporary Athens. I argue that the author’s engagement with well-known sophistic ideas is best understood as instrumental to his polemical agenda: it provides him with a powerful intellectual framework in which to articulate his criticism of democratic society, especially with regard to traditional notions of social ‘benefaction’ and the relation between rich and poor. (shrink)

This wonderful and remarkable book by Wang Fengyi (1864-1937) is a true testament to the benefits of Daoist spiritual cultivation. At age thirty-five, having become aware of the repercussions and implications of emotions on his own health condition, Wang attained the Dao and began spreading his teachings. One of his most remarkable accomplishments was the founding of countless schools for young women, making education accessible to them on a large scale. Wang Fengyi's teachings are like a thoughtful and insightful poetry (...) that can allow one to transform oneself, one's body and one's Spirit. If you seek to help others or bring wellness to yourself, these teachings can be enormously beneficial, offering direction and great insights for one's well-being. As Daoist practitioners, Johan Hausen and Jonas Akers have done an excellent job in translating this valuable treatise, bringing additional authenticity to the transmission of this work and propagation of Wang Fengyi's teachings. (shrink)

This book is an anthology of commentary and criticism written within the transitional period between Alan Watts' 1973 death and the twenty-first century intellectual horizon. Comprised of 16 essays written and published between 1974 and 1994, with up-to-date introductions from the essayists and other contemporary thinkers, this volume opens a window onto unexplored grounds of Alan Watts' impact within late-twentieth-century discourse - an intermediate space where scholars reoriented their bearings through changing times and emerging academic trends. Offering varied (...) explanations and assessments of Alan Watts, including his influence on the Beat and Hippie generations, and his popularization of Zen Buddhism in America, it tackles unaddressed questions within the milieu of late-twentieth century America from the Reagan Revolution and religious conservatism, to paradigm shifts in Buddhist studies and the rise of post-colonial theory. Contributors' post-mortem analyses and critiques of Watts allow for a thematic rendering of their consonance or dissonance with noted Beat, Hippie, and Zen Buddhism themes of his lifetime. This volume will appeal to scholars and students of humanistic psychology, transpersonal psychology, the psychology of religion, comparative religion, and American studies. (shrink)

In this article, I explore an alternative model of Confucian distributive justice, namely the ‘family model’, by challenging the central claim of recent sufficientarian justifications of Confucian justice offered by Confucian political theorists – roughly, that inequalities of wealth and income beyond the threshold of sufficiency do not matter if they reflect different merits. I argue (1) that the telos of Confucian virtue politics – moral self-cultivation and fiduciary society – puts significant moral and institutional constraints on inequality even if (...) it meets the threshold of sufficiency and largely results from differing individual merits; (2) that the Confucian moral ideal of the family state establishes and gives justification to the ‘family model’ of distributive justice that shifts the focus from desert to vulnerability and from causal responsibility to remedial responsibility. The article concludes by presenting Confucian democracy as the socio-political institution and practice that can best realize the Confucian intuition of the family model of justice. (shrink)

The paper aims to highlight some of the characteristics of political trolling and to follow how the phenomenon functions in the Bulgarian context. The analysis focuses on the specifics of troll language and the so-called troll dilemma, as well as on the interaction between the troll and his audience. The features of the transfer of trolling from an online to an offline environment and the characteristics of trolling in a political context are examined. It is suggested that trolling should not (...) be interpreted as antisocial, anarchic behaviour, but as communication that parasitises ideas of objectivity and truth. (shrink)

Following conventional wisdom Theology as an academic discipline (taught at Universities) is something which developed only in the Middle Ages, or in a certain sense even as late as the 19th century. The present essay in contrast traces its origins to Classical Antiquity and outlines its development in early Christianity, especially with a view to institutions of higher education that existed in Late Antiquity, e. g. in rhetoric and philosophy. It concludes that there were forms of academic theological discourse (...) in Late Antiquity which were to become the basis of later developments in the discipline. (shrink)

Although the popular view of design as enhancing beauty and functionality is not wrong, it is not enough. By thinking of design as not only aesthetic (enhancing beauty) and purposive (enhancing functionality) but also as discursive, this paper addresses the increasing prominence of design, and gives a criterion for evaluating design, by asking what kind of discourse it should be. Design, I contend, ought to participate in rational, as compared to commercial or authoritarian, discourse. Commercial discourse reduces (...) humans to consumers, and authoritarian discourse divides humans into masters and slaves. Rational discourse envisions humans in the highest possible terms, as holding equal place within the real, and equal standing before the truth, and therefore as sharing common cause with one another, at all times and places, and under any conditions. Commercial and authoritarian discourse both attempt to consolidate agency in the hands of a few; rational discourse, to distribute agency equally to all. Design is among the enterprises for which the obligatory work is rational discourse, and the stakes thus the fullness of our humanity and the humanity of others. (shrink)

What is it for art-critical conversation to be productively and appropriately responsive to a work of fine art? Broadly, contemporary work on the nature and purpose of aesthetic discourse tends to prioritize one of two poles: the need for agreement in judgement and/or sensibility, and the flourishing of individuality through aesthetic response. I propose that these alternatives each express the legacy of Kantian and Schillerian thought, respectively. Furthermore, I argue that a favourable approach is available if we look to (...) Friedrich Hölderlin’s way of characterizing the kind of communication that can occur between friends. This is a framework that binds together a plurality of perspectives and voices with what it is for one’s individuality to flourish in and through aesthetic response. Drawing on Hölderlin’s thought, I submit Diversity-in-Unity as a norm on art-critical conversation. In art criticism, individual perspectives need to be reciprocally shaped in new and surprising ways. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explain the differences in perspectives on the human soul between scholastic philosophy and Neo-Confucianism through an analysis of Shin Hudam’s criticism on Lingyan Lishao, a work authored by Sambiasi in 1624. Shin Hu-dam, a prominent figure in the Gongseo school in late Choson, rejected the notion of the soul as a substantial form of human beings, drawing instead on the Neo-Confucian concept of the soul as a gathering of Qi. He further (...) negates epistemology of faculty psychology based on the concept of the mind as an interior whole. Moreover, he denounced the scholastic idea that the goal of the soul consists in achieving the supreme good, labeling it as heretical. Shin Hudam should be recognized for his historical significance in providing a theoretical basis for the critique of Western learning by the Neo-Confucian scholars in Choson, ensuring their response was not merely political or religious backlash but grounded in moral-psychological criticism. (shrink)

In this article, I explore an alternative model of Confucian distributive justice, namely the ‘family model’, by challenging the central claim of recent sufficientarian justifications of Confucian justice offered by Confucian political theorists – roughly, that inequalities of wealth and income beyond the threshold of sufficiency do not matter if they reflect different merits. I argue (1) that the telos of Confucian virtue politics – moral self-cultivation and fiduciary society – puts significant moral and institutional constraints on inequality even if (...) it meets the threshold of sufficiency and largely results from differing individual merits; (2) that the Confucian moral ideal of the family state establishes and gives justification to the ‘family model’ of distributive justice that shifts the focus from desert to vulnerability and from causal responsibility to remedial responsibility. The article concludes by presenting Confucian democracy as the socio-political institution and practice that can best realize the Confucian intuition of the family model of justice. (shrink)

The concept of topos has received considerable attention from both argumentation and discourse studies, although its usage and meaning remain obscure. In this article, I argue that the rediscovery of Aristotelian thought might provide a comprehensible explication of topos. Despite the discourse historical approach’s emphasis on topos, its context is found to be limited and this exposes the argumentation strategies of the DHA to criticism. To overcome any shortcomings and provide a better understanding of topos, a classical (...) approach to the concept is suggested, derived from Aristotle’s rhetoric and dialectic. By focusing on Greek media discourses on ‘Islamist terrorism’, I seek to illustrate the synthesis between the DHA’s argumentation strategies and Aristotelian topos as a fruitful analytical and theoretical tool. (shrink)

This article explores the role of Athenian literary prizes in the development of ancient literary criticism. It examines the views of a range of critics , and identifies several recurrent themes. The discussion reveals that ideas about what was good or bad in literature were not directly affected by the award of prizes; in fact the ancient critics display what is called an “anti-prize” mentality. The article argues that this “anti-prize” mentality is not, as is often thought, a product (...) of intellectual developments in the fourth century BC. It is suggested that the devaluation of prizes is actually a contemporary, integral feature of prize-awarding culture in general. This article draws on recent approaches from cultural sociology to offer some conclusions about the way in which prizes function in popular and critical discourse. (shrink)

: Confucianism is often valued as a doctrine that highlights both the individual and social dimensions of the ideal person, for it indeed puts special emphasis on such lofty goals as loving all humanity and cultivating the self. Through a close and critical analysis of the texts of the Analects and the Mencius, however, it is attempted to demonstrate that because Confucius and Mencius always take filial piety, or, more generally, consanguineous affection, as not only the foundation but also (...) the supreme principle of human life, the individual and social dimensions are inevitably subordinated to and substantially negated by the filial precisely within the Confucian framework, with the result that Confucianism in essence is neither collectivism nor individualism, but "consanguinitism.". (shrink)

Where does Neo-Confucianismâe"a movement that from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries profoundly influenced the way people understood the world and responded to itâe"fit into our story of Chinaâe(tm)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 Chinaâe(tm)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. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the use of non-human animals in ritual sacrifices is not necessary for the Confucian tradition. I draw upon resources found within other religious traditions as well as Confucianism concerning carrying out even the most mundane, ordinary actions as expressions of reverence. I argue that this practice of manifesting deep reverence toward God through simple actions, which I call everyday reverence, reveals a way for Confucians to maintain the deep reverence that is essential for (...) Confucianism, while abandoning the use of non-human animal sacrifice. (shrink)

Jean-François Lyotard is recognized as one of the most significant French philosophers of the twentieth century. Although nearly all of his major writing has been translated into English, one important work has until now been unavailable. _Discourse, Figure_ is Lyotard’s thesis. Provoked in part by Lacan’s influential seminars in Paris, _Discourse, Figure_ distinguishes between the meaningfulness of linguistic signs and the meaningfulness of plastic arts such as painting and sculpture. Lyotard argues that because rational thought is discursive and works of (...) art are inherently opaque signs, certain aspects of artistic meaning such as symbols and the pictorial richness of painting will always be beyond reason’s grasp. A wide-ranging and highly unusual work, _Discourse, Figure_ proceeds from an attentive consideration of the phenomenology of experience to an ambitious meditation on the psychoanalytic account of the subject of experience, structured by the confrontation between phenomenology and psychoanalysis as contending frames within which to think the materialism of consciousness. In addition to prefiguring many of Lyotard’s later concerns, _Discourse, Figure_ captures Lyotard’s passionate engagement with topics beyond phenomenology and psychoanalysis to structuralism, semiotics, poetry, art, and the philosophy of language. (shrink)