Li Zhi, Confucianism, and the Virtue of Desire

Li Zhi, Confucianism, and the Virtue of Desire PDF Author: Pauline C. Lee
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438439288
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Li Zhi (1527–1602) was a bestselling author with a devoted readership. His biting, shrewd, and visionary writings with titles like A Book to Hide and A Book to Burn were both inspiring and inflammatory. Widely read from his own time to the present, Li Zhi has long been acknowledged as an important figure in Chinese cultural history. While he is esteemed as a stinging social critic and an impassioned writer, Li Zhi's ideas have been dismissed as lacking a deeper or constructive vision. Pauline C. Lee convincingly shows us otherwise. Situating Li Zhi within the highly charged world of the late-Ming culture of "feelings," Lee presents his slippery and unruly yet clear and robust ethical vision. Li Zhi is a Confucian thinker whose consuming concern is a powerful interior world of abundance, distinctive to each individual: the realm of the emotions. Critical to his ideal of the good life is the ability to express one's feelings well. In the work's conclusion, Lee brings Li Zhi's insights into conversation with contemporary philosophical debates about the role of feelings, an ethics of authenticity, and the virtue of desire.

Li Zhi, Confucianism, and the Virtue of Desire

Li Zhi, Confucianism, and the Virtue of Desire PDF Author: Pauline C. Lee
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438439288
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Get Book Here

Book Description
Li Zhi (1527–1602) was a bestselling author with a devoted readership. His biting, shrewd, and visionary writings with titles like A Book to Hide and A Book to Burn were both inspiring and inflammatory. Widely read from his own time to the present, Li Zhi has long been acknowledged as an important figure in Chinese cultural history. While he is esteemed as a stinging social critic and an impassioned writer, Li Zhi's ideas have been dismissed as lacking a deeper or constructive vision. Pauline C. Lee convincingly shows us otherwise. Situating Li Zhi within the highly charged world of the late-Ming culture of "feelings," Lee presents his slippery and unruly yet clear and robust ethical vision. Li Zhi is a Confucian thinker whose consuming concern is a powerful interior world of abundance, distinctive to each individual: the realm of the emotions. Critical to his ideal of the good life is the ability to express one's feelings well. In the work's conclusion, Lee brings Li Zhi's insights into conversation with contemporary philosophical debates about the role of feelings, an ethics of authenticity, and the virtue of desire.

Symptoms of an Unruly Age

Symptoms of an Unruly Age PDF Author: Rivi Handler-Spitz
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 029574197X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Symptoms of an Unruly Age compares the writings of Li Zhi (1527–1602) and his late-Ming compatriots to texts composed by their European contemporaries, including Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Emphasizing aesthetic patterns that transcend national boundaries, Rivi Handler-Spitz explores these works as culturally distinct responses to similar social and economic tensions affecting early modern cultures on both ends of Eurasia. The paradoxes, ironies, and self-contradictions that pervade these works are symptomatic of the hypocrisy, social posturing, and counterfeiting that afflicted both Chinese and European societies at the turn of the seventeenth century. Symptoms of an Unruly Age shows us that these texts, produced thousands of miles away from one another, each constitute cultural manifestations of early modernity.

The Laws and Economics of Confucianism

The Laws and Economics of Confucianism PDF Author: Taisu Zhang
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107141117
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Zhang argues that property institutions in preindustrial China and England were a cause of China's lagging development in preindustrial times.

Contemporary Confucian Political Philosophy

Contemporary Confucian Political Philosophy PDF Author: Stephen C. Angle
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074566153X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Confucian political philosophy has recently emerged as a vibrant area of thought both in China and around the globe. This book provides an accessible introduction to the main perspectives and topics being debated today, and shows why Progressive Confucianism is a particularly promising approach. Students of political theory or contemporary politics will learn that far from being confined to a museum, contemporary Confucianism is both responding to current challenges and offering insights from which we can all learn. The Progressive Confucianism defended here takes key ideas of the twentieth-century Confucian philosopher Mou Zongsan (1909-1995) as its point of departure for exploring issues like political authority and legitimacy, the rule of law, human rights, civility, and social justice. The result is anti-authoritarian without abandoning the ideas of virtue and harmony; it preserves the key values Confucians find in ritual and hierarchy without giving in to oppression or domination. A central goal of the book is to present Progressive Confucianism in such a way as to make its insights manifest to non-Confucians, be they philosophers or simply citizens interested in the potential contributions of Chinese thinking to our emerging, shared world.

Public Reason Confucianism

Public Reason Confucianism PDF Author: Sungmoon Kim
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316592073
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Recent proposals concerning Confucian meritocratic perfectionism have justified Confucian perfectionism in terms of political meritocracy. In contrast, 'Confucian democratic perfectionism' is a form of comprehensive Confucian perfectionism that can accommodate a plurality of values in civil society. It is also fully compatible with core values of democracy such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and the right to political participation. Sungmoon Kim presents 'public reason Confucianism' as the most attractive option for contemporary East Asian societies that are historically and culturally Confucian. Public reason Confucianism is a particular style of Confucian democratic perfectionism in which comprehensive Confucianism is connected with perfectionism via a distinctive form of public reason. It calls for an active role for the democratic state in promoting a Confucian conception of the good life, at the heart of which are such core Confucian values as filial piety and ritual propriety.

A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden)

A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden) PDF Author: Zhi Li
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541538
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Li Zhi's iconoclastic interpretations of history, religion, literature, and social relations have fascinated Chinese intellectuals for centuries. His approach synthesized Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist ethics and incorporated the Neo-Confucian idealism of such thinkers as Wang Yangming (1472–1529). The result was a series of heretical writings that caught fire among Li Zhi's contemporaries, despite an imperial ban on their publication, and intrigued Chinese audiences long after his death. Translated for the first time into English, Li Zhi's bold challenge to established doctrines will captivate anyone curious about the origins of such subtly transgressive works as the sixteenth-century play The Peony Pavilion or the eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber. In A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden), Li Zhi confronts accepted ideas about gender, questions the true identity of history's heroes and villains, and offers his own readings of Confucius, Laozi, and the Buddha. Fond of vivid sentiment and sharp expression, Li Zhi made no distinction between high and low literary genres in his literary analysis. He refused to support sanctioned ideas about morality and wrote stinging social critiques. Li Zhi praised scholars who risked everything to expose extortion and misrule. In this sophisticated translation, English-speaking readers encounter the best of this heterodox intellectual's vital contribution to Chinese thought and culture.

Neo-Confucianism

Neo-Confucianism PDF Author: Stephen C. Angle
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509518614
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Neo-Confucianism is a philosophically sophisticated tradition weaving classical Confucianism together with themes from Buddhism and Daoism. It began in China around the eleventh century CE, played a leading role in East Asian cultures over the last millennium, and has had a profound influence on modern Chinese society. Based on the latest scholarship but presented in accessible language, Neo-Confucianism: A Philosophical Introduction is organized around themes that are central in Neo-Confucian philosophy, including the structure of the cosmos, human nature, ways of knowing, personal cultivation, and approaches to governance. The authors thus accomplish two things at once: they present the Neo-Confucians in their own, distinctive terms; and they enable contemporary readers to grasp what is at stake in the great Neo-Confucian debates. This novel structure gives both students and scholars in philosophy, religion, history, and cultural studies a new window into one of the world's most important philosophical traditions.

Confucianism in China

Confucianism in China PDF Author: Tony Swain
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474242456
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This accessible history of Confucianism, or the 'Way of the Ru', emphasizes the religious dimensions of the tradition. It clearly explains the tradition's unique and subtle philosophical ideals as well as the 'arts of the Ru' whereby seemingly simple acts such as reading, sitting quietly, good manners, and attending to family and state responsibilities, became ways of ultimate transformation. This book explains the origins of the Ru and documents their impact in imperial China, before providing extensive coverage of the modern era. Confucianism in China: An Introduction shows how the long history of the Ru is vital to comprehending China today. As the empire drew to an end, there were impassioned movements both to reinvent and to eradicate Ru tradition. Less than forty years ago, it seemed close to extinction, but today it is undergoing spectacular revival. This introduction is suitable for anyone wishing to understand a tradition that shaped imperial China and which is now increasingly swaying Chinese religious, philosophical, political, and economic developments. The book contains a glossary of key terms and 22 images, and further resources can be found on the book's webpage http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/confucianism-in-china-9781474242462/.

Neo-Confucianism and Science in Korea

Neo-Confucianism and Science in Korea PDF Author: Sang-ho Ro
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000343154
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Historians of late premodern Korea have tended to regard it as a hermit kingdom, isolated from its neighbours and the wider world. In fact, as Ro argues in this book, Korean intellectuals were heavily influenced by both Chinese Neo-Confucianism and the European Enlightenment in the late 18th and 19th centuries. In the late Choson period the regime felt threatened by the new, more empirical, approaches to knowledge emerging from both the East and the West. For this reason many Korean intellectuals felt it necessary to work in the shadows and formed secret societies for the study of nature. Because of the secrecy of these societies, much of their work has remained unknown even in Korea until recent years. Ho looks at the work of these intellectuals and analyses the impact their thinking and experimentation had on knowledge production in Korea. A fascinating insight into the largely overlooked story of how globalization affected intellectual life in Korea before the 20th century. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of Korean history and of Asian intellectual history more broadly.

Three Streams

Three Streams PDF Author: Philip J. Ivanhoe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190629479
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Recent interest in Confucianism has a tendency to suffer from essentialism and idealism, manifested in a variety of ways. One example is to think of Confucianism in terms of the views attributed to one representative of the tradition, such as Kongzi (Confucius) (551-479 BCE) or Mengzi (Mencius) (372 - 289 BCE) or one school or strand of the tradition, most often the strand or tradition associated with Mengzi or, in the later tradition, that formed around the commentaries and interpretation of Zhu Xi (1130-1200). Another such tendency is to think of Confucianism in terms of its manifestations in only one country; this is almost always China for the obvious reasons that China is one of the most powerful and influential states in the world today. A third tendency is to present Confucianism in terms of only one period or moment in the tradition; for example, among ethical and political philosophers, pre-Qin Confucianism--usually taken to be the writings attributed to Kongzi, Mengzi, and, if we are lucky, Xunzi (479-221 BCE)--often is taken as "Confucianism." These and other forms of essentialism and idealism have led to a widespread and deeply entrenched impression that Confucianism is thoroughly homogenous and monolithic (these often are "facts" mustered to support the purportedly oppressive, authoritarian, and constricted nature of the tradition); such impressions can be found throughout East Asia and dominate in the West. This is quite deplorable for it gives us no genuine sense of the creatively rich, philosophically powerful, highly variegated, and still very much open-ended nature of the Confucian tradition. This volume addresses this misconstrual and misrepresentation of Confucianism by presenting a philosophically critical account of different Confucian thinkers and schools, across place (China, Korea, and Japan) and time (the 10th to 19th centuries).