Learning to Emulate the Wise: The Genesis of Chinese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China ed. by John Makeham

2014 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 1110-1114
Author(s):  
Henry Rosemont
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Philosophy ◽  
Academic Discipline

The “Legitimacy of Chinese Philosophy” Debate and the Global Extension of Disciplinary Knowledge

2019 ◽  
pp. 699-717
Author(s):  
Leigh K. Jenco
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Chinese Philosophy ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Disciplinary Knowledge ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Comparative Political Theory ◽  
Chinese Thought ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

This chapter argues that the ongoing debate about the “legitimacy of Chinese philosophy” (Zhongguo zhexue hefaxing) raises issues relevant to the globalization of knowledge. On its surface, the debate concerns whether Chinese thought can be meaningfully understood as “philosophy”; more generally, it asks how, in the very process of enabling their translation into presumably more “modern” languages of intellectual expression, the terms of a specific academic discipline shape and constrain the development of particular forms of knowledge. The debate reveals the power inequalities that underlie attempts to include culturally marginalized bodies of thought within established disciplines and suggests the range of alternatives that are silenced or forgotten when this “inclusion” takes place. Even contemporary invocations of “Chinese philosophy” are often unable to comprehend the stakes of the debate for many of its Chinese participants, who link the debate to enduring questions about the capacity of indigenous Chinese academic terms to compete successfully with Euro-American ones. These debates may illuminate questions currently motivating comparative political theory.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 333-337
Author(s):  
Theodore M. Porter
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Hierarchical Structure ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Intellectual Character ◽  
Statistical Mathematics ◽  
Solid Foundation ◽  
Structure Of Knowledge

This concluding chapter addresses how statistics has assumed the trappings of a modern academic discipline primarily during the last half century. The intellectual character of statistics had been thoroughly transformed by 1900. The period when statistical thinking was allied only to the simplest mathematics gave way to a period of statistical mathematics—which, to be sure, has not been divorced from thinking. In the twentieth century, statistics has at last assumed at least the appearance of conforming to that hierarchical structure of knowledge beloved by philosophers and sociologists in which theory governs practice and in which the “advanced” field of mathematics provides a solid foundation for the “less mature” biological and social sciences. The crystallization of a mathematical statistics out of the wealth of applications developed during the nineteenth century provides the natural culmination to this story.

Review of periodical articles

Urban History ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 327-347
Author(s):  
Frederik Buylaert ◽  
Gerrit Verhoeven ◽  
Reinoud Vermoesen ◽  
Tim Verlaan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Century Development ◽  
Ideological Baggage

One of the great interpretive arcs of history as an academic discipline is the opposition between pre-modern and modern societies. Stimulated by post-modern theory, historians have done much in the past decades to expunge the ideological baggage of history as a ‘great march of civilization’, but they continue to imagine the industrial revolution as a great hinge between two distinct epochs. For all its merits, this perspective also creates problems. Burdened by hindsight, medievalists and modernists are often inclined to understand a case-study as either a prefiguration of a nineteenth- or twentieth-century development, or as its foil. Some of the most important publications on the history of medieval European towns published in 2019 were about destroying such assumptions.

scholarly journals Introducing Chinese Philosophy to Western Readers – Lin Yutang as a Cross-cultural Interpreter

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 87-104
Author(s):  
Magdalena Filipczuk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Chinese Philosophy ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
The State ◽  
The West ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Conceptual Schemes ◽  
Lin Yutang

The article reconstructs selected motifs in the philosophy of Lin Yutang, a twentieth-century Chinese thinker, translator and editor, especially popular in the West, undertaken, as it were, on the margins of his work to explain and popularize Chinese culture and philosophy in the West. Lin reflects on issues such as how to effectively and accurately explain a radically alien civilization to the Western-educated reader, in his or her own language, and who can appoint himself as the representative of Chinese culture at all? As a bilingual author, Lin very accurately shows the state of suspension between two cultures, characteristic of an intercultural interpreter who attempts to simultaneously move within two disproportionate, culturally determined conceptual schemes.

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