London, GB | Formerly of New York, Buenos Aires, Fife, and the Western Cape. | Saoránach d’Éirinn.

Confucianism

Charles Taylor & Tu Weiming

Two of the brightest philosophical minds, China’s Tu Weiming and Canada’s Charles Taylor, combined at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna last year for a dialogue. The video is above, or you can click the link here.

McGill’s Prof. Charles Taylor is the author of A Secular Age and winner of the Templeton Prize. Prof. Tu Weiming is director of the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University and a leading proponent of Confucian thinking.

March 19, 2012 10:00 pm | Link | No Comments »

Towards a Confucian Modernity

Professor Tu Weiming (杜維明) is the founding dean of the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University as well as Lifetime Professor of Philosophy at that institution. He was born in 1940 in Kunming, the capital of the Yunnan province, and studied at Tunghai University (Taiwan) and Harvard before teaching at Princeton, Berkeley, and then Harvard. Tu has been a visiting professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the École pratique des hautes études in Paris, and elsewhere. This address was given at Colorado College on 5 February 1999.

MY RESPONSE TO Samuel Huntington’s coming clash of civilizations concerns the desirability and necessity of a dialogue of civilizations. Hegel, Marx, and Max Weber shared an ethos that, despite all its shortcomings, the modern West informed by the Enlightenment mentality was the only arena where the true difference for the rest of the world would be made. Confucian East Asia, Islamic Middle East, Hindu India, or Buddhist Southeast Asia were on the receiving end of this process. Eventually, modernization with homogenization or convergence will make cultural diversity inoperative if not totally meaningless. It was inconceivable that Confucianism, or, for that matter, any other non-Western spiritual tradition, could exert a shaping influence on the modernizing process. The development from tradition to modernity was irreversible and inevitable. In the global context, some of the most brilliant minds in the modern West assumed this to be self evidently true, but nowadays it has turned out to be only part of the big picture. In the rest of the world, and arguably in Western Europe and North America, the anticipated clear transition from tradition to modernity never occurred. As a norm, traditions continue to make their presence in modernity, and indeed the modernizing process itself is constantly shaped by a variety of cultural forms rooted in distinct traditions. The eighteenth century recognition of the relevance of radical otherness to one’s own self-understanding seems more applicable to the current situation in the global community than the attention to any challenges to the modern Western mindset of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. (more…)

July 14, 2011 4:00 pm | Link | 1 Comment »

Home | About | Contact | Paginated Index | Twitter | Facebook | RSS/Atom Feed
andrewcusack.com | © Andrew Cusack 2004-present (Unless otherwise stated)