A major voice in late twentieth-century philosophy, Alan Donagan is distinguished for his theories on the history of philosophy and the nature of morality. The Philosophical Papers of Alan Donagan, volumes 1 and 2, collect 28 of Donagan's most important and best-known essays on historical understanding and ethics from 1957 to 1991. Volume 1 includes essays on Spinoza, Descartes, Bradley, Collingwood, Russell, Moore, and Popper, as well as two previously unpublished papers on the history of philosophy as a discipline, and on Ryle and Wittgenstein's nature of philosophy. Linked by Donagan's commitment to the central importance of history for philosophy and his interest in problems of historical understanding, these essays represent the remarkable scope of Donagan's thought.

Learning to Emulate the Wise is the first book of a threevolume series that constructs a historically informed, multidisciplinary framework to examine how traditional Chinese knowledge systems and grammars of knowledge construction interacted with Western paradigms in the formation and development of modern academic disciplines in China. Within this volume, John Makeham and several other noted sinologists and philosophers explore how the field of "Chinese philosophy" (Zhongguo Zhexue) was born and developed in the early decades of the twentieth century, examining its growth and relationship with European, American, and Japanese scholarship and philosophy. The work discusses an array of representative institutions and individuals, including FengYoulan, Fu Sinian, Hu Shi, Jin Yuelin, Liang Shuming, Nishi Amane, Tang Yongtong, Xiong Shili, Zhang Taiyan, and a range of Marxist philosophers. The epilogue discusses the intellectualhistorical significance of these figures and throws into relief how Zhongguozhexue is understood today.

During the last century China has undergone more change than during any other period in its long and turbulent history. Roughly a quarter of the world’s population has been directly affected by the radical transformation that culminated in the establishment of the present Communist state—one which claims to have translated into reality the Confucian ideal of securing the equality of all men. In underdeveloped regions throughout the world, wherever the quest for social justice has been checked, millions of people have been indirectly affected by these changes. Western scholars, somewhat perplexed by what has already happened, are trying to determine the causes underlying the whole succession of events. Believing that recent developments are best understood when viewed from a historical perspective, the editor of this work has tried to present in one volume a conspectus of the brilliant and many-sided development of Chinese philosophy. The study of Chinese philosophy has been severely restricted by the difficulties of the classical literary style and, until recently, by the absence of reliable translations. Problems of terminology abound because the same Chinese term is translated differently in the works of different philosophers. The editor endeavors in the introductory statement preceding each selection to help the reader to cope with these lexical problems. By adopting a chronological arrangement of the materials and calling attention to interlinking developments, he provides the reader with a practical means of familiarizing himself with the most important documents of the cultural heritage of China, the cradle of the world’s oldest civilization, from the Confucian Analects to the theoretical statements of Mao Tse-Tung.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.