From its beginnings, Confucianism has vibrantly taught that each person is able to find the Way individually in service to the community and the world. John Berthrong’s comprehensive new work tells the story of the grand intellectual development of the Confucian tradition, revealing all the historical phases of Confucianism and opening the reader’s eyes to the often neglected gifts of scholars of the Han, T’ang, and the modern periods, as well as to the vast contributions of Korea and Japan. The author concludes his revelatory study with an examination of the contemporary renewal of the Confucian Way in East Asia and its spread to the West.

Legislation to change Korean society along Confucian lines began at the founding of the Chosŏn dynasty in 1392 and had apparently achieved its purpose by the mid seventeenth century. Until this important new study, however, the nature of Koryŏ society, the stresses induced by the new legislation, and society’s resistance to the Neo-Confucian changes imposed by the Chosŏn elite have remained largely unexplored. To explain which aspects of life in Koryŏ came under attack and why, Martina Deuchler draws on social anthropology to examine ancestor worship, mourning, inheritance, marriage, the position of women, and the formation of descent groups. To examine how Neo-Confucian ideology could become an effective instrument for altering basic aspects of Koryŏ life, she traces shifts in political and social power as well as the cumulative effect of changes over time. What emerges is a subtle analysis of Chosŏn Korean social and ideological history.

This book bridges the regions of East Asia and the West by offering a detailed and critical inquiry of educational concepts of the East Asian tradition. It provides educational thinkers and practitioners with alternative resources and perspectives for their educational thinking, to enrich their educational languages and to promote the recognition of educational thoughts from different cultures and traditions across a global world. The key notions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian philosophy directly concern the ideals, processes and challenges of learning, education and self-transformation, which can be seen as the western equivalences of liberal education, including the German concept of Bildung. All the topics in the book are of fundamental interest across diverse cultures, giving a voice to a set of long-lasting and yet differentiated cultural traditions of learning and education, and thereby creating a common space for critical philosophical reflection of one's own educational tradition and practice. The book is especially timely, given that the vocabularies in educational discourse today have been dominantly “West centred” for a long time, even while the whole world has become more and more diverse across races, religions and cultures. It offers a great opportunity to philosophers of education for their cross-cultural understanding and self-understanding of educational ideas and practices on both personal and institutional levels.

Chinese contexts as influenced by the religious moral philosophy of New Confucianism are characterized by the idea of becoming a sage through self-cultivation. For Christian theology – with its emphasis on God’s grace rather than on self-cultivation – Confucian teaching in this matter may appear as a problem. Chinese Christian theology may ask: How can the Christian doctrine of justification by grace alone be contextualized in Chinese contexts which are characterized by the contradicting idea of self-cultivation? Another question may be equally interesting for Christian theology in all contexts: Which insights can be attained from an attempt at contextualizing the Christian doctrine of justification to contexts influenced by New Confucianism? In this book professor Arne Redse contributes to answering these questions.

Argues that Confucianism can be important to the contemporary, global conversation of philosophy and should not be confined to an East Asian context.

This book examines in detail the basic trajectory of the cultural transformation and brings to light the extrinsic conditions and intrinsic mechanisms involved. It focuses on the period from after the Opium Wars to the New Culture Movement, as the New Culture Movement can be considered a pivotal phase in the cultural transformation of modern-day China. The New Culture Movement was a revolutionary eruption triggered by the accumulation of all the new qualitative cultural factors since the Opium Wars. Superficially, the movement’s goal seemed to be to overthrow the traditional culture. But in essence its true objective was to conduct an overall “screening” of that culture. The book elaborates a broad variety of points in this context, including: the ideological and cultural evolution following the Opium Wars; the pressing challenges faced by “Zhong Ti”; the initial shaping of social, public and cultural spaces and major trends in ideological and cultural transformation at the end of the Qing Dynasty; the political disarray and conflicts between the new and old ideology in the first years of the Republic; the rise of the New Culture Movement; and the role of conservatism in the transition to a modern culture.

Zhu Xi (1130–1200), the chief architect of neo-Confucian thought, affected a momentous transformation in Chinese philosophy. His ideas came to dominate Chinese intellectual life, including the educational and civil service systems, for centuries. Despite his influence, Zhu Xi is known as the "great synthesizer" and rarely appreciated as a thinker in his own right. This volume presents Zhu Xi as a major world philosopher, one who brings metaphysics and cosmology into attunement with ethical and social practice. Contributors from the English- and Chinese-speaking worlds explore Zhu Xi's unique thought and offer it to the Western philosophical imagination. Zhu Xi's vision is critical, intellectually rigorous, and religious, telling us how to live in the transforming world of li—the emergent, immanent, and coherent patternings of natural and human milieu.

Religion is the third and final volume in Robert Cummings Neville's systematic development of a new philosophical theology. Unfolding through his earlier volumes, Ultimates and Existence, and now in Religion, philosophical theology considers first-order questions generally treated by religious traditions through philosophical methods while reflecting Neville's long engagement with philosophy, theology, and Eastern and Western religious traditions. In this capstone to the trilogy, Neville provides a theory of religion and presents a sacred worldview to guide religious participation. His philosophical theory of value enlightens religions' approaches to ethics, spirituality, and religious institutional living and collaboration. With a detailed examination of plausibility conditions for sacred worldviews, the book concludes with an exploration of "religionless religion" for which institutions of religion are of penultimate value. Through the development of philosophical theology, Neville has built a unique, multidisciplinary, comparative, nonconfessional theological system, one that addresses concerns and provides tools for scientific and humanistic scholars of religion, postmodern thinkers, intellectuals from both secular and religious backgrounds, and those interested in the global state of religion today.

Discusses contemporary Confucianism’s relevance and its capacity to address pressing social and political issues of twenty-first-century life. Condemned during the Maoist era as a relic of feudalism, Confucianism enjoyed a robust revival in post-Mao China as China’s economy began its rapid expansion and gradual integration into the global economy. Associated with economic development, individual growth, and social progress by its advocates, Confucianism became a potent force in shaping politics and society in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese communities. This book links the contemporary Confucian revival to debates—both within and outside China—about global capitalism, East Asian modernity, political reforms, civil society, and human alienation. The contributors offer fresh insights on the contemporary Confucian revival as a broad cultural phenomenon, encompassing an interpretation of Confucian moral teaching; a theory of political action; a vision of social justice; and a perspective for a new global order, in addition to demonstrating that Confucianism is capable of addressing a wide range of social and political issues in the twenty-first century.

The essays in this volume explore three aspects of social transformation of Southeast Asian Societies namely, social change and develoment, the role of intellectuals, religious and cultural values. They are a tribute to the seminal contributions of the distiguished Malaysian sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas.