Transmitters and Creators


Book Description

"The Analects (Lunyu) is one of the most influential texts in human history. As a putative record of Confucius’s (551–479 B.C.E.) teachings and a foundational text in scriptural Confucianism, this classic was instrumental in shaping intellectual traditions in China and East Asia until the early twentieth century. But no premodern reader read only the text of the Analects itself. Rather, the Analects was embedded in a web of interpretation that mediated its meaning. Modern interpreters of the Analects only rarely acknowledge this legacy of two thousand years of commentaries. How well do we understand prominent or key commentaries from this tradition? How often do we read such commentaries as we might read the text on which they comment? Many commentaries do more than simply comment on a text. Not only do they shape the reading of the text, but passages of text serve as pretexts for the commentator to develop and expound his own body of thought. This book attempts to redress our neglect of commentaries by analyzing four key works dating from the late second century to the mid-nineteenth century (a period substantially contemporaneous with the rise and decline of scriptural Confucianism): the commentaries of He Yan (ca. 190–249); Huang Kan (488–545); Zhu Xi (1130–1200); and Liu Baonan (1791–1855) and Liu Gongmian (1821–1880)."




Whose Tradition? Which Dao?


Book Description

Considers the notable similarities between the thought of Confucius and Wittgenstein. In an incisive work of comparative philosophy, James F. Peterman considers the similarities between early Chinese ethicist Confucius and mid-twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Their enduring legacies rest in no small part on projects to restore humanity to healthy ways of living and thinking. Confucius offers a method of answering ethical questions designed to get his interlocutors further along on the Dao, the path of right living. Struggling with his own forms of unhealthy philosophical confusion, Wittgenstein provides a method of philosophical therapy designed to help one come into agreement with norms embedded in our forms of life and speech. Highlighting similarities between the two philosophers, Peterman shows how Wittgensteinian critique can benefit from Confucian inquiry and how Confucian practice can benefit from Wittgensteinian investigations. Furthermore, in presenting a way to understand Confucius’s Dao as concrete language games and forms of life, and Wittgenstein’s therapeutic interventions as the most fitting philosophical orientation toward early Confucian ethics, Peterman offers Western thinkers a new, sophisticated understanding of Confucius as a philosopher.




Proceedings and Papers


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Quarterly Notebook


Book Description




After Wisdom


Book Description

The nine essays in this volume, written by an international and interdisciplinary group of younger scholars, explore comparative dimensions of ancient Chinese and Greek literature, illuminating the development of myth, reason, wisdom literature, and scholarship during the first millennium BCE.




Text Technologies


Book Description

The field of text technologies is a capacious analytical framework that focuses on all textual records throughout human history, from the earliest periods of traceable communication—perhaps as early as 60,000 BCE—to the present day. At its core, it examines the material history of communication: what constitutes a text, the purposes for which it is intended, how it functions, and the social ends that it serves. This coursebook can be used to support any pedagogical or research activities in text technologies, the history of the book, the history of information, and textually based work in the digital humanities. Through careful explanations of the field, examinations of terminology and themes, and illustrated case studies of diverse texts—from the Cyrus cylinder to the Eagles' "Hotel California"—Elaine Treharne and Claude Willan offer a clear yet nuanced overview of how humans convey meaning. Text Technologies will enable students and teachers to generate multiple lines of inquiry into how communication—its production, form and materiality, and reception—is crucial to any interpretation of culture, history, and society.




Probability Distributions in Risk Management Operations


Book Description

This book is about the formulations, theoretical investigations, and practical applications of new stochastic models for fundamental concepts and operations of the discipline of risk management. It also examines how these models can be useful in the descriptions, measurements, evaluations, and treatments of risks threatening various modern organizations. Moreover, the book makes clear that such stochastic models constitute very strong analytical tools which substantially facilitate strategic thinking and strategic decision making in many significant areas of risk management. In particular the incorporation of fundamental probabilistic concepts such as the sum, minimum, and maximum of a random number of continuous, positive, independent, and identically distributed random variables in the mathematical structure of stochastic models significantly supports the suitability of these models in the developments, investigations, selections, and implementations of proactive and reactive risk management operations. The book makes extensive use of integral and differential equations of characteristic functions, mainly corresponding to important classes of mixtures of probability distributions, as powerful analytical tools for investigating the behavior of new stochastic models suitable for the descriptions and implementations of fundamental risk control and risk financing operations. These risk treatment operations very often arise in a wide variety of scientific disciplines of extreme practical importance.




Human Rights and Criminal Justice for the Downtrodden


Book Description

This book contains essays by leading international experts in the areas of international criminal law and international human rights law. Part One of the book contains eight essays in international criminal law, covering issues such as the crime of aggression; terrorism and the Statute of the International Criminal Court; the evolution of the law on crimes against humanity and genocide; the doctrine of universal jurisdiction; and the relationship between international human rights and international criminal law jurisprudence. Part Two has eight essays on economic, social and cultural rights, covering inter alia the right to development; genetic resources for food and agriculture; the right to food (also in armed conflict); the definition of cultural rights; and business and human rights. Part Three has six essays on minority rights dealing with issues such as the role of the Working Group on Minorities; the Hague, Oslo and Lund recommendations regarding minority questions; the protection of kin-minorities; and the situation of the Greenlanders. Part Four has fourteen essays on human rights issues such as citizenship and human rights; human rights law, the environment and indigenous peoples; the role of human rights institutions; leadership in the human rights movement; the sources of fundamental rights in the European Union; and human rights and traditional practices. The book also contains a comprehensive bibliography of Asbjørn Eide.




Reading Philosophy, Writing Poetry


Book Description

"In a formative period of Chinese culture, early medieval writers made extensive use of a diverse set of resources, in which such major philosophical classics as Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Classic of Changes featured prominently. Reading Philosophy, Writing Poetry examines how these writers understood and manipulated a shared intellectual lexicon to produce meaning. Focusing on works by some of the most important and innovative poets of the period, this book explores intertextuality—the transference, adaptation, or rewriting of signs—as a mode of reading and a condition of writing. It illuminates how a text can be seen in its full range of signifying potential within the early medieval constellation of textual connections and cultural signs.If culture is that which connects its members past, present, and future, then the past becomes an inherited and continually replenished repository of cultural patterns and signs with which the literati maintains an organic and constantly negotiated relationship of give and take. Wendy Swartz explores how early medieval writers in China developed a distinctive mosaic of ways to participate in their cultural heritage by weaving textual strands from a shared and expanding store of literary resources into new patterns and configurations."




Confucius Now


Book Description

Written by the most important scholars in contemporary Confucian studies, these approachable essays focus on the relevance of Confucius’s ideas to modern living, with special attention given to the Analects, his seminal text. Topics covered include tradition and creativity, grief and mourning, the doctrine of correcting names, Confucian kungfu, and moral cultivation.