C. Y. Cheung

The book is divided into two parts, namely, “Japanese Philosophy: Teaching and Research in the Global World;” and “Japanese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline.” In the first part, there are reports of the situation of teaching and research of Japanese philosophy. The areas discussed are Japan, Canada, France, Spain and English-speaking regions. In the second part, there will be papers on varies topics on Japanese philosophy, such as papers on Nishida Kitaro, Kuki Shuzo, Tanabe Hajime to contemporary thinker such as Sakabe Megumi. These papers not only show the topics on Japanese philosophical debates, but also are the potential of Japanese philosophical thoughts.

I would like to discuss the idea of ‘equity’ in Formosa with insights from Nitobe Inazō (1862-1933). The fact that Nitobe was a colonial official was not to be argued, but we should have the academic freedom to interpret his thoughts. Nitobe does not presuppose a narrow nationalism, but he tried to advocate cultural pluralism and an open worldview. He is against the idea of using force to assimilate the other. He also proposed a concept of ‘equity’ in the Japanese-ruled Taiwan, a period of crisis but also of rich philosophical potential.

Suppression of liberal thought under Mao’s China did not stop Gu ZhunGu Zhun (顧準), a veteran communist and economist, from arguing that one could not do without relying on the law of valueLaw of value and the price mechanismPrice mechanism to ascertain the relative economic efficacy of different products in economic planningPlanning. Gu’s views, though independently arrived at, echoed closely Hayek’s arguments of the impossibility of socialist calculationSocialist calculation. Gu is credited as “China’s Hayek” because of that. Persecutions against Gu during the Great Chinese FamineGreat Chinese FamineGreat Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution convinced him that man-made economic catastrophe and serious moral deprivation were likely results of over-centralization of power with utopian politics in command, and that classical liberal ideas like empiricism and constitutionalismConstitutionalism should be advocated instead.

Road to Serfdom is Hayek’s first major work that has exerted a lasting influence on post-war Chinese liberalismLiberalismChinese. Chinese liberals who fled to TaiwanTaiwan after 1949 found Hayek’s Road to Serfdom most relevant in evaluating the totalitarian rule of the Communist Party on the mainland and the authoritarian politics in TaiwanTaiwan. Many, including the then leading liberal Hu ShihHu Shih (胡適/Hu Shi), had since abandoned their pre-war statist approach to liberalism, believing that without economic freedomFreedomeconomic, liberal democracyDemocracyliberal was not secured. This chapter offers a detailed account of Hayek’s critique of central economic planningPlanningcentral economic and why a single and complete ethical code for all in a modern societySociety is impossible.

Chinese liberalism since the May Fourth Movement had a strong tendency of being rationalistic, statist, and anti-traditionalist. This chapter explains how through the influence of Hayek’s classical liberalism and Michael Oakeshott’s idea of a tradition of behavior, post-war Chinese liberalism has experienced a conservative turn and has started to put more emphasis on the creative transformation of the Chinese tradition to nurture the development of liberal values and institutions in China. The strengths and weaknesses of the contributions made in this regard by leading post-war Chinese liberals like David Chow, Yin Haikuang, Lin Yu-sheng, Liu Junning and Qiu Feng are examined.

The conclusion argues that Hayek’s theory is still relevant to Chinese liberalism under Xi Jinping’s party-state capitalism. While the conclusion cannot provide an exhaustive list of research items on this, some potential ones include: (a) demonstrating the superior coordinating and creative function of the free market when compared with authoritarian control under party-state capitalism; (b) strengthening the idea of free agency by taking it into account of the Confucian conception of the autonomous moral self of the individual; and, (c) studying the practice of constitutionalism since the late Qing dynasty, including the democratic experience of Taiwan and the rule of law in Hong Kong, to identify lessons to be learned on how to make liberal institutions work in the Chinese context.

This chapter explains the relevance of Hayek’s theory in the development of post-war Chinese liberalism. It begins by providing a historical analysis of the development of Chinese liberalism from the late Qing Dynasty to the communist takeover of the Chinese mainland. This is followed by a systematic explanation of how Hayek’s critique of totalitarianism and constructivism, his idea of the spontaneous and rule-following nature of social coordination, his argument of the importance of practical knowledge and tradition in social evolution, and his insight on the institutional need to develop liberal constitutionalism to protect individual freedom have helped to shape the development of Chinese liberalism since 1949.

This chapter explains Hayek’s epistemological and methodologicalIndividualismmethodological justification of his idea of true individualism and why the constitutional limitation of human rationality and the circumstantial nature of individual, practical knowledge together not only help demolish the claim of CartesianRationalismCartesianRationalismRationalism, but they also demonstrate that social coordinationSocial coordination is the result of human action, not human designResult of human action, not human design. Inspired by these Hayekian insights, post-war Taiwanese liberals developed their thesis of treating man as manTreating man as man. The understanding of the concurrent development of mind and societySociety helps Chinese liberalismLiberalismChinese to appreciate that individual freedomFreedomindividual and social creativity are mutually reinforcing, and Chinese liberalismLiberalismChinese has since been more appreciative of the importance of tradition and convention, and favors the gradual development of institutional safeguards for libertyLiberty rather than radical, revolutionary changes.

A general survey of the influence of Hayek’s ideas in post-1989 China is given at the start of this chapter. This is followed by a discussion of why Hayek’s idea of the rule of law (nomocracy) is central to his social and political theory, which conceptually and institutionally is distinguishable from the rule of man (teleocracy). But given the foreign nature of nomocracy and China’s entrenched political and intellectual tradition of the institution of the Sage King, it is difficult for many Chinese to develop a clear understanding of the rule of law. But liberal constitutional theorist Gao Quanxi has managed to learn from Hayek’s proposed model constitution to argue that the approach of political constitutionalism and a better appreciation of China’s tradition of constitutional building since the late nineteenth century may help to find a way to further develop Chinese liberalism.

This book is a study of comparative social and political theory, examining how Hayek’s classical liberalism has been influencing the development of Chinese liberalism since 1949. While both Chinese liberalism and the thought of Hayek can each be studied in its own right, this is the first systematic study on how Hayek’s ideas have helped post-war Chinese liberals enrich their social and political theory in the pursuit of freedom and in formulating theoretical responses to the challenges of modernity in China. This book examines and identifies those central theoretical tenets of Hayek that are most inspiring to the post-war Chinese liberals in their efforts in developing a more robust and profound understanding of freedom in the Chinese context. It argues that the new post-war understanding of Chinese liberalism has superseded the social democratic understanding that was widely adopted by pre-war Chinese liberals. These theoretical/Hayekian tenets include: the critique of totalitarianism and scientism, the idea of the free market, the insights inherited from the Scottish Enlightenment to counter the excess of Cartesian Rationalism, the thesis of the concurrent evolution of culture and mind, and the central importance of the rule of law in defending individual freedom. This book aims to help political theorists and historians of comparative political thought both in the East and in the West better understand the intellectual issues involved and explore further research endeavours in the same area.

Ressentiment can be regarded as one of the most complicated feelings of human beings. It is a French foreign-loan word which is used as a noun, but originated from the verb ressentir, which means to feel, to experience or be aware of an emotion or sensation. As in the cases of many other European notions, ressentiment obtained an interesting profile when it traveled from the “West” to the “East.” While the word is usually untranslated in German and English, in Chinese it is translated into two characters, namely, 怨恨 (pronounced as yuàn hèn in Mandarin, and enkon in Japanese). As in the cases of many other vocabularies, yuàn hèn or enkon is a combination of two Chinese characters with similar meanings: 怨 yuàn or en means to rankle, to grudge, to blame, to reproach, to complain or to satirize; 恨 hèn or kon means to hate, to dislike, to resent or to regret.

This is a comparative study of the Chinese left-wing intellectual leader Lu Xun and the «gentle» Nietzsche. It covers four major aspects of their affinities: the intellectual, the political, the literary, and the personal. The study does not aim at demythologising the Lu Xun cult in China which has already been shattered in the hands of its creators. Through an examination of Nietzsche's influence on Lu Xun and an analysis of their similarities, this study reveals a new dimension of Lu Xun's radicalism which remains relevant to the present world. Looking at Lu Xun from the «gentle» Nietzschean perspective, this study also elicits new meanings in Lu Xun's arguments about Chinese «national character» and his insights into the crisis in Chinese culture which remain haunting questions in the Chinese intellectual arena.

The book is divided into two parts, namely, "Japanese Philosophy: Teaching and Research in the Global World;" and "Japanese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline." In the first part, there are reports of the situation of teaching and research of Japanese philosophy. The areas discussed are Japan, Canada, France, Spain and English-speaking regions. In the second part, there will be papers on varies topics on Japanese philosophy, such as papers on Nishida Kitaro, Kuki Shuzo, Tanabe Hajime to contemporary thinker such as Sakabe Megumi. These papers not only show the topics on Japanese philosophical debates, but also are the potential of Japanese philosophical thoughts.

How can we understand what happened in Fukushima? It could be rather difficult to imagine a place where it is the most beautiful but at the same time the most polluted. This lack of imagination, or more precisely the incomprehensibility of what happened in Fukushima, can be explained in the following historical context: The apparently beautiful Japanese environment is indeed a victim of Japan’s project of modernization. It is important to re-examine the history of pollution in Modern Japan, and see how people reacted to major environmental disasters. I will discuss the case of Tanaka Shōzō 田中正造, who is regarded as a social activist and the pioneer of democratic movement in Japan. I shall read Tanaka as an ethical person who develops an ethics to care about the nature as well as human beings.

Nishida Kitarō and Takahashi Satomi are two important philosophers in modern Japan. The former is famous for his maiden work An Inquiry of the Good, while the latter is known for a critic of Nishida’s philosophy. Nishida has never left Japan, and could only mention some basic thoughts of Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger. Takahashi did visit Europe, and was one of the first commentators of Husserl’s phenomenology. This paper will discuss on Nishida and Takahashi’s notions of love, which can be understood as a way of the realization of the self.

Thomas Fröhlich's book has made an important contribution to Tang Junyi scholarship. It is probably the most systematic study of Tang's philosophical thought in English so far. While there are a number of pioneering works in English that have touched upon various aspects of Tang's philosophy, Fröhlich's is a fully-fledged monograph dedicated to the study of Tang in a comprehensive manner. It covers, among other things, the ideas of mind and nature in Tang's thought, his civil theology, moral vision, cultural conservatism, his philosophical ideas on history, politics and the demonic aspects of the political, and his...

Mobility is the key to overcoming the capital-nation-state. It can be divided into two types: the mobility of pastoral nomads and original hunter-gatherers. It is impossible for us to find a society of nomadic hunter-gatherers in today’s world, but we can have a thought experiment by observing existing wandering band societies. Yanagita Kunio is a thinker in Japan who drew attention to nomads. He has examined various types of nomads since his earlier years but is ridiculed for insisting on the existence of mountain nomads. Nonetheless, he has never given up on the reality of mountain nomads. Even though he later focuses on farmers with fixed settlements, or the common people, he still continues his search for the possibility of the existence of mountain nomads. Eventually, he came to look for traces of mountain nomads in indigenous beliefs. These indigenous beliefs were not limited to the Japanese.

In this paper, I shall discuss Nishida’s 西田 philosophy of body from the aspects of acting intuition, rhythm, and situatedness. Pure experience used to be the starting point of Nishida’s early philosophy. In his later philosophy, however, the keyword in Nishida’s philosophy is no longer “experience” but “acting.” It is neither “I think therefore I am” nor “I will therefore I am,” but “I act therefore I am.” As the organ of acting intuition, body is one of the most important philosophical concepts in Nishida’s later philosophy. I shall interpret the philosophy of acting intuition as a phenomenology of rhythm. Also, I shall argue that acting intuition can be understood as a situated action. For Nishida, our body is historical: I am not a knowing body, but an acting body.