Kenneth Kai-chung Yung’s Chinese Émigré Intellectuals and Their Quest for Liberal Values in the Cold War presents the philosophical and political development of Chinese intellectuals who fled the mainland after the Communist takeover in 1949. Focusing on Yin Haiguang 殷海光, Zhang Junmai 張君勱, and Xu Fuguan 徐復觀, the author provides a comparative account and comprehensive overview of the many facets of intellectual discourse among Chinese post-war philosophers and public intellectuals.Yung’s book is structured into (...) five chapters. While the first two chapters introduce the reader to the general trends and historical circumstances of the post-war intellectual sphere, the ensuing chapters... (shrink)

After Mao Zedong's death in 1976, China was no longer governed by a totalitarian political system. As China moved to a market economy and opened up to the outside world, the Chinese people enjoyed increasing freedom in their personal, economic, cultural and intellectual lives. However, the Chinese Communist Party still controlled the political system, which meant that when a number of China's intellectuals in the post-Mao period publicly criticized or deviated from party policies, they lost their positions, (...) were ostracized from society and were sometimes imprisoned. Thus, while the post-Mao government allows more artistic and personal freedom, intellectuals who criticize the party's policies and seek fundamental political reforms are demoted, isolated and sometimes imprisoned. Nevertheless, despite the threat of punishment, a small number of them continue to comment on public policies and call for political reforms. (shrink)

This article investigates the intense debate on the figure of “Chinese public intellectuals,” which has gained increasing importance, both inside and outside Mainland China, during the last decade. The climax was reached in the year 2004, when the debate on the search for and against a role for the “public intellectuals” became the litmus test of the intellectual intersections between the State actors and the public. Through a close reading of the crucial documents, this (...) article critically engages with the terminology and the interpretive paradigms employed. Thus the article highlights the contribution of the scholars examined to a dialogue on the role of critical thinking within China as well as globally. In fact, the exploration of the diversity of contemporary Chinese thought on the topic of “public intellectuals” can be inscribed within the framework of the following questions: How is the social category of “public intellectuals” used and why? And, ultimately, what does it really means to be an intellectual for the public in China today? In this sense, the article sheds light on the indigenous and foreign understandings of “public” and “intellectual.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe article sets Christianity into the perspective of contemporary China and its challenges, and discusses the role of intellectuals, from the “Cultural Christians” of the 1980s to the younger generation of “public intellectual” Christians of today. The five scholars represented in this issue are presented and put into context as voices in contemporary Chinese society.

Scholarship on Chinese civil society suffers from a weak theorization of the concept, in which civil society is generally defined as NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that exists in the third sector. This article examines the dimension between state and society known as ‘civil sphere’, a concept that is broader and more mysterious than the conventional notion of ‘civil society’. Civil sphere can be understood as a discursive structure that defines what is civil and what is uncivil in a society. Taking (...) the Chinese intellectual debate between the New Lefts and the Liberals as an example, this article shows that in a society that is rapidly changing, the existence of such a public sphere represents a vital source of individual freedom. Even though the civil sphere in China has been contracting lately, there are still intellectual debates on fundamental ideological issues that merit academic attention. (shrink)

This is the third in a series of essays on the seminal role of the paradigms of essence-function and interpenetration in East Asian religious and philosophical thought. The first article, entitled "The Composition of Self-Transformation Thought in Classical East Asian Philosophy and Religion"[1] was a general introduction to these paradigms over the broad expanse of indigenous East Asian thought religious/philosophical thought. The second article, entitled "Essence-Function (t'i-yung): Early Chinese Origins and Manifestations,"[2] examined the earliest precursors of these notions in (...) classics such as the Book of Changes, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean , paying special attention to the unique role played by the concept of "sincerity" in manifesting and mediating presence of essencefunction and interpenetration. In this essay, we look at the role essence-function and interpenetration play in the Analects (Lunyu ). (shrink)

Many scholars of early China agree that the fourth century bce witnessed a surge in intellectual interest in concepts that have been dubbed the self, “subjectivity,” the private realm, and the body. As such a sphere came into greater focus in intellectual circles, so did a new discourse that evaluated what it meant to benefit or deprive the self and its related parts. The famous statement purportedly by Yang Zhu 楊朱 (or Yangzi 楊子) that claims he was not willing to (...) pluck out a single hair in order to benefit the world reminds us of such a discourse.2 Around the same time, there also emerged discussions that polarized various ideas of self and the private sphere (si 私), on the one hand, ver- sus the state and the public sphere (gong 公), on the other, especially in circles that concerned themselves with public policy and statecraft, but also more generally. These discussions formed a forceful counterpoint to the discourses involving human subjectivity and the body. Indeed, their open dislike of the influence of private, individual, and personal realms in politics strongly suggests that the statecraft writers were re- acting to and in dialog with those intellectuals who engaged discussion of subjectivity, the self, and its agencies. (shrink)

Growing out of traumatic life experiences in youth, the author started his lifelong journey in studying and practicing philosophy during the turbulent Cultural Revolution in China. The path took him from a “secret library” in the Worker’s Union Office of a steel plant to universities in China and the US; from seeking personal healing to becoming a public intellectual; from pursuing enlightenment in western philosophies to re-discovering his own Chinese cultural heritage; and from learning to think for oneself (...) to becoming an active scholar and formulator of a unique philosophical theory—the philosophy of the way of gongfu, or the art of life. (shrink)

The open society together with a pluralistic public sphere is a cornerstone of modernity and a necessary element of democracy. However, it has been maintained that the possibility of such a society depends on liberal convictions that are not applicable to non-Western cultures and also contradict the Confucian value orientation. The article argues that such an assumption is based on a number of problematic premises. There is no one-sided dependence of the socio-political system on culture, and the contemporary (...) class='Hi'>Chinese society is much too diverse to be dominated by Confucian values. Moreover, China’s cultural history and also Confucianism can be brought into the debate in yet another way than as a negative factor inhibiting and restricting an open society. There is textual evidence that forms of open society existed already in ancient China. Though they were not always supported by the elite, China’s intellectual heritage offers enough points of reference in order to refute the claim that the open society is an alien element in Chinese culture. (shrink)

The present chapter sketches the adoption of logic in late nineteenth and early twentieth century China. Addressing both conceptual and institutional aspects of this process, it contextualizes the raising interest in the discipline among Qing scholars and Republican intellectuals. Arranged largely chronologically, it delineates the successive periods in the reception of major works of and intellectual trends in the field. It introduces the most influential scholars promoting a public discourse on logic in the final years of the empire, (...) but also the ever more professional agents who participated in the ensuing establishment of a modern institutional framework for studies in logic like universities, departments of logic, academic societies, journals etc. While at the beginning, these people were mostly no trained logicians, progress in the establishment of academic logic in the 1930s provided the conditions for the formation of the first Chinese specialists in the field who were often internationally trained and soon to engage in cutting-edge research. In some contrast, academic discourse on logic well into the 1930s was dominated by exaggerated social and political expectations, not least due to the successive influence on intellectuals of inductionist scientism in the first decades of the twentieth century, of an inflated pragmatist notion of logic in the 1920s, and of an overly simplistic “antiformalist” notion of logic propagated by (vulgar-)Marxist historical dialecticians in the 1930s. The arrival of scientific logic also went in tandem with a renewed interest in studies in the traditional Buddhist “science of reasons” (yinming, hetuvidyā, “Buddhist logic”) and spurred the search for contributions to the field of logic in the record of inherited Chinese literature, a development which soon led to the common acceptance of the existence of genuinely Chinese traditions of logic. It is eventually a peculiarity of the Chinese reception of logic that since around 1920, less than two decades after the first modern translations of textbooks on traditional syllogistics, the visit of Bertrand Russell – one of the fathers of mathematical logic – fueled the spread of this new approach to logic which has eventually changed its face for good. Designed as a historical survey, this chapter is a general account on the major contributions to the field by Chinese scholars of the time and has to forego detailed discussions. (shrink)

During the 17th and 18th centuries, European investigations into Chinese geography underwent a process of change: firstly, from the wild imagination of the classical era to a natural perspective of modern trade, then historical interpretations of religious missionaries to the scientific mapping conducted by sovereign nation-states. This process not only prompted new production of maps, but also disseminated a large amount of geographical knowledge about China in massive publications. This has enriched the geographical vision of Chinese civilization while (...) providing a new intellectual framework for Europeans to understand China. Concurrently, it has formed another route for the travel of knowledge and intercultural interactions between the East and the West. Those interactions between space and knowledge have been reflected in the production, publication and dissemination of numerous maps of China in early modern Europe. (shrink)

In the eighteenth century, Voltaire presented China as the kingdom of philosophers. The term philosophe, which appeared at this period, is the ancestor of the "intellectual," a name most historians date back to the Dreyfus Affair at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the request for a specific role in public affairs by literati is much more ancient than this specific case. After all, at least since the early nineteenth century, the Russian intelligentsia affirmed its involvement in the (...) public sphere. And discussions have been going on in China for decades to assess how much modern zhishifenzi can be considered as the heirs to the traditional literati, or shi. All along the twentieth century, and especially after the May Fourth movement signaled its irruption on the political scene, the intelligentsia has been involved in the definition of the way to "save China." The 1920s and 1930s have been witnesses to raging debates on the path to modernization, the necessity to create a new culture in rupture with Confucianism, and on the desirable political system for China.1 The majority of intellectuals agreed on the necessity to introduce the values of Enlightenment in the Middle Kingdom, but they soon diverged on the type of political system that would best ensure their enactment. Intellectuals were soon involved with the various political parties that competed for the leadership of the country, and opposition between exponents of parliamentary democracy such as Hu Shi and Marxists such as Chen Duxiu. (shrink)

Public intellectuals today must be understood in relation to the concept of ‘viral modernity’, characterised by viral and open media and technologies of post-truth that reveal the dramatic transformations of the ‘public’, its forms and its future possibilities. The history, status and role of the public intellectual are constituted by both the network of law in liberal society and above all the primacy of the concept of freedom of expression. The task of public intellectuals (...) was to define, analyse and protect these rights by speaking truth to power. Both Wittgenstein and Foucault as exemplary intellectuals distinguished themselves by problematising truth and showing that truth-telling is an aspect of self-transformation and the intellectual form of life. (shrink)

In an age of growing academic specialisation, one, moreover, in which experts and expertise are habitually derided in a ‘post-truth’ era, the notion of the ‘public intellectual’ has come to be wide...

Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China;There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds– Gregory Bateson (1972, p. 492)While there are classical anteced...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 80-97 [Access article in PDF] Literary Truth as Dreamlike Expression in Foucault's and Borges's "Chinese Encyclopedia" Robert Wicks ALTHOUGH THE TOPIC REMAINS MOSTLY unexplored, Michel Foucault had an aesthetic and intellectual attraction towards writers and artists in the Spanish-speaking tradition. For example, at the conclusion of his Histoire de la folie (Madness and Civilization, 1961)—a book which brought him extensive intellectual recognition in (...) France—Foucault drew his readers' attention to José de Goya y Lucientes's (1746-1828) well-known etching, El Sueño de la Razón Produce Monstruos (The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters, Plate 43 of Los Caprichos, 1797). In Foucault's estimation, by revealing a "night which is doubtless that of classical unreason," Goya's work represented a socially removed condition within which people encounter "what is most solitary" and experience what is "deepest" within themselves. With his reference to Goya's imagery, Foucault illustrated a major theme of his history of madness, namely, how people referred to as "mentally ill" experienced a gradual, physical exclusion from participation in public society, and how they were eventually isolated in a more frightening way: within their physical confinement, they were subject to techniques of psychological and spiritual alienation that reduced them to a condition of utter solitude.In a comparable, if not more central manner, Foucault used as thematic motifs for the preface, first and second chapters of a book for which he is widely known, Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things, 1966), the work of three major writers and artists from the Spanish-speaking world: Jorges Luis Borges (1899-1986), Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), and Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616). Among these references, the most popular is probably Foucault's discussion of [End Page 80] Velázquez's Las Meninas—a painting which captured Foucault's interest as a perfect exemplar of its time period—and which inspired him to devote the entire first chapter of his book to decoding the mechanics of its perspectival arrangement. And within the community of those who read, write and discuss the interrelationship between Foucault's thought, literary theory and the contemporary emphasis upon the multivocal quality of textual meaning, Foucault's citation of an excerpt from a short story by Borges—the subject of this essay—is also familiar. Foucault introduced his 1966 book, The Order of Things, with the following words: This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a "certain Chinese encyclopedia" in which it is written that "animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies." In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that. 1The short story from which Foucault extracted the above, quasi-cubistic, excerpt was published in Borges's 1952 collection, Otras Inquisiciones (Other Inquisitions), and is entitled, "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins." Although this story's entirety is rarely surveyed in discussions of Foucault, appreciating its broader contents helps illuminate why Foucault began The Order of Things with this entertaining and bizarre segment. Borges's original... (shrink)

ExcerptThis article compares two fairly recent autobiographical works about the experiences of two highly publicized global disasters: Josef Haslinger's Phi Phi Island: Ein Bericht (2004) and Kathrin Röggla's really ground zero: 11. september und folgendes (2001). Röggla was in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001. Haslinger was a victim of the 2004 tsunami in Thailand, where he vacationed with his family. Both tell stories that are at once intensely personal, relating threats to the narrator's very existence, and decidedly public, (...) as the events in question were broadcast around the world and subject to prolific media commentary and overwhelming visual representation. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the devaluation of the work of public intellectuals within the academic community. The principal reason given for this devaluation is that the work of the public intellectual does not have intellectual integrity as independent thought and original scholarship. I develop three models of public intellectual work: the permanent–critic model, the popularizer model, and the public–theorist model. I then consider each model in relation to the concern with intellectual integrity and conclude (...) that both independent thought and original scholarship are possible within work that is engaged with nonacademic publics. (shrink)

This study examines the characteristics of request sequences in Chinese public service calls. The data analysis indicates that a prominent characteristic of Chinese public service calls is the frequent appearance of insert expansions and non-minimal post-expansions, with the latter occurring after both preferred response and dispreferred response. This is closely related to participants’ institutional identities and epistemic asymmetry; operators handling such service calls should pay due attention to this asymmetry to ensure mutual understanding in conversation.

Public and experts’ perceptions of benefits and risks of nanotechnology constitute an important element of nanoethics studies. On the one hand, compared with traditional ethics, nanoethics is a future-oriented ethics. The construction of ethical norms requires public participation. On the other hand, nanotechnology is characterized by uncertainty. Our previous research showed the Chinese public’s support for nanotechnology was associated more with beliefs, including views of technology and the weighing of benefits and risks of nanotechnology, and less (...) with knowledge about nanotechnology; the support was high but might change over time. Meanwhile, Chinese researchers have been actively conducting studies on nanotechnology while being highly aware of nanosafety issues. In this context, we further examined in the present study Chinese nanoresearchers’ perceptions of specific benefits and risks of nanotechnology, compared them with those of the Chinese public, and examined the Chinese nanoresearchers’ perceptions of risks of specific nanoapplications. Initial cross-regional comparisons were made with results from equivalent US and European surveys. Results showed Chinese nanoresearchers perceived a higher level of overall nanobenefits than the public and an almost equal level of overall nanorisks with the public. Four nanorisks were perceived by a higher proportion of experts than public; the experts likely relied on technical expertise while the public, possessing little knowledge about nanotechnology, might have exercised caution based on experiences and observations of other technologies. Of 23 nanoapplications, Chinese nanoresearchers regarded food using nanomaterials as the most risky and displays using nanomaterials as the least risky. Similarities and differences were observed in comparisons of Chinese with US and European survey results. In our age of technology and economic globalization, this research is of significance both for China’s formulation of nanotechnology development strategies and for the further study on nanoethics and good governance of emerging technologies such as nanotechnology worldwide. (shrink)

The prominence of religion in recent debates around politics, identity formation, and international terrorism has led to an increased demand on those studying religion to help clarify and contextualise religious belief and practice in the public sphere. While many texts focus on the theoretical development of the subject, this book outlines a wider application of these studies by exploring the role of religious studies scholars and theologians as public intellectuals. -/- This collection of essays first seeks to (...) define exactly what makes an intellectual "public". It then goes on to deal with a few questions of concern: How do public intellectuals construct knowledge in religious and theological scholarship? What is the link between public intellectuals of higher education and their role in society? Do higher education institutions have a responsibility to endorse public intellectualism? -/- Looking at the individual and collective role of religious studies scholars and theologians in public life, this book will be of great interest to all scholars and academics involved in religious studies and theology across the academy. (shrink)

Cet article porte sur la première phase de formation d’une philosophie économique proprio sensu en Chine, dans les années 1910-1930. Parmi les économistes chinois, ceux ayant reçu une éducation à l’économie occidentale appliquèrent leur savoir tout neuf de l’économie moderne à réinterpréter la pensée chinoise traditionnelle. Ils proposèrent un cadre analytique neuf pour systématiser les idées de la Chine ancienne et concentrèrent leur attention sur les enseignements des sages Laozi, Confucius, Mencius, Mozi, et Guanzi. La comparaison interculturelle plaça des concepts (...) chinois dans un contexte de pensée sociale et économique occidentale. Ensuite, on tira de nombreuses mentions et citations de nature « économique » des sages de l’Antiquité chinoise, pour les insérer dans la littérature universitaire en tant que tels, avec de facto un impact durable sur la recherche ultérieure. Cette entreprise intellectuelle préparait une histoire de la pensée économique chinoise comme discipline universitaire. Une lecture moderne des idées économiques de la Chine ancienne se liait à des questions de développement national. Les économistes de la période républicaine analysaient l’éthique traditionnelle des normes, les relations entre justice et profit, le contrôle des besoins et des désirs humains, les comportements de consommation, dans l’objectif de trouver les obstacles cachés retenant la Chine sur la voie du développement moderne. Ils soulignèrent les réussites de la pensée confucéenne, qui avaient contribué à jeter les bases de succès à venir. Les arguments critiques furent présentés en reconnaissant l’influence de l’éthique confucéenne sur la vie économique du peuple chinois. Le présent article se fonde sur l’étude des écrits d’économistes chinois de la période républicaine : Chen Huanzhang, Yuan Xianneng and Li Zhaoyi sont examinés pour leur exploration de l’héritage philosophique traditionnel, après avoir fait leurs études en Occident. Quant à Li Quanshi et Tang Qingzeng, ils publièrent leurs ouvrages sur l’histoire de la pensée économique chinoise en chinois. Une étude exhaustive de ces sources permet de reconstituer la démarche intellectuelle qui interpréta les idées économiques de l’ancienne Chine. L’examen des origines de la saisie de sources économique dans la philosophie traditionnelle met au jour les racines de la pensée économique moderne en Chine. (shrink)

This paper considers the process of becoming an international public intellectual, taking the case of Maria Montessori (1870–1952), the Italian physician who became an authority on education and, u...

Public intellectuals have long played a role in American culture, filling the gap between the academic elite and the educated public. According to some commentators, the role of the public intellectual has undergone a steady decline for the past several decades, being replaced by the academic expert. The most notable cause of this decline has been both the growth of the academy in the twentieth century,which has served to concentrate intellectual activity within its confines, and the (...) changing nature of the media, which has framed the way in which information is conveyed to the public. We argue that although bioethics has developed primarily within the academic tradition and utilized the role of expert when dealing with the public, bioethicists are well suited to don the mantle of the public intellectual. Indeed, because they address issues in medicine and science of great relevance for the general public, bioethicists have a duty to revitalize the tradition of public intellectuals as a necessary complement to the important, but narrower role of expert. (shrink)

The poet Tony Harrison has created work for the stage and television, and even assumed the role of poet/journalist, writing newspaper reports in verse from war-torn Bosnia. His work is underpinned by a belief in the political nature of the act of writing. He has generally attracted a non-working-class readership; nevertheless, he has never abandoned his quest for a ‘democratic’ poetry. Much of his work has taken the form of a poetry of immediate response to current events. He has also (...) been insistent, at times, on where his poetry should be published. When he wrote ‘Initial Illumination’ for The Guardian, for example, he argued it should not appear in the ‘literary’ section, but on the news pages. Harrison sees himself as a ‘war poet. He uses his position as a public intellectual to engage in a struggle against dominant discourses and ways of seeing and to bring audiences to confront the horror of war. The article focuses in particular on his Gulf War poem, ‘A Cold Coming’, in which he uses strategies such as ekphrasis, to position the reader as a kind of ‘secondary witness’ of a war that had been turned by the media into a distant, anaesthetised spectacle. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the devaluation of the work of public intellectuals within the academic community. The principal reason given for this devaluation is that the work of the public intellectual does not have intellectual integrity as independent thought and original scholarship. I develop three models of public intellectual work: the permanent–critic model, the popularizer model, and the public–theorist model. I then consider each model in relation to the concern with intellectual integrity and conclude (...) that both independent thought and original scholarship are possible within work that is engaged with nonacademic publics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Before Confucius: Studies in the Creation of the Chinese ClassicsJohn S. MajorBefore Confucius: Studies in the Creation of the Chinese Classics. By Edward L.Shaughnessy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Pp. ix + 262. $19.95.The eight essays in this collection (six of them previously published) show the combination of boldness and erudition that is characteristic of all of Edward Shaughnes-sy's work. The results of (...) his investigations are always interesting and felicitously expressed, and if one sometimes resists following the author quite so far down the evidentiary and interpretive road as he himself is willing to go, the intellectual journey is always a rewarding one.The common thread in these essays is Shaughnessy's belief that the Chinese classics, although admittedly written in their final form at a time well after the era [End Page 314] to which they refer-that is, during the Warring States Period or even the Han—preserve much material that authentically refers to, and was originally written more-or-less contemporaneously with, events of the Western Zhou era. He adduces evidence from bronze inscriptions, archaeologically recovered texts, positional and calendrical astronomy, and other securely datable sources to argue for the authenticity of portions of the classics, notably the Book of Documents, the Book of Poetry, and the Book of Changes.Publication of these essays comes just when the antiquity of the classics is being challenged more vigorously than at any time since the "doubting antiquity" movement of the 1920s. In particular, the evidence presented by Bruce and Taeko Brooks and their associates in meetings of the Amherst-based Warring States Working Group tends to support a view not only that the classics were written down much later than the events they purport to describe (almost everyone agrees about that) but that much of the "historical" material in the classics is closer to legend than to fact, and may well represent later confabulation for purposes of political or philosophical advantage. Shaughnessy's Before Confucius and the Brookses' The Original Analects (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) strikingly represent two poles of the contemporary disagreement about the nature and authenticity of the Chinese classics.As a charter member of the Warring States Working Group who has consistently dissented from its more radical antiquity-doubting positions, I am perhaps unusually well placed to comment on the questions of dating raised by Shaughnessy's work. It seems to me that the key to the synthesis that I suspect will form over the next decade or so is the nature of the archaeologically recovered texts of the Warring States Period that have emerged from the ground in such profusion in recent decades, and continue to do so. These attest to several unexpected things, including the extent to which texts were possessed, copied, and circulated at the time; the implied high level of literacy among the contemporary ruling class; the degree to which assemblages of texts from individual tombs seem not to represent schools, master-disciple lineages, or clear doctrinal or ideological groupings, but rather to testify to a strong eclectic tendency among the contemporary literate elite; and the degree to which recovered texts anticipate later received texts, but in variant and/or partial form (for example, the Guodian Laozi text, recognizably Laozi but a far cry from the complete, received Daodejing).In view of all this, it seems to me reasonable to say that on the one hand a fair amount of material may well have come down to later ages from the Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn periods (through many vicissitudes of copying, recitation, variation, repairs to broken and misarranged bundles of slips, and so on), to enter wide circulation as texts in the Warring States Period. On the other hand, the late Warring States and Han editors of the textual tradition that had come down to them collated, amalgamated, sorted, augmented, and otherwise shaped the texts to a somewhat larger degree than has sometimes been supposed, and it is extremely unlikely that any of the Chinese classics were in circulation in anything like their received form at the end of the Spring and Autumn periods. Thus, while I... (shrink)

Research into the sociology of intellectual life reveals numerous appeals to the public conscience of intellectuals. The way in which concepts such as ‘the public intellectual’ or ‘intellectual life’ are discussed, however, conceals a long history of biased thinking about thinking as an elite endeavour with prohibitive requirements for entry. This article argues that this tendency prioritizes the intellectual realm over the public sphere, and betrays any claims to public relevance unless a broader definition of (...) what counts as intellectual life is introduced. By calling for a shift from the notion of public intellectuals to Jane Jacobs’ (1961) idea of the ‘public character’, a publicly situated and affect-laden conception of intellectual life is articulated with the aim of redefining intellectual life as an ordinary, collective pursuit, rather than the prerogative of a few extraordinary individuals, as well as restoring the role of the senses in theoretical discussions on the life of the mind. The theoretical scope of this article therefore is to cast the net wider in the search for meanings of what public intellectual life is, can or may be in a larger context than ‘intellectualist’ discussions currently allow. (shrink)

In this address to the president's plenary at the 2001 annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the author reflected on then recent international events and their possible implications for the research and teaching agendas of the social studies of science, technology, and medicine. He proposed the political engagement of science, technology, and society institutions and individual STS researchers while maintaining a strong commitment to the scholarly studies of science and technology. Drawing on the (...) work of René Gabriëls, the author elaborated a role for STS scholars as the new generation of “public intellectuals.”. (shrink)

A substantial proportion of Chinese nationals seem to accept evolution, and the country is sometimes held up to show that the sorry state of evolution acceptance in the United States is not inevitable. Attempts to improve evolution acceptance generally focus on improving communication, curricular reform, and even identifying cognitive mechanisms that bias people against evolution. What is it that the Chinese scientific community did so well, and can it be generalized? This paper argues that evolution acceptance in China (...) has a very specific history, one that other countries are very unlikely to emulate. We show that the interactions among science, education, mass media, social and political movements, and ideological arguments about evolution greatly influenced the Chinese public's understanding and acceptance of evolution. We find that it was not just formal education, but many more ideologically motivated methods of evolution exposure that contributed to the high rate of acceptance. But since the purpose of evolution dissemination has moved beyond merely teaching biology, the Chinese public persists with substantial misunderstandings of the theory. Thus, bottom line percentage of acceptance figures can be misleading; the details and the history really matter. (shrink)

Margaret Atwood and David Suzuki are two of the most prominent Canadian public ‎intellectuals ‎involved in the global warming debate. They both argue that anthropogenic global ‎warming is ‎occurring, warn against its grave consequences, and urge governments and the ‎public to take ‎immediate, decisive, extensive, and profound measures to prevent it. They differ, ‎however, in the ‎reasons and evidence they provide in support of their position. While Suzuki ‎stresses the scientific ‎evidence in favour of the global warming (...) theory and the scientific ‎consensus around it, Atwood is ‎suspicious of the objectivity of science, and draws on an ‎idiosyncratic neo-Malthusian theory of ‎human development. Their implicit views ‎about the cognitive authority of science may be ‎identified with Critical Contextual Empiricism ‎and Feminist Standpoint Epistemology, respectively, ‎both of which face difficulties with ‎providing solid grounds for the position they advocate.‎ ‎. (shrink)

In the light of Markus’s notion of the decent society, this contribution examines the challenges facing public intellectuals in Australia’s contemporary political public sphere. It observes, firstly, that Australia has a distinctly Benthamite political culture that listens more to bureaucratic solutions than to metaphysics, history and arguments grounded in human rights. It explains, secondly, how public opinion gives voice to underlying norms and should thus be treated as the starting point for intellectual activism. Thirdly, the article (...) looks into confusion on the criteria for political deliberation in contemporary Australia. Consideration is then given to the growing constraints imposed on public intellectuals through various new forms of censorship and closure. The conclusion uses the gathering debates on adjustment to climate change to illustrate how public intellectual activism can break new ground. (shrink)

Scott Welsh is likely to elicit a sigh of relief from the many academics who struggle with what, if any, public intellectual persona they should adopt. Welsh (2012) argues against a broad swathe of mostly left-leaning rhetorical scholars that the academic’s democratic duty is adequately discharged by providing suitably ambivalent rhetorical resources for others to use in their political struggles. For Welsh, following Slavoj Žižek (2008), the scholar’s first obligation is to “enjoy your symptom”—that is, to demonstrate in one’s (...) discursive practice the problematic nature of trying to claim epistemic privilege in a society ostensibly of equals. The main conceptual difference between Welsh’s and my own conception of .. (shrink)

The essays in this volume treat topics from education to publishing, from academic freedom to political activism, from Russell's possible adoption of new communication modes (were he alive today) to the representation of his life and ideas in fiction. They reflect the engagement of Bertrand Russell in public affairs over three quarters of a century. They also reflect the diverse interestes that bring scholars together in the Russell Society to study his manifold works. The consistently first-rate papers in this (...) collection serve as a powerful reminder of the breadth and depth of the contributions from one of the leading philosophers of the Twentieth Century. Those of us familiar with Russell's writings have always been impressed by the range of topics that concerned Bertie. His commitment to the examined life, with all its foibles, shines bright in this set of essays. This text is an invaluable resource for students of Russell's life and thought (Kenneth Blackwell and Alan Schwerin). -Publisher description. (shrink)

The public intellectual has been the subject of a lively scholarly debate for over two decades, especially in the US. There, it is often said that intellectuals have increasingly lost interest in speaking to a broad public and engaging with important real-world issues. Advocates of this view condemn academics’ distance from reality and their propensity for abstract theorizing – something that it is said has been primarily inspired by Rawls’s normative political theory. Supporters of ‘engaged’ philosophy argue (...) that this abstract and ostensibly sophisticated framework is highly obscure to the public. In addition, its implicit moralism is at odds with the actual needs of the political realm towards which it is directed. This paper suggests that Rawls’s normative theory had a unique impact on Italian philosophy. Here, what I call the ‘public intellectual’ refers to a new approach to both political philosophy and intellectual activity, which was developed in Italy as a theoretical alternative to a more traditional ‘engaged’ model. (shrink)