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A new interpretation of the Confucian classic, the Mencius, based on both traditional sources and newly discovered documents.
In July of 2008, Tsinghua University recovered a batch of Warring States bamboo slips from abroad. These were referred to as the Bamboo slips collected by Tsinghua University, i.e., the Tsinghua Manuscripts. A large part of the Tsinghua Manuscripts is comprised of early classical and historical texts. Among these, some can be compared with transmitted classics such as the Shang Shu or “Elevated Scriptures”, but many more are previously unseen texts that have been lost for over two-thousand years. These manuscripts have immense value for understanding the original state of pre-Qin classical texts and for reconstructing early Chinese history. A panel of experts convened to evaluate the man...
Since the mid-1980s, Taiwan and mainland China have witnessed a sustained resurgence of academic and intellectual interest in ruxue—“Confucianism”—variously conceived as a form of culture, an ideology, a system of learning, and a tradition of normative values. This discourse has led to a proliferation of contending conceptions of ruxue, as well as proposals for rejuvenating it to make it a vital cultural and psycho-spiritual resource in the modern world. This study aims to show how ruxue has been conceived in order to assess the achievements of this enterprise; to identify which aspects of ru thought and values academics find viable, and why; to highlight the dynamics involved in the...
Fourteen years ago, a corpus of bamboo-strip texts was found in a late-fourth-century-BCE tomb at Jingmen, Hubei province in central China. The discovery of the "Guodian" texts, together with other recently discovered Warring States manuscripts, has revolutionized the study of early Chinese intellectual history. Kenneth Holloway argues that the Guodian corpus puts forth a political philosophy based on the harmonious interconnection of individuals engaged in moral self cultivation. This unique worldview, says Holloway, cannot meaningfully be categorized as "Confucian" or "Daoist," because it shares important concepts and vocabulary with a number of different textual traditions that have anach...
This book reconstructs a neglected episode in the development of Confucianism, one that considerably influenced later Chinese religious thought. Material Virtue examines a set of four through first century B.C.E. Chinese texts that argue virtue has a physical correlate in the body. Based on both transmitted (e.g., the Mengzi or Mencius) and recently excavated (e.g., the Wuxing or Five Kinds of Action) texts, Material Virtue describes how the argument addresses challenges to early Chinese religious ethics in part by relying on emerging notions such as the balance of qi (pneumas) also found in natural philosophy.
Through an examination of the Great Peace (taiping), one of the first utopian visions in Chinese history, Zhao Lu describes the transformation of literati culture that occurred during the Han Dynasty. Driven by anxiety over losing the mandate of Heaven, the imperial court encouraged classicism in order to establish the Great Peace and follow Heaven's will. But instead of treating the literati as puppets of competing and imagined lineages, Zhao uses sociological methods to reconstruct their daily lives and to show how they created their own thought by adopting, modifying, and opposing the work of their contemporaries and predecessors. The literati who served as bureaucrats in the first century BCE gradually became classicists who depended on social networking as they traveled to study the classics. By the second century CE, classicism had dissolved in this traveling culture and the literati began to expand the corpus of knowledge beyond the accepted canon. Thus, far from being static, classicism in Han China was full of innovation, and ultimately gave birth to both literary writing and religious Daoism.
The Tsinghua University bamboo-strip manuscripts are among the most extraordinary collections of ancient texts discovered in China to date. In Introduction to the Tsinghua Bamboo-Strip Manuscripts, Liu Guozhong, one of the scholars intimately involved in editing the Tsinghua strips, offers a straightforward overview to the complexities inherent in researching this collection. Liu provides an invaluable glimpse into how these artifacts were cleaned, preserved, and prepared for publication, while also situating them within a history of similar finds. He moreover explores in detail a number of crucial questions raised by the Tsinghua strips, from the transmission of the Shangshu and the nature of the oft-neglected Yi Zhoushu, to the implications these texts have for our understanding of early Western Zhou history.
As the main theme of Improving Complex Systems Today implies, this book is intended to provide readers with a new perspective on concurrent engineering from the standpoint of systems engineering. It can serve as a versatile tool to help readers to navigate the ever-changing state of this particular field. The primary focus of concurrent engineering was, at first, on bringing downstream information as far upstream as possible by introducing parallel processing in order to reduce time to market and to prevent errors at a later stage which would sometimes cause irrevocable damage. Up to now, numerous new concepts, methodologies and tools have been developed, but over concurrent engineering’s 20-year history the situation has changed extensively. Now, industry has to work in the global marketplace and to cope with diversifying requirements and increasing complexities. Such globalization and diversification necessitate collaboration across different fields and across national boundaries. Thus, the new concurrent engineering calls for a systems approach to gain global market competitiveness. Improving Complex Systems Today provides a new insight into concurrent engineering today.