摘要
The China reform and opening up that began in 1978 has gone well beyond economics and politics to include multiple openings to traditional Chinese philosophy.Among these openings have been serious efforts both to recover the Confucian tradition and to bring it to bear on contemporary issues.Taken together,the contributors to this special theme illustrate especially the effort to bring one dimension of the Chinese philosophical tradition to bear on issues related to technology.Wang Xiaowei adopts and criticizes ideas from Ni Peimin,an elder generation philosopher educated at Fudan University and in the United States,to advance a Confucian notion of human dignity appropriate to contemporary contexts.Ni Peimin responds collegially to Wang’s criticisms and thereby advances his own Chinese philosophical engagement with the contemporary world.Zhu Qin suggests the potential benefit of Confucian imaginative practices for engineering ethics education,and does so with interpretations of specific passages from the Analects.After questioning the adequacy of Bruno Latour’s post-natural thinking,Teng Fei argues for a response to the Anthropocene based in a Confucian shengsheng生生relationship.Even the proposal for mediation design practices by Jia Lumeng and Hung Ching makes passing reference to the Confucianism of Feng Youlan,a path breaking twentieth century Chinese philosopher who also studied with John Dewey at Columbia University.
