Biblical scholarship is for the most part a historical and descriptive enterprise. Stereotypically, philosophy is thought to be evaluative. However, descriptive varieties of philosophy of religion do ...exist and some of their methods can be used for the clarification of concepts, beliefs, and practices in ancient nonphilosophical religions. In other words, there are subcurrents on both sides of the analytic-Continental divide that, when adopted and adapted through a shrewd bit of “theological engineering,” offer the biblical scholar hermeneutically legitimate forms of philosophical analysis. In this chapter we take a closer look at those philosophical traditions.
Descriptive or elucidative philosophy is
In traditional interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, a distinction is usually made between involving auxiliary disciplines on the level of exegesis versus involving them in a larger-scale approach:
In ...this chapter we make the following distinction:
Philosophical criticism as discussed in the previous chapter is therefore the precursor to what I discuss in this chapter as the philosophy of Israelite religion. By this latter concept I mean the philosophical clarification of larger clusters of folk philosophies of religion (plural) in books, sources, traditions, and redactions within the Hebrew Bible. We are no longer simply doing exegesis of a particular passage;
Bopp the Builder Bart Karstens
The Making of the Humanities,
10/2012
Book Chapter
Open access
The historical study of discipline formation is a relatively underdeveloped research area in the historiography of science. It questions how the modern academic system of disciplines has emerged and ...how differentiation in it has taken place by investigating the factors involved in the construction or breaking down of disciplinary boundaries. This research focus is interesting for at least four reasons. First, the process of discipline formation is an ongoing process. Thus, knowledge about discipline formation in the past can help us to gain a better understanding of the process of discipline formation in the present. Second, the search for historical
“The line of flight is a deterritorialization. The French do not understand this very well. Obviously, they flee like everyone else, but they think that fleeing means making an exit from the world, ...mysticism or art, or else that it is something rather sloppy because we avoid our commitments and responsibilities. But to flee is not to renounce action: nothing is more active than flight. It is the opposite of the imaginary. It is also to put to flight—not necessarily others, but to put something to flight, to put a system to flight as one bursts a tubetube .
“China did not originally have a so-called philosophy. Thank god our people had such healthy habits.”² This provocative statement, made by Fu Sinian 傅斯年 (1896–1950) in a letter to a good friend, ...shows the young author in all his self-confidence, originality, and vigour. “Chinese philosophy” had just been created or (re)discovered by his contemporaries as an academic sub-discipline through the study of the nation’s ancient masters (zi子) . Its creation, guided by major figures such as Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) and Feng Youlan 馮友蘭 (1895–1990), demanded an adaptation of past Chinese thought to a modern Western paradigm, as in
Introduction John Makeham
Learning to Emulate the Wise,
07/2012
Book Chapter
This volume is an inquiry into how “Chinese philosophy” (Zhongguo zhexue中國哲學) became an academic discipline in China in the early decades of the twentieth century. We seek to show how Chinese ...philosophy was conceived and shaped in the course of its early development. Our enquiry has been driven by a range of questions, in particular: What factors influenced this process of formation and development? What was the relationship between Chinese philosophy and traditional forms of learning in China? What role did Japanese scholarship have in its genesis? What was its relationship with European and American philosophy? What impact did models
The early-twentieth century saw the introduction of Buddhist studies into the Chinese academic world. For the most part, this occurred in the philosophy departments of the newly established ...universities. The subsequent academic discourse on Buddhism was a great challenge to the traditional teachings of the monasteries. Some Buddhist monks, such as Taixu 太虛 (1890–1947), and Buddhist laymen, such as Ouyang Jingwu 歐陽竟無 (1871–1943), responded by developing a modern approach to their intellectual tradition.1 Under the pressure of Western-style academic institutions, including Christian universities and seminaries, a number of Buddhist training centres opened. These included the Wuchang Buddhist Institute 武昌佛學院 and
EPILOGUE Denecke, Wiebke
The Dynamics of Masters Literature,
01/2011, Volume:
74
Book Chapter
Let us return to the questions that have motivated this project: What happens if we scrape away as much as possible of the disciplinary and conceptual overlay that has accrued on the surface of the ...Masters Texts, the interpretive barnacles of the last half millennium since the Jesuit mission? Which neglected parts, problems, particular moves, concepts, and strategies of the Masters Texts will come to light?
Five aspects emerge as particularly characteristic of the textual genre as it evolved in the pre-Qin period. The first and most fundamental characteristic of Masters Literature is, true to its name, the centrality of
