Authors from all over the world unite in an effort to cultivate dialogue between Asian and Western philosophy. The papers forge a new, East-West comparative path on the whole range of issues in Kant studies. The concept of personhood, crucial for both traditions, serves as a springboard to address issues such as knowledge acquisition and education, ethics and self-identity, religious/political community building, and cross-cultural understanding. Edited by Stephen Palmquist, founder of the Hong Kong Philosophy Café and well known for both his Kant expertise and his devotion to fostering philosophical dialogue, the book presents selected and reworked papers from the first ever Kant Congress in Hong Kong, held in May 2009. Among others the contributors are Patricia Kitcher (New York City, USA), Günther Wohlfahrt (Wuppertal, Germany), Cheng Chung-ying (Hawaii, USA), Sammy Xie Xia-ling (Shanghai, China), Lau Chong-fuk (Hong Kong), Anita Ho (Vancouver/Kelowna, Canada), Ellen Zhang (Hong Kong), Pong Wen-berng (Taipei, Taiwan), Simon Xie Shengjian (Melbourne, Australia), Makoto Suzuki (Aichi, Japan), Kiyoshi Himi (Mie, Japan), Park Chan-Goo (Seoul, South Korea), Chong Chaeh-yun (Seoul, South Korea), Mohammad Raayat Jahromi (Tehran, Iran), Mohsen Abhari Javadi (Qom, Iran), Soraj Hongladarom (Bangkok, Thailand), Ruchira Majumdar (Kolkata, India), A.T. Nuyen (Singapore), Stephen Palmquist (Hong Kong), Christian Wenzel (Taipei, Taiwan), Mario Wenning (Macau).

Drawing from extended fieldwork in La Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, the author suggests an innovative re-reading of different concepts of magic that emerge in the global cultural economics of tourism. Following the making and unmaking of the tropical island tourism destination of La Réunion, he demonstrates how destinations are transformed into magical pleasure gardens in which human life is cultivated for tourist consumption. Like a gardener would cultivate flowers, local development policy, nature conservation, and museum initiatives dramatise local social life so as to evoke modernist paradigms of time, beauty and nature. Islanders who live in this 'human garden' are thus placed in the ambivalent role of 'human flowers', embodying ideas of authenticity and biblical innocence, but also of history and social life in perpetual creolisation.

This book engages in cross-tradition scholarship, investigating the processes associated with cultivating or nurturing the self in order to live good lives. Both Ancient Chinese and Greek philosophers provide accounts of the life lived well: a Confucian junzi, a Daoist sage and a Greek phronimos. By focusing on the processes rather than the aims of cultivating a good life, an international team of scholars investigate how a person develops and practices a way of life especially in these two traditions. They look at what is involved in developing practical wisdom, exercising reason, cultivating equanimity and fostering reliability. Drawing on the insights of thinkers including Plato, Confucius, Han Fei and Marcus Aurelius, they examine themes of harmony, balance and beauty, highlight the different concerns of scepticism across both traditions, and discuss action as an indispensable method of learning and, indeed, as constitutive of self. The result is a valuable collection opening up new lines of inquiry in ethics, demonstrating the importance of philosophical ideas from across cultural traditions.

Environmental disasters, unequal distribution of resources, viral pandemics, and other types of trans-national disasters, are global crises that cannot be solved within the narrow framework of individual nation-states. They must be addressed through global cooperation and solidarity. Such strategies require intercultural dialog that goes beyond fashionable slogans and can lead to a truly equal exchange of knowledge and ideas. Towards this endeavour, this book by Jana S. Rošker focuses on the traditional Confucian ethic of relationism, which historically spread throughout many regions of East Asia. She examines the specific features of relational ethics and explores its possible contribution to the new global ethics.

Within a changing social and political context, the role of the church in public life and the response of Christians to social issues has taken on renewed energy. Churches have entered enthusiastically into community engagement projects such as foodbanks and night shelters, with a broad understanding of this as mission. Missional Pastoral Care offers much needed reflection about the nature of mission and about expectations for missional outcomes. Using the stories of team members within the Eden Network (which emphasises an ‘incarnational’ approach to urban mission) the book demonstrates that at its best mission happens in a shared life rather than being about ‘us’ telling the listening world. A timely and provocative call to churches, missional groups and those training for ministry to reflect more deeply on their practice and theology, the book insists that mission is about difference, love, locality and long-term consistency and, at its best, is slow, complicated and messy.

In Cultivating Moral Citizenship, ethnographer Jude Fokwang unpacks the meanings, mechanisms and processes through which young people in an inner city of the West African nation of Cameroon respond to local and global challenges as they seek to position themselves as social adults. Faced with the decline of old predictabilities, the diminishing capacity of the postcolonial state to control its destiny and the precarity of waithood, young people instrumentalise the opportunities and resources afforded by associations to build reciprocal relationships that advance their individual and collective pursuits in a community that has increasingly become transnational. In positioning themselves as moral actors, the young people in this ethnography invest in high profile social and communal projects, including the enforcement of moral orthodoxies that enable readers to appreciate the ways in which moral citizenship is engendered, expanded and eroded simultaneously.

Solidly grounded in Chinese primary sources, Neo Confucianism: Metaphysics, Mind, and Morality engages the latest global scholarship to provide an innovative, rigorous, and clear articulation of neo-Confucianism and its application to Western philosophy. Contextualizes neo-Confucianism for contemporary analytic philosophy by engaging with today’s philosophical questions and debates Based on the most recent and influential scholarship on neo-Confucianism, and supported by primary texts in Chinese and cross-cultural secondary literature Presents a cohesive analysis of neo-Confucianism by investigating the metaphysical foundations of neo-Confucian perspectives on the relationship between human nature, human mind, and morality Offers innovative interpretations of neo-Confucian terminology and examines the ideas of eight major philosophers, from Zhou Dunyi and Cheng-Zhu to Zhang Zai and Wang Fuzhi Approaches neo-Confucian concepts in an penetrating yet accessible way

From Blues to Beyoncé amplifies Black women's ongoing public assertions of resistance, agency, and hope across different media from the nineteenth century to today. By examining recordings, music videos, autobiographical writings, and speeches, Alexis McGee explores how figures such as Ida B. Wells, Billie Holiday, Ruth Brown, Queen Latifah, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Janelle Monáe, and more mobilize sound to challenge antiBlack discourses and extend social justice pedagogies. Building on contemporary Black feminist interventions in sound studies and sonic rhetorics, From Blues to Beyoncé reveals how Black women's sonic acts transmit meaning and knowledge within, between, and across generations.

This book bridges the regions of East Asia and the West by offering a detailed and critical inquiry of educational concepts of the East Asian tradition. It provides educational thinkers and practitioners with alternative resources and perspectives for their educational thinking, to enrich their educational languages and to promote the recognition of educational thoughts from different cultures and traditions across a global world. The key notions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian philosophy directly concern the ideals, processes and challenges of learning, education and self-transformation, which can be seen as the western equivalences of liberal education, including the German concept of Bildung. All the topics in the book are of fundamental interest across diverse cultures, giving a voice to a set of long-lasting and yet differentiated cultural traditions of learning and education, and thereby creating a common space for critical philosophical reflection of one's own educational tradition and practice. The book is especially timely, given that the vocabularies in educational discourse today have been dominantly “West centred” for a long time, even while the whole world has become more and more diverse across races, religions and cultures. It offers a great opportunity to philosophers of education for their cross-cultural understanding and self-understanding of educational ideas and practices on both personal and institutional levels.

This book aims to address in a novel way some of the fundamental philosophical questions concerning suicide. Focusing on four major authors of Western philosophy - Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein - their arguments in favour or against suicide are explained, contextualized, examined and critically assessed. Taken together, these four perspectives provide an illuminating overview of the philosophical arguments that can be used for or against one’s right to commit suicide. Intended both for specialists and those interested in understanding the many complexities underlying the philosophical debate on suicide, this book combines philosophical depth with exemplary clarity.