Spiritual foundations and Chinese culture : a philosophical approach

Abstract

The various articles in this volume emerge out of an international conference held at the Fujen Catholic University in Taipei, Taiwan on 13-14 December 2013. Whilst the themes treated by these articles are quite diverse the conference at which they were presented shared a common purpose with the Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. The Council aims to bring scholars from different cultural and religious traditions together in order to pursue the goal of mutual understanding oriented towards helping cultures and religious traditions to flourish. In the particular case of this conference, the relationship between spiritual foundations and Chinese culture as considered from a philosophical perspective was the focus. Using a variety of philosophical methods the articles attempt to investigate the various ways the spiritual dimension is present in Chinese and western cultures. Some of the contributors took a comparative methodological approach, comparing and contrasting a Chinese and a western thinker or system of thought. Others took a more inter-cultural approach seeing the interpenetration of systems of thought today as enabling and contrasting, and not merely as comparing between different cultures. Still others consider the analytical division between Chinese and western thought as in some ways inadequate. Whether because posing the Chinese and western binary immediately illicits the question what about the rest? The dynamics of globalisation seem unhappy with the singling out, perhaps artificially, of two particular cultures for comparison. Or, because in some ways the notion that thought happens in hermetically sealed cultural vacuums that can be compared or contrasted is itself problematic. As the canonical texts of world literature are now read in all cultures of the world there is a real sense in our present age that we have become a global culture sharing in a great diversity of classical texts. If this is indeed the case, then the reading of these canonical texts in different cultural contexts raises various hermeneutical questions, originating in ancient thought and developed in modern times that several scholars in this volume consider. The hope of this set of essays is that from the various perspectives of the authors, something of this role of the spiritual may be discerned. Partial, fragmentary, and no doubt in need of further revision, the contributions presented here are honest and engaged explorations which earnestly seek to foster mutual enrichment and mutual understanding: themselves core values of the spiritual in our days.