This study is constituted by three components. The first will examine how Chinese scholars and Western sinologists have characterized modern Chinese intellectual history and what directions they have proposed for future intellectual development in China. The second section will construct a hermeneutic model of intercultural understanding and discuss its implications for the evaluation of modern Chinese intellectual development. I will show that an understanding of modern Chinese intellectual development in hermeneutical terms can circumventing many of the entrenched and misleading dichotomies (...) in the field. In the third section, I will investigate three intercultural difficulties that modern and contemporary Chinese intellectuals face in the study of their own society and tradition. The recognition of these intercultural difficulties — which is made possible by re-conceptualizing local intellectual development in hermeneutical terms — put into relief the plight and possibilities of local intellectual development in non-Western localities. (shrink)

This study analyzes and evaluates the social thought of Dai Zhen. It interprets Dai’s thought in terms of a critique of ideology that problematizes Song dynasty Neo-Confucian moral vocabulary. Dai thinks that social critique is the ultimate goal of scholarship and he was explicit about this belief. This study will show that he analyzes the negative social consequences of Song Neo-Confucian moral discourse in sociologically sophisticated ways, and that he has developed this understanding through a series of works that began (...) with Yuanshan (The Origin of Goodness) and ended with Mengzi Ziyi Suzheng (Commentaries on the Meaning of Terms in Mencius). Contemporary social theorist and cultural critics should find Dai’s work relevant because his deconstruction of the reified moral vocabulary of his times is postmodern in spirit and he elucidated how discourses can concretely impact on society. (shrink)