Bertrand Russell was a renowned thinker who has exerted great influence over the Western intellectual circles of the 20th century. In particular, his criticism and reflections on Western religious traditions have become important symbols of contemporary Enlightenment. He deepened the past scholars' accomplishments in sociology, anthropology, and psychology into atheistic views, through which he revealed the psychological motives and social functions of the origin of religion. He analyzed the types and disadvantages of religion from the aspects of historical development, social function, and religious form, deeply criticized the dogmatism of religion and the institutional cruelty of the Catholic Church, and positively affirmed the function of religion in expressing emotion in human spiritual life. Through the analysis of Russell's enlightening thoughts, this article points out that the origin and functions of religion most likely find expression in people's universal "desire for knowledge."
Yang Guorong is a contemporary philosopher with little need for introduction—and not only because he has been introduced here before. Professor Yang’s decades of prolific scholarship cover nearly all major fields of Chinese philosophy, from the pre-Qin Masters to neo-Confucian metaphysics on to modern academic philosophers. That scholarship is accompanied by a series of major works laying out his own original philosophy, comprised principally of his “concrete metaphysics.” Most recently he has expanded on that theorizing by formulating the philosophy of “affairs” introduced in the essays collected here. This introduction outlines and contextualizes their main arguments. So what is a philosophy of affairs? “Affairs” translates the Chinese shi, a most commonplace term. You shenme shi? (What’s up?) You shi ma? (Everything all right?) Zhe shenme shi? (What’s this?) Yet despite its everyday nature, the term itself is strikingly difficult to render into English— and this is in fact a defining feature of the philosophy. Yang argues that “affairs,” shi, offers a view of the world that is distinctively Chinese. It belongs to “Chinese philosophy,” shaping and shaped by a unique metaphysical outlook and, most importantly, giving us a unique philosophical framework for understanding our understanding. While we might identify this with the Chinese nation or tradition or ethnicity or culture, in the most deeply important sense Yang describes the ideas and arguments he puts forward here as Chinese in the sense of being deeply rooted in Chinese language and the particular philosophical systems that grew within and through it. We can thus say it is distinctively Chinese philosophy in both the sense of being a philosophy of China and its culture, zhongguo zhexue, and being a philosophy that operates in ways distinctive to and shaped by Chinese language, hanyu zhexue. In fact, it integrates the two in a way so inseparable that it calls into question the contemporary push to distinguish the two. The philosophy of affairs, that is, is shaped by the unique conceptual schemes of its original language; it was also a force that shaped the language itself. Perhaps the most troublesome thing about translating the term shi here is that its closest English equivalent is the informal, slang use of the word “thing”: wo you shi (I have a thing—in the sense of some engagement); zhe zhong shi (this kind of thing). But a main point of the essays that follow, in laying out the basic framework of the philosophy of affairs, is precisely the distinction between affairs and things, shi and wu. The core argument of the philosophy of affairs is to point out that it is necessarily through affairs that we engage with things in meaningful ways. Affairs must be conceptually
Xiao Jiefu (1924–2008) was born in Chengdu. His ancestral place is Jingyan (井研) in Sichuan province. Due to his efforts, traditional Chinese philosophy became established as an academic discipline at Chinese universities in the People’s Republic of China. He was a philosopher and a historian of philosophy. He graduated from the Department of Philosophy of Wuhan University in 1947. From 1951 to 1955, he served as the director of the Marxist–Leninist Teaching and Research Institute of West China University (Huaxi daxue 华西大学 ) and of Sichuan Medical University, further studied in the advanced theory class of the Central Party School in 1956, engaged in an advanced study in the Department of Philosophy of Peking University in 1957, and was transferred to the Department of Philosophy of Wuhan University in the autumn of the same year. From that time, he taught in this department and served as the director of the Teaching and Research Institute for the History of Chinese Philosophy and was a tutor of doctoral students. He was an internationally renowned scholar, the founder and academic leader of the national key discipline of Chinese philosophy at Wuhan University, and the first director of the academic committee of The Center of Traditional Chinese Cultural Studies of Wuhan University (a key research base of humanities and social sciences of the Ministry of Education). His social part-time jobs included vice president of the Society for the History of Chinese Philosophy; vice president of the Chinese Confucius Institute; academic advisor of the International Association of Confucianism; academic member of the International Association of Daoism; academic advisor of the Chinese Society for Studies on The Book of Changes (Zhouyi 周易) member of the international academic advisory group of the International Society of Chinese Philosophy; and tutor of the Chinese Culture Academy. He engaged in the teaching and research of Chinese philosophy and culture for a long time. He was a famous expert in the philosophy of Wang Fuzhi (王夫之 , 1619–1692) and the early enlightenment of the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. He attended or hosted many academic conferences at home and abroad and published more than 100 academic papers in China and abroad. His main works include Blowing Sand Collection (a collection of his articles in 3 volumes), Introduction to Wang Fuzhi’s Philosophy, Sources of Historical Materials for the History of Chinese Philosophy, Development and Change of Enlightenment in the Intellectual History of Ming and Qing Dynasties (co-authored), Critical Biography of Wang Fuzhi (co-authored), and The History of Chinese Philosophy
Wang Fuzhi’s 王夫之 philosophy was generated from unique historical circumstances in the 17th century. First of all, his philosophy as a whole touched on the cognitive aspects of several distinct processes, which he termed “inquiring the pattern through approaching concrete affairs” (ji shi qiong li 即事穷理), “governing the heart by the pattern” (yi li yu xin 以理御心 ), “crystallizing the way through [letting it] immerge in virtue” (ru de yi ning dao 入 德以凝 道 ), and “discerning the continuing through summarizing the changing” (yao bian yi zhi chang 要变以知常). Second, he examined the objective and contradictory movement of nature and human society with the dialectics of “integrating the manifold and synthesizing contrasts” (hui qi canwu, tong qi cuozong 会其参伍, 通其 错综), in order to put forward the dialectical historical view of nature and human society that “wholly realizes the change in the pattern of things and human affairs” (ji wuli renshi zhi bian 极物理人事之变). In addition, Wang also completed dialectical research on the process of cognition itself. By proposing that “the heart keeps pace with the coming of the affairs” (shi zhi lai, xin zhi wang事之来, 心之往) or, in other words, “how beginning and end form one structure and how outside and inside combine their properties” (shi zhong tong tiao, nei wai he de 始终同条, 内外合德), he established a unique dialectical epistemology. These three aspects in Wang’s naive materialistic dialectics mutually contain and correspond to each other, but they also have their own different categories and systems, and therefore it is possible to study them respectively. In this article I will provide an outline of Wang’s unique dialectics.
As human activity in the broad sense, affairs unfold through the entirety of the processes of human being. They are also intrinsic to each aspect of human being. Through affairs, humans create heaven and earth anew and thereby reconstruct being. Affairs are interconnected with action and manifest the essential human powers in which emotional attachments participate. The mark of action and the weight of emotional attachments, in sublating the original state of things and bestowing on them actuality, also give affairs diverse qualities. Affairs not only change objects; they also affect humans themselves. In the processes of "being capable in one's affairs," people also further "achieve their virtue." The processes of enacting affairs both employ things and interact with other people, and behind human interactions with things lie the relations among persons. The unfolding of affairs thus occurs in the context of communicative interactions among humans and also constitutes the actual source of the formation of relations among them. Human being cannot be separated from concern for values and pursuit of meaning. As human activity, affairs also possess value content and are interrelated with the pursuit of meaning.
