EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 106 Ambrogio Selusi (University of Macerata) Chinese Philosophical Universalism: the EarlyWestern Exclusion and the Enduring 中体西用 Theory Key words: universalism, German eclecticism, 中体西用 , Neo-Confucianism, 当代新儒家 My speech aims at investigating the universal power of Chinese thought in a two-phase analysis: 1) the early Western point of view on China and 2) a few definitions of Chinese universalism as provided by Chinese philoso- phers of the twentieth century. In the first phase, I will explore the reasons of the first real complete exclusion of Chinese thought from the realm of philosophy as it happened in the early eighteenth century within the German Eclectic School (i. e. Heumann and Brucker), whose role inOrientalism is regrettably neglected by today’s schol- ars. Those thinkers, almost a century before the well-known Hegelian Exclusion, depicted Chinese thought as weak and irrational, thus lacking universality, while (Western) philosophywas the core discipline of universalism. In the second phase, I will retrace the 中体西用 theory of the late Qing Empire (i. e. Zhang Zhidong) and how this theory, refused by Republican 五四 thinkers (i. e. Hu Shi) while somehow supported by 国民党 , never ceased to remerge in diverse forms during the last century. The idea that Chinese thought was spiritual and devoted to human cultivation, while Western thought was technical and only useful, was differently suggested by Feng Youlan, Mou Zongsan, Xu Fuguan and several other Neo Confucian ( 当代新儒家 ) philosophers. Those phi- losophers did not advocate scientific or logical universalism ( 西用 ) for Chinese thought (as Needham and other Chinese thinkers did), but instead suggested a different kind of universalism, which is universalism in a Chinese way ( 中体 ). In the last decades now, we have seen Chinese cultural and political milieu claiming this “Chinese universalism” or 中体 both in RPC and Taiwan, while, at the same time, the economical, industrial and scientific development is already reaching Western development or 西用 . In my opinion, although this is a Qing slogan, it is still alive and it contains all the power and danger of any universalistic theory, either Western or Eastern. Ciaudo Joseph (INALCO (ASIEs), ATER, Université de Strasbourg ) Reading Bergson’s “Intuition” from a Neoconfucian Perspective: Considering the Introduction of a New Philosophical Concept Key words: Intuition, Bergson, Knowledge of Moral nature, Metaphysics, Translation My talk aims at questioning the role played by the translation of Henri Bergson’s philosophical writings in the development of the concept of “intuition” (zhijue 直覺 ) in contemporary Chinese philosophy. The translation and discussion around Bergson’s “An introduction to metaphysics” (1903) between 1918 and 1921 will be the key focus of the study. In Chinese context, the intuition was very soon associated with “the knowledge of one’s moral nature” (dexing zhi zhi 德性之知 ), and was no longer solely regarded as the method of metaphysics. Discussed by Chinese intellectuals like Li Shiceng, Liang Shuming, Zhang Junmai, Fan Shoukang or FengYoulan, it turned into one of the basic Chinese modern concept to think about ethical and moral issues. As such, Chinese philosophers used Bergson’s intuition as a device of moral phi- losophy sooner than the philosopher himself even started to write his moral philosophy. I will try to decrypt this transformation or moralization in Chinese context, and explicit the role it played in the emergence of a modern Chinese philosophy. The key documents put under light in this paper will be the three Chinese translations of “An introduction to metaphysics” (1903) and several articles related to Bergson published around 1920, notably the special issue of People’s Bell (Minduo 民鐸 ) dedicated to Bergson in 1921.