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The quest for an indisputable foundation of all knowledge has been one of the driving forces behind intellectual history. In the European tradition it is mainly connected to René Descartes (1596–1650) and his Meditations on First Philosophy whereas in the Islamic world it was already expressed in a brilliant manner by Abū Ḥāmid al-Ġazālī (1058–1111) in his book entitled Deliverance from Err or. The article investigates both these texts by contextualizing them within the long history of intellectual autobiographies, which stretches from antiquity to the present and comprises many exciting examples from Asia and Europe.

This article contains a summary of an Islamic theological text written in the middle of the 6. century H. / 12. century AD. The author lived in Iran, in the city of Rayy; he was the father of Fakhr al-din al-Razi (d. 606 H. / 1210 H.), who was the protagonist of the „Avicennian turn“ in Islamic theology. The text was a kind of manual for teaching an advanced course at a madrasa; but only the second half of it is preserved. After the summary an attempt is made at pointing out the peculiarities of the author’s approach, with regard to its historical as well as educational and social context.

Chinese studies are going through a period of reforms. This article appraises what could constitute the theoretical and methodological foundations of contemporary sinology today. The author suggests an approach of “Chinese culture” by drawing from recent frameworks of Science and Technology Studies (STS). The paper starts with current debates in Asian studies, followed by a historical overview of the concept of culture in anthropology. Then, two short case studies are presented with regard to two different STS approaches: studies of expertise and experience and the notion of interactional expertise , and the framework of waves and forms . A general argument is thereby sketched which suggests how “Chinese culture” can be understood from the perspective of materiality.

Extrait The pleonastic negation refers to the negation without negative function. Because of this special property, many studies have tried to find the producing mechanism of the pleonastic negation. But so far all the explanations of the production of the pleonastic negation, although restricted to one particular language, have encountered some counterexamples. In order to explain the production of pleonastic negation in Chinese and also provide a possibility to explain the same phenomena in other languages, this article lauches a comparison between the Chinese and the French to exclude the elements irrelevant with the production of the pleonastic negation. It is also proposed that the pleonastic negation results from a subconscious blending of two expressions but is reserved because of its function to emphasize the subjective feeling. This approach helps to explain the contingence of the presence of the pleonastic negative marker after the trigger-items.

When in 1962 Habermas formulated his theory of the public sphere as “a society engaged in critical debate” he sought to describe something he felt was unique to the modern liberal democratic Western world. Yet the creation of discursive spheres where people across lines of social difference debate questions of the common good, mutual interest, and forms of equality long predates the modern era and flourished well outside the “Western” world. This essay adapts Habermas’ influential concept to highlight the emergence of a nascent public sphere at the earliest layers of Marathi literary creation in 13th century India. At this inaugural stage of a regional language’s full shift to writing, we see traces of a debate in the language of everyday life that struggled over the ethics of social difference, a public deliberation that might presage key aspects of Indian modernity and democracy today.

In recent decades, the concept of religion, and specifically its application to non-Western historic cultural formations has come unter critical scrutiny. This paper proposes the study of semantic fields as a method to explore the self-understanding of historic formations of what, in modern parlance, counts as religion, and thus, as a testing strategy for the concept of religion that is employed in scholarly analysis. It uses the said method to analyse three works by the medieval Japanese Buddhist monk Dōgen (1200–1253), who came to be revered as founder of the still extant Sōtō school of Zen Buddhism. By putting his notion of the ‘Buddha Way’ ( butsudō ) into strong relief, it provides a basis for comparison with modern concepts of religion. The conclusion is that Dōgen’s ideas conform to a surprisingly large extent with modern ideas. This may be one reason for his popularity in modern times. But Dōgen should not be taken to represent the general world-view of medieval Japan. Further comparative analyses of other corpora remain necessary to gauge the applicability of ‘religion’ as a category for the analysis of medieval Japanese culture.

Anmerkungen zu Übersetzung und Zitationsweise: Namen werden mit dem Vornamen voran wiedergegeben. Die Umschrift japanischer Begriffe in lateinischen Lettern ( rōmaji ) erfolgt nach dem Hepburn-System. Alle typografischen Sonderzeichen innerhalb der Übersetzung entsprechen Hervorhebungen des Autors im Original. Anmerkungen und Kommentare der Übersetzer befinden sich in den Fußnoten. The history of ideas is a history of translations and interpretations, of finding new words for old phenomena and attributing new phenomena to old words. In this commented translation from a Japanese source text, this historical process is demonstrated for the term civil society and the languages German, French, Italian and Japanese. In his 1989 article “On Gramsci’s notion of civil society”, Japanese Marxist Kiyoaki Hirata compared the use of the term by Georg W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci, while translating it to Japanese as shimin shakai 市民社会, today a highly popular term in Japan. After having published a translation of the first part of Hirata’s article, in which he endeavors on the connections and differences between Hegel and Marx, we have now translated the second part, in which Hirata reconstructs how Gramsci relied on Hegel and Marx in redefining the concept of civil society ( società civile ). We have pointed out why the global resurgence of the term civil society during the 1990s was accompanied by the invention of the neologism Zivilgesellschaft , while the classic term bürgerliche Gesellschaft almost fell into disuse in the German language. As both the English and the Japanese discourse on civil society ( shimin shakai ) continued unaffected by this translative-turn however, we have decided to translate shimin shakai in this pre-1990 text as bürgerliche Gesellschaft . This way we are able underline the fact that Hegel, Marx and Gramsci were writing on and further developing the same concept and that just because they have highlighted different aspects and attributed different functions to it, we do not necessarily need different words for each concept in order to properly understand these continuities and differences. More so we argue that neologisms like Zivilgesellschaft and Bürgergesellschaft have in the German discourse obscured continuities in the history of ideas on civil society. Hiratas text – despite of its weaknesses, such as a neglect of scientific documentation standards and a highly metaphoric and speculative language – is therefore a valuable contribution to highlighting such continuities and worth to be made accessible to a non-Japanese speaking readership. By pointing out the dialectic heritage in Gramsci’s writings, Hirata – much differently from many post-1990 authors – shows that Gramsci’s civil society is not constituted by a set of more or less organized so-called “non-state” actors that enclose and limit government authority, but rather forms an integral part of the state in which a government’s political force is bolstered by an ethical hegemony. It is in civil society that leading groups stabilize their authority over the whole society by educating and persuading the subaltern groups to an active consent to social and economic rules that benefit the interests of the leading group, while on the other hand no subaltern group can ever become politically leading before having established ethical hegemony in civil society.

During the Tokugawa bakufu, Japan’s foreign policy was under set conditions, generally known as sakoku , meaning ‘closed country’. However, the existing regime was not fully closed to the outside world. Contact with foreigners in Nagasaki, Tsushima, and Ryūkyū Islands meant that the country was not completely isolated, but rather experienced a situation in which government policy was aimed at achieving strict control over all contact with the outside world, as part of a larger strategy to monopolize all foreign relations. This paper examines the ideas of Takashima Shirōtayu Shūhan (1798–1866), one of the early Japanese reformers, who argued for the modernization of Japan. Beginning in the 1830s, a Nagasaki bakufu official, Takashima Shūhan, began importing flintlock pistols, known as gewehr rifles, from the Netherlands. Additionally, through the Dutch at Dejima, Takashima managed to obtain cannons, field guns, and mortars, in doing so highlighting the importance of the modernization of the artillery forces of the bakufu army. In September 1840, Takashima Shūhan completed his memorandum, which was sent to the bakufu top administers. On 27 June 1841, Takashima was permitted to undertake the first modern Western military demonstration in Tokumarugahara (an area north of the capital city, Edo). He was heavily criticized by many, including bugyō Torii Tadateru, Torii Tadateru 鳥居忠耀 (1796–1873), metsuke 目付 (censor or inspector) and minami machi bugyō 南町奉行 (magistrate of the southern part of Edo) in the bakufu administration, was one of most active figures during the time of the Tenpo reforms, well known for his actions against people who had a strong interest in Western culture and military arts. and was placed under investigation and house arrest on charges of subversion and conspiracy. Takashima’s memorandum requires careful study in order to discover the reasons for the bakufu’s response, which must also include a discussion of the Japanese financial situation at that time.

Zusammenfassung Dieser Beitrag ist der abschliessende dritte Teil der Übersetzung der Summe von Ishibashi Ningetsus (石橋忍月, 1865–1926) poetologischen Überlegungen. Die literaturhistorische Bedeutung des Texts besteht in der Einführung eines weder regional noch historisch eingeschränkten, ausserdem auch alle Textsorten einschliessenden Konzepts der „Poesie“ ( shi 詩), das sich klar vom klassischen Begriff der Schriftgelehrsamkeit ( bungaku 文学) unterscheidet. Die japanische Literatur entwickelt sich damit zu einem vollwertigen Bestandteil eines autonomen Feldes „Kunst“. Eine weitere Leistung des Sō jitsu ron besteht in der Integration traditioneller japanischer und moderner europäischer theoretischer Ansätze. Das macht den Text zu einem Meilenstein auf dem Weg zu einer selbständigen japanischen wissenschaftlich-theoretischen Auseinandersetzung mit der eigenen Literatur.

Myanmar has been perceived to be in a sociopolitical and economic transition since the semi-civilian government under President Thein Sein took office in 2011. Amongst other things, for a representative democracy to function, citizens have to have the freedom to express their opinions and deliberate them with fellow citizens. This requires the secure granting of fundamental civil liberties, as prescribed in the freedom of expression, association, and assembly. Hence, once in the process of democratization, a formerly authoritarian state has to make significant improvements in the granting and protection of these rights too. To empirically test whether Myanmar has made such improvements since 2011 is the goal of a greater research project I am working on. This research note introduces the project and summarizes first findings. By combining knowledge on legal reforms and protest data from the Myanmar Protest Event Dataset, it is suggested that, in Myanmar, the de jure exercisability and de facto exercise of fundamental civil liberties have significantly improved from 2011 to 2015. Informal methods of suppressing the right to protest, such as arbitrary violence, have increasingly descended while methods that are formally in accordance with the rule of law but still lack compliance with international human rights standards have ascended.