Imperfect Conceptions

Imperfect Conceptions PDF

Author: Frank Dikötter

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780231113700

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Imperfect Conceptions reveals how Chinese cultural currents - fear and fascination with the deviant and the urge to draw clear boundaries between the normal and the abnormal - have combined with medical discourse to form a program of eugenics that is viewed with alarm by the rest of the world.

How China Sees the World

How China Sees the World PDF

Author: John M. Friend

Publisher: Potomac Books

Published: 2018-11-01

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 1612349838

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Han-centrism, a virulent form of Chinese nationalism, asserts that the Han Chinese are superior to other peoples and have a legitimate right to advance Chinese interests at the expense of other countries. Han nationalists have called for policies that will allow China to reclaim the prosperity stolen by foreign powers during the “Century of Humiliation.” The growth of Chinese capabilities and Han-centrism suggests that the United States, its allies, and other countries in Asia will face an increasingly assertive China—one that thinks it possesses a right to dominate international politics. John M. Friend and Bradley A. Thayer explore the roots of the growing Han nationalist group and the implications of Chinese hypernationalism for minorities within China and for international relations. The deeply rooted chauvinism and social Darwinism underlying Han-centrism, along with China’s rapid growth, threaten the current stability of international politics, making national and international competition and conflict over security more likely. Western thinkers have yet to consider the adverse implications of a hypernationalistic China, as opposed to the policies of a pragmatic China, were it to become the world’s dominant state.

Conceptions of Institutions and the Theory of Knowledge: 2nd Ed.

Conceptions of Institutions and the Theory of Knowledge: 2nd Ed. PDF

Author: Stanley Taylor

Publisher: Transaction Publishers

Published: 1989-01-01

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9781412820103

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This classic study is concerned with the impact of the sociology of knowledge on the classical theory of knowledge. First issued in a limited edition in 1956, the book has since attracted what can only be termed a cult following. In his own quite original way, Taylor considers knowledge as a product of group life in an institutional and cultural context. In his emphasis on the sociological rather than the psychological or individual, he reveals a sharp break with the empiricist and rationalist traditions of epistemology as such. This makes the work path-breaking. Taylor maintains that the sociology of knowledge began its career as a simple distrust of exact knowledge that betrayed its social origins. But the field is now at a point at which as a discipline it is in charge of the systematic formulation of the pervasive features of a culture. The growth of symbolism, relativism, and institution-building as such has transformed the study of knowledge itself. In this insight, he anticipates the development of knowledge as an area of study unto itself, apart from the information or ideology underlying claims to knowledge. This edition includes three newly discovered essays by Taylor-on the sociology of art; the role of choice in human life; and the connection between history and the written word. The essays complete his lifelong search for the institutional frames of ideological belief. Taylor, whose career began as a teacher of sociology at the University of Texas and Dubuque University, takes up in systematic order the history of philosophical disputations on knowledge, moving from individualism, positivism, and historical relativism. He goes beyond criticism into a view of the "concept" as an organizing principle of action, and as a statement of propositions of how the world can be examined in future states.