NEW APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF CHINESE INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

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The study of Dr.McDermott focuses on basic re-evaluation of the importance of the Confucian virtue of friendship during the last century of Ming rules. Friendship aquired great political significance when it was judged by some major sixteenth and early seventeenth century Neo-Confucian thinkers, such as Ho Hsin-yin, Ku Hsien-ch'en etc. to be the most important human relationship and thus might provide a moral basis for criticizing the despotic realities of imperial rule. This critique served as the foundation for the famous full-scale attack on Ming imperial rule by Huan Tsung-hsi and Ku Yen-wu in the next generation. It also showed how another set of political values, stressing the importance of voluntary association and even equality in human relations, lay within the Confucian tradition.Prof.McMullen's article is as follows. In analyzing the concepts of Public and Private in the T'ang dynasty this essay limits itself to exploring the terminology that T'ang dynasty Chinese themselves most frequently used to discuss these concepts. In doing so it asks the following questions : What did medieval Chinese believe the relationship between public and private was and should be in their political system? Did they recognize a legitimate private sphere and it so what areas of experience did it concern and what efforts did they make to protect it? Given their apparently greater concern with public life than earlier or later Confucians did T'ang writers conceive of a non-offcial real in which political and social issues were independently and critically discussed? Finally was there a greater desire of freedom for the individual and thus of social and psychological private space in the T'ang than later on?