The Ivory Tower and The Marble Citadel

Essays on Political Philosophy in Our Modern Era of Interacting Cultures

Thomas A. Metzger

• Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• eBook ISBN:
  9789629964887
• Year: 2012

The Ivory Tower and the Marble Citadel opens up a new way of pursuing the critical development of political philosophy in today's intercultural intellectual arena. Metzger holds that political philosophies are linguistically unavoidable efforts to infer the principles of morally legitimate government from a maximally enlightened conceptualization of the universal human condition. Because these efforts depend on a vocabulary embodying culturally inherited premises, textual analysis uncovering these premises and debate about how they should be revised are crucial for the improvement of political philosophy.

Table of contents

• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. Political Rationality and the Four Premises
• 2. Factual and Normative Continuity
• 3. Selfhood and Authority in Neo-Confucian Political Culture
• 4. The Confucian Concept of Moral Autonomy
• 5. Gadamer, Liu Xiao-gan, and “Neo-Hegelianism”
• 6. Mou Zong-san and the Four Premises
• 7. Stephen C. Angle and the Human Rights Discourse in China
• 8. Epistemological Implications of Culture
• 9. Lao Sze-kwang’s Concept of Modernity
• 10. Donald J. Munro’s Utilitarianism
• 11. Revisiting John Dunn’s Liberalism
• 12. Overdosing on Iconoclasm
• 13. Rethinking U.S.-Chinese Relations
• 14. Understanding the Taiwan Experience (with R. H. Myers)
• 15. A 1994 Self-Appraisal
• Glossary and Index