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A Confucian Perspective on the Enlightenment and Religion

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Major Aspects of Chinese Religion and Philosophy
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Abstract

The Enlightenment of the modern west is indicative of reason in criticizing the intellectual obscurities inflicted on Europeans by religious dogmatism and political despotism in the ideology of King’s power by God’s Covenant. Such intellectual movement had not only greatly enlightened human mentality but also positively motivated the French and Americans in their social revolutions. In a due course, people in the west had accomplished a drastically new approach toward religion and religious institutions also had attained their domestic improvement, a triad being more convincing among civilians that philosophy seeks truth, religion goodness, and art beauty. Within the domain of reason we have therefore the role of philosophy or science and in a contrastive frame the role of religion has been agreeably limited within the domain of pure reason, being activated by human free will.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Engels, “The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science,” in The Selected Works of Marx and Engels (Beijing: People’s Press, 1995), Vol. 3, p. 687.

  2. 2.

    See “The Works of Shi Zi (sizi), in The Complete Works of One Hundred Scholars (baizi quanshu) (Changsha: Yuelu Press, 1993), Vol. 2, p. 1612.

  3. 3.

    Voltair, “Prejudice,” in Quotations for Our Time , ed. Laurence Peter (London: Methuen London Ltd. 1982), p. 419.

  4. 4.

    W. Pitt (2011), “On Property,” in Capitalists Party Policies, ed. Richard Barrett at http://www.capitalistparty.ca/index.php/on-property.

  5. 5.

    I. Kant, “What Is Enlightenment,” in Critique of Practical Reason and Foundations of Metaphysics of Morals , transl. by Lewis White Beck (Beijing: China Social Sciences Publishing House, and Cheng Cheng Books Ltd., 1999), II, viii. p. 35.

  6. 6.

    Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, translated and with an introduction by Lewis White Beck (the Macmillan Publishing Company, 1959), p. 39.

  7. 7.

    Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1956), p. 29.

  8. 8.

    Jin Xin Shang., The Works of Mencius (Mengzi, jinxin shang).

  9. 9.

    Sima Qian, “Biographies of Qu Yuan and Jia Yi, Historical Records (shiji, quyuan jiasheng liezhuan),” in The Twenty - Four Histoires (Version of Simplified Chinese Characters) (Beijing: Zhong Hua Shu Ju Press, 2000),Vol. 84, p. 1933.

  10. 10.

    Enduring Issues in Religion, edit.by John Lyden (Greenhaven Press, Inc, 1995), p. 19.

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Correspondence to Shan Chun .

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Chun, S. (2012). A Confucian Perspective on the Enlightenment and Religion. In: Major Aspects of Chinese Religion and Philosophy. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29317-7_9

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