Self and Knowledge: A Primary Investigation of Confucian Epistemic Subjectivity

論文發表人：陳寬鴻（夏威夷大學哲學系博士班）

  

http://ph.ourpower.com.tw/cubekm02/ezcatfiles/cust/download/attach/2/ISCP-program.pdf

 

http://ph.ourpower.com.tw/cubekm02/front/bin/cglist.phtml?Category=68

 

It is a common belief that there is no epistemology in the Confucian philosophical tradition. Even though it may be true that the Confucian wisdom has little to do with epistemology "proper"—that is, a theory of knowledge in general—it certainly does not entail that there are no distinct epistemic stances in Confucianism. In this project, I would like to construct the idea of epistemic subjectivity in Confucianism. Such a construction will inevitably call the premises of the conventional epistemology into question because the Confucian philosophical narratives provide a much different set of assumptions about the contents and practices of self and knowledge. In this project, the investigations of the problematic of the notion of epistemic subjectivity will be the continuous strand that penetrates these assumptions. Through the investigations, I shall revisit the issue of how knowledge is recognized in classical Confucianism with special attention on the Analects and the Xunzi. I would like to argue that knowledge in Confucian tradition is irreducibly social via articulating the following theses: that knowing how is prior to knowing that, that knowing a way is prior to knowing the truth and that knowing people is prior to knowing objects.

 

 

對於絕大多數的哲學家來說，儒家傳統並沒有所謂「知識論」的存在。儘管以西方嚴格意義的系統知識論為基準，儒學確實與其不甚相關；然而這並不表示儒學傳統中沒有自成一格的知識立場。

本文將重新建構儒學傳統中「知識主體性」的概念並做深入分析。在建構的過程當中無可避免的將會對西方現代系統知識論的基本假設提出質疑，因為儒學傳統中對於知識的規範與認定是奠基於另一套迥然不同的預設之上。以「知識主體性」的概念為核心，筆者將側重於對《論語》和《荀子》兩部文獻的考察，論證儒學傳統中知識的社會性以及以下子題：（一）技能性知識較言說性知識重要；（二）「通道」概念比「真理」概念重要；（三）人際知識比物件知識重要。