Confucian Perspectives on Learning and Self-Transformation

This book bridges the regions of East Asia and the West by offering a detailed and critical inquiry of educational concepts of the East Asian tradition. It provides educational thinkers and practitioners with alternative resources and perspectives for their educational thinking, to enrich their educational languages and to promote the recognition of educational thoughts from different cultures and traditions across a global world.The key notions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian philosophy directly concern the ideals, processes and challenges of learning, education and self-transformation, which can be seen as the western equivalences of liberal education, including the German concept of Bildung. All the topics in the book are of fundamental interest across diverse cultures, giving a voice to a set of long-lasting and yet differentiated cultural traditions of learning and education, and thereby creating a common space for critical philosophical reflection of one's own educational tradition and practice. The book is especially timely, given that the vocabularies in educational discourse today have been dominantly “West centred” for a long time, even while the whole world has become more and more diverse across races, religions and cultures. It offers a great opportunity to philosophers of education for their cross-cultural understanding and self-understanding of educational ideas and practices on both personal and institutional levels.

Roland Reichenbach is professor of Foundation in Education at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. After teacher training he studied Clinical Psychology and Philosophical Ethics at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He was visiting scholar at Stanford University from 1992 to 1993 and at the Université de Montréal from 1997 to 1999. Reichenbach held former professorships at the University of Münster, Germany (2002-2008), and the University of Basel, Switzerland (2008-2012). His main interests: Philosophy of Bildung, pedagogical ethics, civic education, and cultures of negotiation.Duck-Joo Kwak is a professor of Philosophy of Education at Seoul National University, Korea. Her recent research interests are in arts-education, philosophy of teacher education, and comparative philosophy of education on the humanistic traditions between the East and West. She also has written numerous articles on Stanley Cavell, especially his existential interpretation of later Wittgenstein, and civic and moral education in the post-liberal Confucian culture.