The Kyoto School and Confucianism: a Confucian reading of the philosophy of history and political thought of Masaaki Kosaka

This dissertation examines the philosophy of Masaaki Kōsaka (1900-1969) from the East Asian perspective of Confucianism, which I believe is the most appropriate moral paradigm for comprehending his political speculations. Although largely neglected in post-war scholarship, Kōsaka was a prominent member of the Kyoto School during the 1930s and 40s. This was a group of Japanese thinkers strongly associated with the philosophies of Kitarō Nishida and Hajime Tanabe. Kōsaka is now best known for his participation in the three Chūō Kōron symposia held in 1941 and 1942. These meetings have been routinely denounced by liberal historians due to the participants’ support for the Pacific War and the Co-Prosperity Sphere. However, many of these liberal portrayals have failed to take into account the full extent of the group’s resistance to the military junta of Hideki Tōjō. Adopting the methods and techniques of the empirical disciplines of academic history and Orientalism, I develop an interpretative framework that is more receptive to the political values that mattered to Kōsaka as a Confucian inspired intellectual. This has necessitated the rejection of moral history, which typically prioritises modern liberal values brought a priori to the historical record of wartime Japan, as well as recognition of the different ontological foundations that inform the unique political theories of the East Asian intellectual tradition. Reinforced by the prior research of Michel Dalissier and Graham Parkes, as well as my own reading of the Confucian canon, I adopt David Williams’s thesis of ‘Confucian Revolution’ as my principle schema of interpretation. This, I believe, is better able to reconcile Kōsaka’s support for the war with his strong condemnation of the imperialist practices of the Japanese military. Moreover, acknowledging the importance of Confucianism allows us to fully appreciate Kōsaka’s strong affinity for Kant’s practical metaphysics, Hegel’s political philosophy and Ranke’s historiography.

Learning to 'understand backwards' in time: children's temporal cognition and the primary history curriculum

This study examines children’s temporal ways of knowing and it highlights the centrality of temporal cognition in the development of children’s historical understanding. It explores how young children conceptualise time and it examines the provision for temporal cognition at the levels of the intended, enacted and received history curriculum in the Irish primary school context. Positioning temporality as a prerequisite second-order concept, the study recognises the essential role of both first-order and additional second-order concepts in historical understanding. While the former can be defined as the basic, substantive content to be taught, the latter refers to a number of additional key concepts that are deemed fundamental to children's capacity to make meaningful sense of history. The study argues for due recognition to be given to temporality, in the belief that both sets of knowledge, the content and skills, are required to develop historical thinking (Lévesque, 2011). The study addresses a number of key research questions, using a mixed methods research design, comprising an analysis of history textbooks, a survey among final year student teachers about their teaching of history, and school-based interviews with primary school children: What opportunities are available for children to develop temporal ways of knowing? How do student teachers experience being apprenticed into the available culture for teaching history and understanding temporality at primary level? What insights do the cognitive-developmental and sociocultural perspectives on learning provide for understanding the dynamics of children’s temporal ways of knowing? The study argues that the skill of developing a deeper understanding of time is a key prerequisite in connecting with, and constructing, understandings and frameworks of the past. The study advances a view of temporality as complex, multi-faceted and developmental. The findings have a potential contribution to make in influencing policy and pedagogy in establishing an elaborated and well-defined curriculum framework for developing temporal cognition at both national and international levels.

Processes of social flourishing and their liminal collapse: elements to a genealogy of globalization

This article aims at exploring a long-term historical perspective on which contemporary globalization can be more meaningfully situated. A central problem with established approaches to globalization is that they are even more presentist than the literature on modernization was. Presentism not only means the ignoring of history, but also the unreflective application to history of concepts taken from the study of the modern world. In contrast, it is argued that contemporary globalization is not a unique development, but rather is a concrete case of a historical type. Taking as its point of departure the spirit, rather than the word, of Max Weber, this article extends the scope of sociological investigation into archaeological evidence. Having a genealogical design and introducing the concept of ‘liminality’, the article approaches the modern process of globalization through reconstructing the internal dynamics of another type of historical change called ‘social flourishing’. Taking up the Weberian approach continued by Eisenstadt in his writings on ‘axial age’, it moves away from situations of crisis as reference point, shifting attention to periods of revival by introducing the term ‘epiphany’. Through the case of early Mesopotamia, it shows how social flourishing can be transmogrified into globalizing growth, gaining a new perspective concerning the kind of ‘animating spirit’ that might have driven the shift from Renaissance to Reformation, the rise of modern colonialism, or contemporary globalization. More generally, it will retrieve the long-term historical background of the axial age and demonstrate the usefulness and importance of archaeological evidence for sociology.

Negotiating national identity on film: competing readings of Zhang Yimou’s 'Hero'

How are national identities transformed? If they are mostly narratives of belonging to a community of history and destiny to which people subscribe, those boundary-making procedures that constitute the political field by instituting differences can provide a tentative answer to this question. This paper is concerned with one such cultural practice, namely film-viewing. Globalisation, a boundary-blurring practice, has been the backdrop against which transformations in national identity are often discussed, either bemoaned as cultural imperialism or celebrated as ongoing hybridisation. This piece of research took Zhang Yimou’s controversial film Hero as a point of departure, and asked groups of Chinese audiences how they understood the Chinese identity it conveys. Although it is still a work in progress, provisional results are reported below.