A Philosophical Defense of Culture: Perspectives from Confucianism and Cassirer

Draws on two different but strikingly similar streams in our world tradition to argue for the contemporary philosophical relevance of "culture."

In A Philosophical Defense of Culture, Shuchen Xiang draws on the Confucian philosophy of "culture" and Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms to argue for the importance of "culture" as a philosophic paradigm. A defining ideal of Confucian-Chinese civilization, culture (wen) spans everything from natural patterns and the individual units tha...