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Ist der Konfuzianismus ein Humanismus? Seit dem Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts ist er, sowohl im Westen als auch in China, vielfach in diesem Licht betrachtet worden. Ming-huei Lees Studie unternimmt den Versuch, die Vielfalt und Lebendigkeit der konfuzianischen Tradition in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart aus transkultureller Perspektive zu verdeutlichen. Schwerpunkte bilden dabei die philosophische Interpretation klassischer konfuzianischer Texte und das für den modernen Konfuzianismus höchst folgenreiche Zusammentreffen mit der Philosophie Kants. Neben einem Vergleich des konfuzianischen und des abendländischen Humanismus und einer Analyse des Schicksals des Konfuzianismus im heutigen China werden mit »Lunyü« und »Mengzi« klassische konfuzianische Texte ebenso diskutiert wie die Kant-Rezeption in China. Ist der Konfuzianismus eine Religion? Ming-huei Lee zeigt, dass der Konfuzianismus eine moralische Religion im Kantischen Sinne ist und dass er - im Unterschied zum neuzeitlichen europäischen Humanismus - als Humanismus mit religiöser Dimension verstanden werden kann.

What happens in the mind when we translate? And how does our mother tongue influence our speaking, writing, thinking and translating? In the answer to one question lies the resolution of the other. KyeongHwa Lee has explored both questions using eye tracking, writing process analysis, and a survey of study participants. She can prove that people of different native languages store and process the information of a sentence in different ways. The syntactic structure and the information structure of their respective native language obviously play a decisive role. They influence how we understand texts, how we speak and write, and how we translate from one language to another. Similar sentence structure of working languages apparently facilitates the language transfer process. But the influence of the mother tongue goes far beyond that: it also shapes our thinking.

The present book is a special gift for a special colleague and friend. Defined as an “Unfestschrift,” it gives colleagues, students, and friends of Regina Bendix an opportunity to express their esteem for Regina’s inspiration, cooperation, leader¬ship, and friendship in an adequate and lasting manner. The title of the present book, Reading Matters, is as close as possible to an English equivalent of the beautiful German double entendre Erlesenes (meaning both “something read/a reading” and “something exquisite”). Presenting “matters for reading,” the Unfestschrift unites short contributions about “readings” that “mattered” in some way or another for the contributors, readings that had an impact on their understanding of whatever they were at some time or presently are interested in. The term “readings” is understood widely. Since most of the invited contributors are academics, the term implies, in the first place, readings of an academic or scholarly nature. In a wider notion, however, “readings” also refer to any other piece of literature, the perception of a piece of art (a painting, a sculpture, a performance), listening to music, appreciating a “folkloric” performance or a fieldwork experience, or just anything else whose “reading” or individual perception has been meaningful for the contributors in different ways. Contrary to a strictly scholarly treatment of a given topic in which the author often disappears behind the subject, the presentations unveil and highlight the contributor’s personal involve¬ment, and thus a dimension of crucial importance for ethnographers such as the dedicatee.