Five years after the publishing of the book The Global System: An Introduction to the World System Philosophy, Zhao Tingyang, from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, brought another exciting and landmark works to the ideological circle. This book, with a beautiful title—Investigations of the Bad World: Political Philosophy as the First Philosophy, represents the Chinese ideological circle and intelligence circle’s latest opinions on political and philosophical issues and tells us how to face and think before “the worst social conditions”. Anyone concerned about political philosophy, the rise of big powers, international relations, world politics, political liberalism, power and rights, or the political and ideological history of China and the world are all ready to join discussions of this book.
Generally speaking, this book delivers three important values. The first one lies with political philosophy, and this subject, as well as politics or the issue of globalization, has developed at an impressive speed in recent years in many aspects including the number of academic documents. The second value is reflected by the discipline nature of philosophy, i.e. what the first philosophy is and how to reason it are basic and preconditioned questions, and which one should be given top priority, metaphysics, ethnics or politics? On the head page, the author quotes Confucius’s reply to Lord Ai from Kingdom Lu on a political issue (Lord Ai: May I ask what the greatest thing of humanity is?), in which Confucius said “the government is the greatest thing of humanity”; and the third value lies in the rise of big powers, which is quite different from general philosophical issues, but if we cannot see the global political responsibility assumed by China and the nation’s developments of dealing with foreign affairs among big nations, and predict and pay attention to the future relations between big nations, we will be unable to understand the book’s far-reaching influence in this respect.
This works can be considered an extension and summarization of Philosophy and Future Philosophy, One or All Issues, Discussion of Possible Life: A Theory about Happiness and Justice, and The Global System: An Introduction to the World System Philosophy. The author creatively combines the different subjects such as knowledge theory (idealism and metaphysics), moral philosophy, politics and political philosophy into the area of political philosophy. Zhao Tingyang’s strongpoint lies in his ability to point out straight from the shoulder the fundamental issue in a certain area. Notably, the book Investigations of the Bad World: Political Philosophy as First Philosophy sums up Zhao Tingyang’s various ideas, which is unprecedented in terms of both form and scale.
As a new nonesuch book, Investigations of the Bad World: Political Philosophy as First Philosophy will prompt lasting attention and discussions.(By Lin Hang)
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