Today historians hesitate to judge collaborators with the Axis powers in World War II, citing the impossibility of putting oneself in the often untenable position collaborators found themselves. Nonetheless, contemporary moral philosophy continues to ponder the ethical choice of complicity versus resistance. Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950?), Korea's most distinguished modern novelist as well as one of its more notorious pro-Japanese partisans during the colonial period, offers a compelling test case for how we might attempt to not only understand, but also morally adjudicate, his support of Japan's occupation of his country. With the ongoing debate over collaboration with the German Reich in mind, I contend that the case of colonial Korea presents us with important first-order ethical issues to resolve.

The discovery in Hunan in 1973 of silk manuscripts over two thousand years old opened a new field of Chinese studies. The find is of considerable value and importance to students of Chinese archaeology, palaeography, textual criticism, history, and philosophy. The Silk Manuscripts of Ma-wang-tui, containing around 120,000 characters, include two hitherto unknown versions of the Lao Tzu and probably the lost “Four Scriptures of the Yellow Emperor.” A preliminary investigation of these texts indicates that they represent a mode of thinking referred to in the Historical Records as the “thought of Huang-Lao,” that was prevalent in China in the second century B.C. and that may have originated in the ancient state of Ch'u. This paper proposes that the thought of Huang-Lao, as a fusion of Taoist and Legalist ideas, articulates a coherent political philosophy that emphasizes the inseparability of the metaphysical foundations of politics and the art of government as a daily routine.

Here's a short version: The “-ism” we invoke when we posit things like “Daoism” was glimpsed for the first time by Sima Tan . (d. 110 b.c.e.), lord grand astrologer (taishigong) to the Han court. His essay “Yaozhi” (Essential points), included in the final chapter of his son Sima Qian's Taishigong, analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of six approaches to governance:

Yinyang ,

Ru (known to us as Confucians),

Mo (the Mohists),

Fajia (called Legalists),

Mingjia (called Sophists), and

Daojia (or Daode , the supposed Daoists).

One aspect of the intellectual upheaval which accompanied the Meiji Restoration of 1868 was the phenomenon of bummei kaika, “civilization and enlightenment.” Although it may be useful to think of the early Meiji years as a Japanese siècle de lumières, it is significant that the country's most progressive scholars derived their main inspiration from such contemporaneous Western social philosophies as positivism and utilitarianism, not the European enlightenment of the eighteenth century. It is natural that the proponents of bummei kaika turned for guidance to John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte rather than Diderot or Rousseau, because their goal was to expose Japan to those urbane modes of thought from abroad which would bring her to the “civilized” stage of development envisaged by European social philosophy. The means to be employed consisted of empiricism, not abstract reasoning: “what we should call the truly enlightened world,” wrote Tsuda Mamichi in 1874, “is when practical studies become popular in our country and each person attains an understanding of truth.” Similarly, Fukuzawa Yukichi took nineteenth century England, not eighteenth century France, as the model for Japan's efforts to achieve “enlightenment.”

It was from the Jesuits that the intelligentsia of Europe learned of the philosophy of Confucius. Many years before their sinophile propaganda had begun to affect the thinking of European scholars the members of the Society of Jesus had determined their attitude towards Chinese thought. It was, in fact, the simplification, to suit their own needs, of an ancient, complex and effective system of religion, ethics, and social philosophy. Faced with the coalescence of religious and moral teachings represented by the son chiao or three cults (of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism) the Jesuit missionaries found it expedient to oppose the social philosophy of Confucianism to the esoteric teachings of Buddhism and the mystico-magical thought of Taoism—creating a purely imaginary dualism in which the two latter were labelled heathen cults and the former was exalted to the position of a noble philosophic system, rivalling, if not surpassing, that of Greece and Rome.

The bharatiya dalit panthers is an organization of Maharashtrian Dalits (ex-Untouchables) who have converted to Buddhism and adopted as their long-range political goal the establishment of a democratic socialist state. The ideology of the Panthers, embodied in their texts and practices, synthesizes threads of Buddhist and Marxist philosophies. Longstanding debates about the supposed incompatibility of Buddhism and Marxism pose questions regarding the conjunction of religion and politics in popular movements, the role of popular texts in constituting ideologies of resistance, and the ways texts and beliefs become transformed into actions.