A fascinating history of China s relations with the West―told through the lives of two eighteenth-century translators. The 1793 British embassy to China, which led to Lord George Macartney s fraught encounter with the Qianlong emperor, has often been viewed as a clash of cultures fueled by the East s lack of interest in the West. In The Perils of Interpreting , Henrietta Harrison presents a more nuanced picture, ingeniously shifting the historical lens to focus on Macartney s two interpreters at that meeting―Li Zibiao and George Thomas Staunton. Who were these two men? How did they intervene in the exchanges that they mediated? And what did these exchanges mean for them? From Galway to Chengde, and from political intrigues to personal encounters, Harrison reassesses a pivotal moment in relations between China and Britain. She shows that there were Chinese who were familiar with the West, but growing tensions endangered those who embraced both cultures and would eventually culminate in the O
This monograph is a new interpretation of Kant`s temporal conception of the causality of the freedom of the will. The interpretation is based on an analysis of Kant`s primary conception of an action, viz., as a causal consequence of the will. The analysis in turn is based on H. P. Grice`s causal theory of perception and on P. F. Strawson`s modification of the theory. The monograph rejects the customary assumption that Kant`s maxim of an action is a causal determination of the action. It assumes instead that the maxim is definitive of the action, and since its main thesis is that an action for Kant is to be primarily understood as an effect of the will, it concludes that the maxim of an action can only be its logical determination. #12288 Kant`s temporal conception of the causality of free will is confronted not only by contemporary philosophical conceptions of causality, but by Kant`s own complementary theory of causality, in the Second Analogy of Experience. According to this latter conception, causality
The central novel claim of the book is that in the B-Deduction Kant provides a proof of the derivability of each of the twelve categories from the principle of apperception. This goes against the current view that the Transcendental Deduction is not a proof in the strict philosophical sense and the standard reading that the Deduction only gives an account of the global applicability of the categories.