Writing Philosophy from the Periphery: Lixing as Foundational Empty Signifier in Tang Junyi’s Cultural Consciousness and Moral Reason
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article adopts Ernesto Laclau’s notion of empty signifier to discuss Tang Junyi’s uses of the concept of lixing (‘reason’ or ‘rationality’) in his seminal work Cultural Consciousness and Moral Reason (文化意識與道德理性; 1958). My dual goal, in doing so, is to bring to light the relations of power constitutive of the text’s discourse on lixing and relate them to the problematic of writing philosophy from the periphery. I argue that in this work, lixing ’s dual referents—as a translation of ‘reason’ and as denoting a Neo-Confucian faculty to intuit moral truths—allow Tang to inscribe himself in a philosophical field designed to exclude non-Western philosophies, while at the same time enabling him to symbolically relegate Euro-American philosophy to a peripheral position by filling in the notion of lixing with a content that legitimizes his own agenda. Tang could thus authorize his Confucian metaphysics by presenting it as the true content of lixing , understood not only as a universal faculty enabling humanity’s access to all that is universal, but also as a condition sine qua non of for one’s inclusion in the philosophical game. By attempting to co-opt the empty signifier ( lixing /reason) for his own purposes, I argue Tang employs one of two possible strategies that can be adopted by those situated at the periphery in order to oppose the hegemon; one that leaves the structure of power relations intact but working in favor of the periphery.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it