19 December 2022, 9 am
Akademic Conference Centre
Husova 4a, Prague 1
The participants of the workshop make use of the vocabulary of civilizational analysis, especially as developed in the work of Johann Arnason, to understand Chinese civilization in comparison with its Western counterpart(s), for instance in the discussion of a shared ‘Axial Age’, the continuities and paradoxes of tradition and modernity, the comparative studies of world empires, and the differing ‘social imaginaries’. The latter term refers to the role of our imagination in articulating our world and our place in it. In this way, society is seen as an institution with a network of imaginary meanings. An important question is what sort of meanings would apply to the Chinese context. To what extent do they differ from comparable Western meanings?
