Back to the Future: A Response to Stephan Schmidt

回到未來：對Stephan Schmidt的回應

As you might have learned from your high school debating coach, a winning strategy in that sort of an exercise is to buckle your opponent into an awkward and vulnerable position by putting his view in the worst possible light so that your own ideas might shine with all their elegance and brilliance. That surely sounds good, but it has this drawback: real debate doesn't work that way. You cannot assume that your opponent will not bounce back and set the record straight. In reading Stephan Schmidt's review published in the December 2010 issue of Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies (vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 361-372), the idea of that failing strategy kept popping up in my mind. The book Schmidt reviewed, Humanism in Intercultural Perspective: Experiences and Expectations, is a collection of essays edited by Jörn Rüsen and Henner Laass, and published by Transcript in 2009 as one of the volumes in the Humanism in the Age of Globalization series.