The opposition between learning as a process of self-cultivation ("Bildung") and learning as a form of vocational training for the workplace ("Ausbildung") is becoming ever more deeply entrenched in the twenty-first-century university. In language education in particular, the distinction between these two competing aims…

According to Fichte's early science of knowledge, man is a free and independent being who becomes somebody not through the power of nature, by developing his innate skills and abilities, or through external influence, but by his own power. Since the essence of human beings is I-hood, the individual, having defeated the not-I or nature living in…

The contribution focuses on Neo-Confucian texts as collected by Zhu Xi (?? 1130-1200) and Lü Zuqian (1137-1181) and is a look from the "outside", from the perspective of German theories of Bildung ("self-cultivation"). It aims at demonstrating that among other insights that today's readers may gather from Neo-Confucian…