Talk:Bonny Hicks

Approval of article

See Citizendium Pilot talk:Literature Workgroup for comment. Stephen Ewen 03:47, 14 January 2007 (CST)

Uncertain source in reference

In the current version of the article, there is a reference as follows:

Tu Wei-Ming characterized Hick's life and philosophy as providing a "sharp contrast to Hobbes' cynic[al] view of human existence"

The cited source is a bit puzzling, for several reasons:

1) The original essay seems only to be found at http://www.zaobao.com/bilingual/pages/bilingual221298.html, and yet it is attributed as having being published by Harvard University -- I can find no trace of it at www.harvard.edu.

2) The essay itself contains a number of grammatical errors and stylistic infelicities, e.g. "the Harvard University," instead of "Harvard University." and " Hobbes' cynic view of human existence" which should be "Hobbes' cynical view"; the article is credited to Professor Tu and yet refers to him in the third person.

3) I think this essay is more likely written by someone other than Professor Tu, and was published abroad, most likely in Singapore -- we should have a more accurate reference, or a higher quality reference, or the remarks attributed to Professor Tu should be paraphrased rather than quoted, given the uncertain provenance of the source.

Russell Potter 10:32, 14 January 2007 (CST)

Sorry for that bit of sloppiness. The reference source is actually Lianhe Zaobao, which the paper's owner Singapore Press Holdings describes here as "the flagship Chinese daily in Singapore". Lianhe Zaobao is no doubt an entirely legitimate and reputable Singaporean daily. Here is the newspaper's main webpage: http://www.zaobao.com/

The first paragraph of the article is not written by Tu and does refer to him in the third person. It is clearly an intro paragraph inserted by the daily's editor, albeit the page formatting does not make that immediately apparent. The second paragraph begins Tu's article, where the first person begins and is maintained. I would fully expect the entire English version of the article to have a few grammatical problems, given that Lianhe Zaobao is a Chinese language daily. Someone at the daily probably translated Tu's article into English which, by the way, gives an indication of its importance.

I have:

1) Fixed the citation.

2) Simply made the change from "cynic" to "cynical" in the Tu quote, since I think we can safely surmise that if the Chinese version (viewable below the English version at the URL) were translated perfectly it would say such.

Stephen Ewen 18:02, 14 January 2007 (CST)