With an inside view from an expert in the field and a clear and engaging writing style, Asian Philosophies, Seventh Edition invites students and professors to think along with the great minds of the Asian traditions. Eminent scholar and teacher John M. Koller has devoted his life to understanding and explaining Asian thought and practice. He wrote this text to give students access to the rich philosophical and religious ideas of both South and East Asia. New to this seventh edition: (...) Added material on Confucianism, including focused coverage of (1) the Analects and society and (2) ren and nature; Additional information on Theravada Buddhism, Vajrayana Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism as well as new in-depth coverage of ecological attitudes in Buddhism; Expanded coverage of ecological attitudes in all of the Asian traditions; Brief excerpts from primary sources to help better explain the key concepts; Added timelines for essential texts in each tradition; Improved Glossary and Pronunciation Guide; Additional text boxes, to help students quickly understand key ideas, texts, and concepts; Updated Further Reading sections. (shrink)

Expanding the scope of existential discourse beyond the Western tradition, this book engages Asian philosophies to reassess vital questions of life's purpose, death's imminence, and our capacity for living meaningfully in conditions of uncertainty. Inspired by European existentialism in theory, the book explores concrete techniques for existential practice via the philosophies of East Asia. The investigation begins with the provocative existential writings of twentieth-century Korean Buddhist nun Kim Iryop, who asserts that meditative concentration conducts a potent energy outward throughout the (...) entire karmic network, enabling the radical transformation of our shared existential conditions. Understanding her claim requires a study of East Asian traditions more broadly. Considering practices as diverse as Song-dynasty Chinese views on mental cultivation, Buddhist merit-making ceremonies, the ritual memorization and recitation of texts, and Yijing divination, the book concludes by advocating a speculative turn. This 'speculative existentialism' counters the suspicion toward metaphysics characteristic of twentieth-century European existential thought and, at the same time, advances a program for action. It is not a how-to guide for living, but rather a philosophical methodology that takes seriously the power of mental cultivation to transform the meaning of the life that we share. (shrink)

Offers a renovated form of Confucian liberalism that forges a reconciliation between the two extremes of anti-Confucian liberalism and anti-liberal Confucianism.

A crucial tenet of virtue-based or expertise-based theorizing about politics is that there are ways to identify and select morally and epistemically excellent people to hold office. This paper considers historical challenges to this task that come from within Greek and Confucian thought and political practice. Because of how difficult it is to assess character in ordinary settings, we argue that it is even more difficult to design institutions that select for virtue at the much wider political scale. Specifically, we (...) argue that the vast majority of proposals that purport to select for virtue are either (a) unlikely to be effective, (b) not implementable at the scale of most current nations, or (c) have already been incorporated into most democratic states. Thus defenders of meritocratic institutions should take more seriously the practical barriers that will almost certainly arise when trying to implement these proposals at scale. Historical proponents of meritocratic values were well aware of concerns about the feasibility of their political ideals, and we should be too. (shrink)

Democracy -- Political participation -- Value of democracy -- Procedure and substance -- Justice -- State coercion and criminal punishment -- Sufficiency and equality -- Humanitarian intervention.

"The book defends the thesis that the concept of self-cultivation philosophy is an informative interpretive framework for comprehending and reflecting on several philosophical outlooks in India, the Greco-Roman world and China. On the basis of an understanding of human nature and the place of human beings in the world, self-cultivation philosophies maintain that our lives can and should be substantially transformed from what is judged to be a problematic, untutored condition of human beings, our existential starting-point, into what is put (...) forward as an ideal state of being. We are to do this by undertaking a set of therapeutic or spiritual exercises guided by some philosophical analysis. The self-cultivation philosophies in India are expressed in: the Bhagavad Gītā; the Sāṃkhya and Yoga philosophies of Īśvarakṛṣṇa and Patañjali; and teaching of the Buddha and his followers Buddhaghosa and Śāntideva. The philosophies originating in Greece, with subsequent development in the Roman period, are the most prominent Hellenistic approaches: the Epicureanism of Epicurus, Lucretius and Philodemus; the Stoicism of Chrysippus, Epictetus and Seneca; and Pyrrho and the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus. The self-cultivation philosophies from China are the early Confucian outlooks of Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi; the classical Daoist perspectives of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi; and the Chan tradition of Bodhidharma, Huineng and Linji"--. (shrink)

Hylomorphism is a metaphysical theory that accounts for the unity of the material parts of composite objects by appeal to a structure or ‘form’ characterizing those parts. I argue that hylomorphism is not merely a plausible or appealing solution to problems of material composition, but a position entailed by any coherent metaphysics of ordinary material objects. In fact, not only does hylomorphism have Aristotelian defenders, but it has had independent lives in both East and West. -/- I review three contemporary (...) hylomorphic theories appeal to ‘structure’ to explain the unity of material objects. Each, however, accepts a controversial principle: that substances can have other substances as proper parts. Such a principle is implausible and severely threatens the coherence of the theory. -/- I begin by showing that Thomas Aquinas’ account of form, which does not accept that substances can have other substances as parts, gives us a more coherent version of hylomorphism. Then I argue Zhu Xi, a Song dynasty Confucian thinker, developed a non-Aristotelian hylomorphism. Unlike Aristotelians, Zhu Xi’s metaphysics was formed in opposition to Buddhist versions of skepticism and gives us reasons to think that anyone who holds a view of objects stronger than Buddhists is committed to forms. In conclusion, I show directly, by appeal to some of those same considerations from Zhu Xi, why it is that all those who believe there are unified material objects will appeal to something like a substantial form. The traditional hylomorphic picture of material composition, then, remains a plausible framework for contemporary metaphysicians – and for good reason. (shrink)

Challenging the popular perception that Confucianism provides mostly a moral defense of political hierarchy, this article demonstrates that Confucianism is more than compatible with democracy and f...

ABSTRACT In order to construct a satisfactory theory of cheng-yi 誠意, Zhu Xi 朱熹 develops an account of how self-deception is possible—a profound problem that has puzzled many philosophers. In Zhu’s opinion, zhi 知 can be divided into two categories: a priori knowing and empirical knowing. The further division of empirical knowing defines three sorts of self-deception: the self-deception caused by one’s ignorance, the self-deception caused by one’s superficial knowing, and the self-deception that may occur when one acquires genuine knowledge. (...) In this paper, I will construct a theoretical model of self-deception that follows Zhu’s criterial definition of self-deception in Daxue Zhangju 大學章句, thereby accounting for the possibility of these three sorts of self-deception. Better understanding of Zhu’s conception of self-deception could, moreover, open fruitful avenues for further work on his metaphysics and moral psychology. (shrink)

The idea of the Confucian sage-king can be politically dangerous if the implication is that anyone can become a sage through learning. But Confucians after the Han dynasty generally saw the task of...

Two controversial cases in Confucian literature present the demands of filial piety as conflicting with those of impartial justice. Let us call them the Case of Concealment (Analects 18.13) and the Case of Evasion (Mencius 7A53). A dogmatic reading of the texts indicates that both Confucius and Mencius give more weight to filial piety than to justice. This essay, however, provides an alternative reading of the cases: the liberal reading. I argue that the Confucian teachers used the cases as moral (...) dilemmas that force Confucian students to learn how to use a cluster of Confucian virtues, including practical wisdom, discretion, and straight determination, under difficult circumstances. The liberal reading views these moral dilemmas as rhetorical tools; they guide Confucian students in meditative exercises and ultimately transform students’ mode of seeing and being. (shrink)

Abstract:Within various contexts, such as politics and parenting, Confucianism has been criticized on the basis that it endorses 'unquestioning obedience' to authority. In recent years, several philosophers have argued against this view by appealing to textual evidence from Classical Confucian philosophers. This article examines Wang Yangming's views on this subject, arguing that Wang teaches that criticism of those who stand in a socially superior role relation is not only permitted, but encouraged. From this, the implications that Wang's analysis has for (...) contemporary discussions of disagreement between epistemic superiors and inferiors and epistemic peerhood are considered. It will be argued that Wang's position is much closer to the total evidence view than the preemptive view. Relatedly, it is suggested that Wang provides a novel proposal about how to recognize or disregard epistemic 'superiors', especially in the context of moral knowledge. (shrink)

Much of the literature exploring Chinese international student engagement with critical thinking in Western universities draws on reductive essentialisations of ‘Confucianism’ in efforts to explain cross-cultural differences. In this paper I review literature problematising these tendencies. I then shift focus from inferences about how philosophy shapes culture and individual students, toward drawing on philosophy as a ‘living’ resource for understanding and shaping the ideal of critical thinking. A cross disciplinary approach employs historical overview and philosophical interpretation within and beyond the (...) Confucian tradition to exemplify three types of criticality common in Chinese philosophy. These are criticality within tradition, criticality of tradition, and critical integration of traditions. The result is a refutation of claims or inferences (intentional or implicit) that Chinese philosophy is not conducive to criticality. While this paper focuses ontypesof criticality, it also reveals a commonmethodof criticality within Chinese philosophy, in the form of ‘creation through transmission’. This resonates with recent research calling for less confrontational and more dialogical engagement with critical processes. However, I also draw attention to examples of confrontational argumentation within Chinese philosophy, which may provide valuable resources for educators and students. Finally, I conclude careful and explicit consideration is needed regarding the types of criticality sought within Western universities to prevent educators and students from ‘speaking past’ one and other instead of ‘speaking with’ one and other in critical dialogue. (shrink)

This article adopts Ernesto Laclau’s notion of empty signifier to discuss Tang Junyi’s uses of the concept oflixing(‘reason’ or ‘rationality’) in his seminal workCultural 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 onlixingand 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 oflixingwith a content that legitimizes his own agenda. Tang could thus authorize his Confucian metaphysics by presenting it as the true content oflixing, 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. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that we can have a plausible account of the experience of practical necessity, namely, the experience that some action is necessitated for someone, by referring to the philosophy of Wang Yangming, a Neo-Confucian philosopher in Ming Dynasty China. The experience of practical necessity, according to Wang, can be of two kinds: general and particular, both having their bases on human nature and related to the fulfillment of the self. I argue that this account fares better (...) than the non-reductionist account and other reductionist accounts, including Christine Korsgaard’s, which explains the experience in terms of the constitution of the self. (shrink)

Yat-hung Leung debates Chenyang Li’s view of harmony and benevolence in Confucian teachings: Which is the more fundamental and important value, and ultimate ideal? In The Confucian Philosophy of Harmony, Li delineates a distinctively Confucian conception of “deep harmony” as the basic ideal of Chinese culture and especially Confucianism. Leung questions that depiction of things, arguing that benevolence does and should hold that place of honor. Leung focuses his arguments against two claims: firstly, that harmony should be understood as the (...) supreme value in Confucian thought, and secondly, that the ideal of harmony is of greater value to us today than that of benevolence. Leung points out that in the influential texts and traditions of Confucian philosophy, benevolence is of higher value than harmony. He disputes both the representative nature of the texts Li relies on as well as Li’s portrayals of some of those texts. We more properly understand Confucian harmony and benevolence in the inverse relation, with harmony as the product of benevolence, and thereby come to see that the substantive action-guiding content of benevolence in fact has the greater value to contemporary life. (shrink)

AbstractThis essay argues for a new interpretation of the notion of “unity” in Yangming’s 王陽明 famous doctrine of the “unity of knowledge and action” (zhi xing he yi 知行合一). I distinguish two parts of Wang’s doctrine: one concerning training (gong fu 工夫), and one concerning the “original natural condition” of knowledge and action (ben ti 本體). I focus on the latter aspect of the doctrine, and argue that Wang holds, roughly, that a person exhibits knowledge in its original natural condition (...) if and only if the person exhibits action in its original natural condition. Moreover, I argue that Wang denies that knowledge in its original natural condition is identical to action in its original natural condition. (shrink)

This article presents a new interpretation of the great Ming dynasty philosopher Wang Yangming’s celebrated doctrine of the “unity of knowledge and action”. Wang held that action was not unified with all knowledge, but only with an elevated form of knowledge, which he sometimes called “genuine knowledge”. I argue for a new interpretation of this notion, according to which genuine knowledge requires freedom from a form of doxastic conflict. I propose that, in Wang’s view, a person is free from this (...) form of doxastic conflict if and only if they are acting virtuously. (shrink)

This article investigates the Neo-Confucian project of “reverse moral economy,” which aims to restore the ideal congruence between political power and moral virtue, by examining a political debate on the selection of the new Crown Prince and the incumbent ruler’s subsequent abdication that took place in Korea during the formative period of the Chosŏn 朝鮮 dynasty in light of the so-called “the Mencian trouble,” a compromise between Mencius’ ideal vision of Confucian virtue politics and his realistic concern with political stability. (...) After discussing how Korean Neo-Confucians were able to justify their choice of a more virtuous candidate in violation of the Lineage Law, which upheld father-son transmission as the constant norm, by judiciously balancing between the candidate’s virtue and the incumbent ruler’s recommendation, it articulates the Korean Neo-Confucian project of reverse moral economy from the standpoint of the constitutionality of the new dynasty. (shrink)

This essay seeks to demonstrate the following: 1. the value of metaphysical cosmology to our relationship with nature, and to making policy about the environment; 2. the mistaken nature and harmful consequences of the hegemonic cosmology of anthropocentrism; and, 3. the possibility of Zhang Zai's Qi/qi Great Harmony cosmology as both the refutation of and replacement for anthropocentrism. The essay concludes that ultimate moral progress of expanding the self from the narrow and exclusionary views of anthropocentrism consists in cosmocentrism, or (...) the transformation of thought to a cosmological perspective as exemplified by Zhang Zai's Great Harmony continual cyclical process of Qi/qi. It is argued that positive metaphysical visions such as Zhang Zai's can negate anthropocentric cosmology and inspire us to view our relationship with the environment in a fundamentally enlightened and more respectful way, which is not arrogantly self-centred, disconnected and supremacist. (shrink)

At present, there is a wide divergence in attitudes toward free speech in countries strongly influenced by Confucianism. Japan, Korea, and Taiwan have fairly robust rights of free expression. Mainland China does not, strongly restricting speech that the government judges threatens State interests. I argue that although traditional Confucian scholars supported many restrictions on expression, Confucian philosophers actually have good reason to want to protect expression about values. Subsequently, I consider how to address the problem of disinformation while preserving this (...) Confucian right to free expression. I focus on the case of Taiwan, as the Confucian state facing the most serious disinformation campaigns from China. The goal of government and civil society actors has been to focus on correcting disinformation while preserving free access to information, though laws do provide for civil and even criminal penalties for intentional spread of false information. As many democratic societies are facing the problem of concerted disinformation campaigns that aim to sow confusion and increase discord among the populace, Taiwan’s successes here are worth studying. Yet the Confucian cultural background means people accept more government involvement in defining what is true and false than may be the case elsewhere, and the right to free speech is less absolute. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 4, Page 568-579, May 2022. At present, there is a wide divergence in attitudes toward free speech in countries strongly influenced by Confucianism. Japan, Korea, and Taiwan have fairly robust rights of free expression. Mainland China does not, strongly restricting speech that the government judges threatens State interests. I argue that although traditional Confucian scholars supported many restrictions on expression, Confucian philosophers actually have good reason to want to protect expression about values. Subsequently, (...) I consider how to address the problem of disinformation while preserving this Confucian right to free expression. I focus on the case of Taiwan, as the Confucian state facing the most serious disinformation campaigns from China. The goal of government and civil society actors has been to focus on correcting disinformation while preserving free access to information, though laws do provide for civil and even criminal penalties for intentional spread of false information. As many democratic societies are facing the problem of concerted disinformation campaigns that aim to sow confusion and increase discord among the populace, Taiwan’s successes here are worth studying. Yet the Confucian cultural background means people accept more government involvement in defining what is true and false than may be the case elsewhere, and the right to free speech is less absolute. (shrink)

What factors shape the movement of systems of thought from one historical-cultural context to another? This paper provides a preliminary answer to this question by constructing an analytic framework drawn from the sociology of philosophy, and it uses this framework to consider the prospects for the contemporary transposition of Confucianism from China to America. The central, though still provisional, conclusion is that while global power dynamics matter, the particular conditions of the “philosophical fields” of both the original and the recipient (...) locations are of primary importance in determining the extent and significance of any particular case of philosophical transposition. Therefore, due to the dynamics of the philosophical fields in both countries, it is unlikely that Confucianism will gain greater intellectual and political influence in the United States. (shrink)

In this wise and creative book, Wright, Warren, and Snow propose a path-breaking interdisciplinary research program that promises to ground a mature science of moral virtue. Their theoretical framework and ideas for measurement are designed to guide psychologists as they study the individual traits that people have, the ways that traits interact or conflict, and the ways they change over time. While lauding the authors’ impressive achievements, I criticize the contentious Aristotelian assumptions they build into their program. I argue that (...) the science of virtue will be better served if researchers restrict themselves to more neutral assumptions and convert philosophically contentious views into competing empirical hypotheses. (shrink)

This essay investigates Dasan Jeong Yak‐yong's (1762–1836) account of human‐nature‐as‐taste, by comparing his commentaries on significant chapters in the Mengzi to Zhu Xi's commentaries. Dasan argues that human nature is understood through giho, taste sentiments and desires, and not as Principle (li). I first introduce Dasan's account of human‐nature‐as‐taste in his commentaries to 3A1 and 7A4. Next, I argue that giho is most appropriately translated as “taste,” because this term captures the dispositional characteristics of giho as a mental faculty as (...) well as its mental effects, such as desires, sentiments, and preferences. I then examine Dasan's and Zhu Xi's commentaries on 6A7 and 6A6, to illustrate how Dasan's view of human‐nature‐as‐taste interprets the chapters differently from Zhu Xi's metaphysical account of human‐nature‐as‐Principle, which Dasan considers as unsupported by the philological and contextual grounds. This exploration of Dasan's empirical account of human‐nature‐as‐taste, serving as a preliminary for a philosophical study of his reinterpretation of the Confucian Classics and his performative account of moral self‐cultivation, will provide us with an alternative perspective to the Neo‐Confucian metaphysic‐epistemic account of human nature. (shrink)

Tian 天 is central to the metaphysics, cosmology, and ethics of the 800-year-long Chinese philosophical tradition we call “Neo-Confucianism,” but there is considerable confusion over what tian means—confusion which is exacerbated by its standard translation into English as “Heaven.” This essay analyzes the meaning of tian in the works of the most influential Neo-Confucian, Zhu Xi 朱熹, presents a coherent interpretation that unifies the disparate aspects of the term’s meaning, and argues that “cosmos” does an excellent job of capturing this (...) meaning and therefore should be adopted as our translation of tian. (shrink)

I am grateful to Dr. Yu Yihsoong for having engaged so deeply with my book Sagehood and its view of Coherence, and to the editor for giving me this opportunity to reply. I am also pleased that Dr. Yu is not hung up on the translation of li as “Coherence”—indeed, he says he likes the translation—but rather argues with the details of what I say about li itself. As I read him, Dr. Yu’s critique of my book has three main (...) aspects. First, he sees that I defend a virtue-ethical rather than a rule-ethical reading of Neo-Confucianism, and based on his sense of what virtue ethics is and requires, this leads Dr. Yu to conclude that I am forced into certain errors of interpretation. Second, Dr. Yu believes that while... (shrink)

I approach this encounter with Joseph Chan’s important work on Confucian perfectionism from a fundamentally sympathetic standpoint. Most basically, I agree with two of his key premises. Confucianism is more than a rich historical tradition: it is a live strand of political theory, able to criticize and contribute to our lives today. But for modern Confucianism to be plausible and attractive, it must find a way to embrace the idea of limited government or constitutionalism in a deeper fashion than it (...) did historically. There are many other issues that Joseph covers in his book, and on many of these I am also in agreement with him. But my interest here is in the grounding of limited... (shrink)

Philosophers, technologists, and pundits are beginning to recognize the deep ethical questions raised by artificial intelligence. So far, attention has concentrated in three areas: how we are being damaged or controlled by profit-driven algorithms, and what to do about it; how to ensure that autonomous, intelligent machines make “good” decisions, and how to define what these decisions are; and how to think about the possibility of artificial superintelligence surpassing and perhaps controlling us. To the extent that theorists have looked at (...) the good that AI can bring, they have tended focus on possibilities for material abundance and leisure. In addition, virtually all of this theorizing to-date has been limited to Western ethical frameworks. Especially given the huge investments in AI presently being made in China, it seems prudent to expand our collective philosophical frameworks to encompass a more global set of ethical perspectives. (shrink)

This paper studies one aspect of the great Ming dynasty philosopher Wang Yangming’s (王陽明 1472-1529) celebrated doctrine of the unity of knowledge and action (zhi xing he yi 知行合一). Wang states that his doctrine does not apply to all knowledge, but only to an elevated form of knowledge, which he sometimes calls “genuine knowledge” (zhen zhi 真知). But what is “genuine knowledge”? I develop and compare four different interpretations of this notion: the perceptual, practical, normative and introspective models. The main (...) aim of the paper is to develop these models in more detail than has been done before. But at the end of the paper I argue that the introspective model is to be preferred over the alternatives. (shrink)

An overview of Confucianism in the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties, which many regard as second only to the classical period in philosophical importance and influence. This piece canvasses the major thinkers and schools, competing views on the metaphysics of li (pattern, principle) and qi (vital stuff), criticisms of Buddhism and Daoism, and debates about the heartmind, virtue, knowledge, and governance.

A sketch of my ethical views, or secular moral philosophy. Emphasis is on stating how it all hangs together.

This paper offers an account of an important type of human relationship: relationships based on shared ends. These are an indispensable part of most ethically worthy or valuable lives, and our successes or failures at participating in these relationships constitute a great number of our moral successes or failures overall. While many philosophers agree about their importance, few provide us with well-developed accounts of the nature and value of good shared-end relationships. This paper begins to develop a positive account of (...) such relationships. In the interest of highlighting some strengths and weaknesses of competing approaches, it contrasts the theories that are proposed by the Confucian philosopher Dai Zhen 戴震 (1724–1777) and the influential moral philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Both philosophers share many of the same core ethical commitments, but as the author shows, Dai Zhen’s approach to thinking about the nature and value of good shared-end relationships is superior to Kant’s because it highlights the fact that such relationships must be motivated by ethically-shaped forms of other-concern and self-interest, whereas Kant does not picture self-interest as an important source of morality or ethically valuable relationships. The author considers clarifications and revisions to Kant’s theory that seem to make more room for the mixture of motives required for good shared-end relationships, but concludes that these ad hoc modifications do not succeed at providing a recognizably Kantian theory that can account for them as well as Dai Zhen’s. (shrink)

When studying historical thinkers, it helps enormously to know on which issues they had philosophically systematic views. For example, if attributing to Mencius the view that all existence is process-like rather than substance-like, it is very useful to know whether Mencius had philosophically systematic views about the (process-like or substance-like) nature of existence in the first place, or whether speculation about this particular issue is more constructive on the part of interpreters. In this paper, I offer a rough-and-ready account of (...) philosophical systematicity, talk about what would count as evidence of this sort of systematicity, and what implications it should have for one's interpretation if one can or cannot provide such evidence. The historical tradition that I am most concerned with is the pre-modern Chinese one, but my conclusions should hold for philosophical interpretations of thinkers of most times and traditions. (shrink)

In this chapter the author defends the view that the major variants of Confucian ethics qualify as virtue ethics in the respects that matter most, which concern the focus, investigative priority, and explanatory priority of virtue over right action. The chapter also provides short summaries of the central Confucian virtues and then explains how different Confucians have understood the relationship between these and what some regard as the chief or most comprehensive virtue, ren (humaneness or benevolence). Finally, it explicates what (...) most Confucians take to be a requirement of all virtues, which the author calls “wholeheartedness,” and concludes by highlighting some neglected implications of the wholeheartedness requirement for ethics more generally. These include reasons for linking conceptions of virtue and human nature, for thinking that good character necessitates that individuals change how things seem to them, and for endorsing automatic as opposed to intensively deliberative judgments and decisions. (shrink)

An overview of Zhu Xi's moral psychology, with a special focus on the metaphysical underpinnings and the relations between heartmind (xin), emotions (qing), and nature (xing). The authors explain how Zhu uses his account to balance the demand for independent standards of assessment with his commitment to ethical norms that virtuous agents can embrace wholeheartedly.