In Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds, Edouard Machery argues that resolving many traditional and contemporary philosophical issues is beyond our epistemic reach and that philosophy should re-orient itself toward more humble, but ultimately more important intellectual endeavors, such as the analysis of concepts.

Li 禮 (translated variously as “ritual”, “etiquette”, or “propriety”) plays a central role in early Confucianism, but its complexity is not always fully understood. At first glance, it may seem as if li behaviors are merely attempts to promote conservative practices from the idealized Chinese past. However, by examining the nature and function of li, as described the Analects (Lunyu 論語) and the Xunzi 荀子 (two key texts in the early Confucian tradition), it becomes overwhelmingly apparent that li is a (...) much more complicated phenomenon. Li actually plays key roles within the interconnected fields of Confucian ethics, religion, and politics and often adds aesthetic elements to these areas of thought. As such, it is as much a source of Confucian innovation as it is a tool for promoting reverence for the past. (shrink)

The early Confucians recognize that the exchanges and experiences of quotidian life profoundly shape moral attitudes, moral self-understanding, and our prospects for robust moral community. Confucian etiquette aims to provide a form of moral training that can render learners equal to the moral work of ordinary life, inculcating appropriate cognitive-emotional dispositions, as well as honing social perception and bodily expression. In both their astute attention to prosaic behavior and the techniques they suggest for managing it, I argue, the Confucians afford (...) a model useful for appropriation in contemporary efforts to address small but potent moral harms such as microinequities. (shrink)

Confucian resources for moral discourse and public policy concerning abortion have potential to broaden the prevailing forms of debate in Western societies. However, what form a Confucian contribution might take is itself debatable. This essay provides a critique of Philip J. Ivanhoe’s recent proposal for a Confucian account of abortion. I contend that Ivanhoe’s approach is neither particularly Confucian, nor viable as effective and humane public policy. Affirmatively, I argue that a Confucian approach to abortion will assiduously root moral consideration (...) and public policy in evidence-based strategies that recognize the complexity of the phenomena of unplanned pregnancy and abortion. What most distinguishes a Confucian approach, I argue, is a refusal to treat abortion as a moral dilemma that stands free of the myriad social conditions and societal inequities in which empirical evidence shows it situates. (shrink)

El presente artículo explora algunas afinidades filosóficas entre el confucianismo y el averroísmo. Se analizan ambas corrientes en su incompatibilidad con la antropología filosófica moderna y, más concretamente, con la noción cristiano–liberal de individuo. Dicha incompatibilidad se examina en tres dimensiones distintas, a saber: una dimensión historiográfica, una filosófica y una genealógica. Se concluye que ambas tradiciones intelectuales ofrecen herramientas conceptuales y hermenéuticas para pensar nuestro presente más allá de las categorías filosóficas modernas.

Recent interest in Confucianism has a tendency to suffer from essentialism and idealism, manifested in a variety of ways. One example is to think of Confucianism in terms of the views attributed to one representative of the tradition, such as Kongzi or Mengzi or one school or strand of the tradition, most often the strand or tradition associated with Mengzi or, in the later tradition, that formed around the commentaries and interpretation of Zhu Xi. Another such tendency is to think (...) of Confucianism in terms of its manifestations in only one country; this is almost always China for the obvious reasons that China is one of the most powerful and influential states in the world today. A third tendency is to present Confucianism in terms of only one period or moment in the tradition; for example, among ethical and political philosophers, pre-Qin Confucianism-usually taken to be the writings attributed to Kongzi, Mengzi, and, if we are lucky, Xunzi -often is taken as. (shrink)

The role of li, or ritual, in Confucianism is a perceived impediment to interpreting Confucianism to share a similar ethical framework with care ethics because care ethics is a form of moral particularism. I argue that this perception is false. The form of moral particularism promoted by care ethicists does not entail the abandonment of social conventions such as li. On the contrary, providing good care often requires employing systems of readily recognizable norms in order to ensure that care is (...) successfully communicated and completed through one's care-giving practices. I argue that li performs this communicative function well and that the early Confucians recommend breaching li precisely when its efficacy in performing this function is compromised. (shrink)

My purpose in this essay is to suggest, via case study, that if Anglo-American philosophy is to become more inclusive of non-western traditions, the discipline requires far greater efforts at self-scrutiny. I begin with the premise that Confucian ethical treatments of manners afford unique and distinctive arguments from which moral philosophy might profit, then seek to show why receptivity to these arguments will be low. I examine how ordinary good manners have largely fallen out of philosophical moral discourse in the (...) west, looking specifically at three areas: conditions in the 18th and 19th centuries that depressed philosophical attention to manners; discourse conventions in contemporary philosophy that privilege modes of analysis not well fitted to close scrutiny of manners; and a philosophical culture that implicitly encourages indifference or even antipathy toward polite conduct. I argue that these three areas function in effect to render contemporary discourse inhospitable to greater inclusivity where Confucianism is concerned and thus, more broadly, that greater self-scrutiny regarding unexamined, parochial western commitments and practices is necessary for genuine inclusivity. (shrink)

This paper redirects some of the philosophical discussion of sexual objectification. Rather than contributing further to debates over what constitutes objectification and whether it is harmful, I argue that aesthetic experience is a useful tool for resisting objectification. Attending to our embodied experiences provides immediate evidence that we are subjects; aesthetically attending to that evidence is a way of valuing it. I consider the human body as an aesthetic site, then as an ethico-aesthetic site, and finally as a site of (...) resistance. In addition to deepening accounts of body aesthetic experience, this paper helps frame human bodies as integral to moral agency, rather than impediments to it. (shrink)

Appeals to human nature in normative inquiry have fallen out of favor among contemporary philosophers. There are a variety of reasons frequently cited by those who see appeals to human nature as deeply problematic: (a) that the notion of human nature, which conceives nature as having a teleological direction, is incompatible with evolutionary biology; (b) that the manifest diversity of cultural values and traditions falsify any essentialist claims involving a common nature necessarily shared by all humans; (c) that appeals to (...) human nature have been frequently employed throughout history to justify the oppression of women and other marginalized members of society; (d) that human nature, if seen as a descriptive account of how human beings naturally are, does not tell us anything about how we ought to be; and (e) that human nature, if seen as a normative account of how we ought to be, lacks explanatory power and cannot play any substantive role in moral inquiry. To fully defend the view that human nature has a substantive role to play in ethics, one would have to address at least each of these challenges. (For a response to such challenges, see Van Norden 2007, 341-50.) Such a defense is not the aim of this essay. Instead, I want to focus on the following question: Are there any good reasons to think that an account of human nature is indispensable for moral inquiry, here conceived as the systematic exploration of the nature of and the connections between such significant moral concepts as practical reason, virtue, and wellbeing? (shrink)