Argues that the only way to understand the Confucian vision of the consummate moral life is to take the tradition on its own terms.

This classic and controversial book examines the roots of the idea of virtue, diagnoses the reasons for its absence in modern life, and proposes a path for its recovery.

Ideal for students and scholars alike, this edition of _Zhuangzi _ includes the complete Inner Chapters, extensive selections from the Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters, and judicious selections from two thousand years of traditional Chinese commentaries, which provide the reader access to the text as well as to its reception and interpretation. A glossary, brief biographies of the commentators, a bibliography, and an index are also included.

A record of the words and teachings of Confucius, _The Analects_ is considered the most reliable expression of Confucian thought. However, the original meaning of Confucius's teachings have been filtered and interpreted by the commentaries of Confucianists of later ages, particularly the Neo-Confucianists of the Song dynasty, not altogether without distortion.In this monumental translation by Professor D. C. Lau, an attempt has been made to interpret the sayings as they stand. The corpus of the sayings is taken as an organic (...) whole and the final test of the interpretation rests on the internal consistency it exhibits. In other words, _The Analects_ is read in the light of _The Analects._This results in a truer understanding of Confucius' thought than the traditional interpretation and paves the way for a re-assessment of its importance in the history of Chinese thought and its relevance to the present day world.This volume also contains an introduction to the life and teachings of Confucius, and three appendices on the events in the life of Confucius, on his disciples, and on the composition of _The Analects._. (shrink)

Since the very beginning, Confucianism has been troubled by a serious gap between its political ideals and the reality of societal circumstances. Contemporary Confucians must develop a viable method of governance that can retain the spirit of the Confucian ideal while tackling problems arising from nonideal modern situations. The best way to meet this challenge, Joseph Chan argues, is to adopt liberal democratic institutions that are shaped by the Confucian conception of the good rather than the liberal conception of the (...) right.Confucian Perfectionism examines and reconstructs both Confucian political thought and liberal democratic institutions, blending them to form a new Confucian political philosophy. Chan decouples liberal democratic institutions from their popular liberal philosophical foundations in fundamental moral rights, such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and individual sovereignty. Instead, he grounds them on Confucian principles and redefines their roles and functions, thus mixing Confucianism with liberal democratic institutions in a way that strengthens both. Then he explores the implications of this new yet traditional political philosophy for fundamental issues in modern politics, including authority, democracy, human rights, civil liberties, and social justice.Confucian Perfectionism critically reconfigures the Confucian political philosophy of the classical period for the contemporary era. (shrink)

Offers an in-depth exposition of the Confucian conception of persons as the starting point of Confucian ethics.

Being rude is often more gratifying and enjoyable than being polite. Likewise, rudeness can be a more accurate and powerful reflection of how I feel and think. This is especially true in a political environment that can make being polite seem foolish or naive. Civility and ordinary politeness are linked both to big values, such as respect and consideration, and to the fundamentally social nature of human beings. This book explores the powerful temptations to incivility and rudeness, but argues that (...) they should generally be resisted. Drawing on early Chinese philosophers who lived during great political turmoil but nonetheless sought to “mind their manners,” it articulates a way of thinking about politeness that is distinctively social. It takes as a given that we can feel profoundly alienated from others, and that other people can sometimes be truly terrible. Yet because we are social neglecting the social and political courtesies comes at great cost. The book considers not simply why civility and politeness are important, but how. It addresses how small insults can damage social relations, how separation of people into tribes undermines our better interests, and explores how bodily and facial expressions can influence how life with other people goes. It is especially geared toward anyone who feels the temptation of being rude and wishes it were easier to feel otherwise. It seeks to answer a question of great contemporary urgency: When so much of public and social life with others is painful and fractious, why should I be polite? (shrink)

Philosophy of action in the context of Classical China is radically different from its counterpart in the contemporary Western philosophical narrative. Classical Chinese philosophers began from the assumption that relations are primary to the constitution of the person, hence acting in the early Chinese context necessarily is interacting and co-acting along with others –human and nonhuman actors. This book is the first monograph dedicated to the exploration and rigorous reconstruction of an extraordinary strategy for efficacious relational action devised by Classical (...) Chinese philosophers in order to account for the interdependent and embedded character of human agency –what the author has denominated “adapting” or “adaptive agency” (yin 因). As opposed to more unilateral approaches to action also conceptualized in the Classical Chinese corpus, such as forceful and prescriptive agency, adapting requires great capacity of self and other-awareness, equanimity, flexibility, creativity, and response, which allows the agent to co-raise courses of action ad-hoc: unique and temporary solutions to specific, non-permanent, and non-generalizable life problems. Adapting is one of the world’s oldest philosophies of action, and yet it is shockingly new for contemporary audiences, who will find in it an unlikely source of inspiration to deal with our current global problems. This book explores the core conception of adapting both on autochthonous terms and by cross-cultural comparison, drawing on the European and Analytic philosophical traditions as well as on scholarship from other disciplines, opening a brand-new topic in Chinese and comparative philosophy. (shrink)

This book rewrites the story of classical Chinese philosophy, which has always been considered the single most creative and vibrant chapter in the history of Chinese philosophy. Works attributed to Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Han Feizi and many others represent the very origins of moral and political thinking in China. As testimony to their enduring stature, in recent decades many Chinese intellectuals, and even leading politicians, have turned to those classics, especially Confucian texts, for alternative or complementary sources (...) of moral authority and political legitimacy. Therefore, philosophical inquiries into core normative values embedded in those classical texts are crucial to the ongoing scholarly discussion about China as China turns more culturally inward. It can also contribute to the spirited contemporary debate about the nature of philosophical reasoning, especially in the non-Western traditions. -/- This book offers a new narrative and interpretative framework about the origins of moral-political philosophy that tracks how the three normative values, humaneness, justice, and personal freedom, were formulated, reformulated, and contested by early Chinese philosophers in their effort to negotiate the relationship among three distinct domains, the personal, the familial, and the political. Such efforts took place as those thinkers were reimagining a new moral-political order, debating its guiding norms, and exploring possible sources within the context of an evolving understanding of Heaven and its relationship with the humans. Tao Jiang argues that the competing visions in that debate can be characterized as a contestation between partialist humaneness and impartialist justice as the guiding norm for the newly imagined moral-political order, with the Confucians, the Mohists, the Laoists, and the so-called fajia thinkers being the major participants, constituting the mainstream philosophical project during this period. Thinkers lined up differently along the justice-humaneness spectrum with earlier ones maintaining some continuity between the two normative values (or at least trying to accommodate both to some extent) while later ones leaning more toward their exclusivity in the political/public domain. Zhuangzi and the Zhuangists were the outliers of the mainstream moral-political debate who rejected the very parameter of humaneness versus justice in that discourse. They were a lone voice advocating personal freedom, but the Zhuangist expressions of freedom were self-restricted to the margins of the political world and the interiority of one's heartmind. Such a take can shed new light on how the Zhuangist approach to personal freedom would profoundly impact the development of this idea in pre-modern Chinese political and intellectual history. (shrink)

Harmony is a concept essential to Confucianism and to the way of life of past and present people in East Asia. Integrating methods of textual exegesis, historical investigation, comparative analysis, and philosophical argumentation, this book presents a comprehensive treatment of the Confucian philosophy of harmony. The book traces the roots of the concept to antiquity, examines its subsequent development, and explicates its theoretical and practical significance for the contemporary world. It argues that, contrary to a common view in the West, (...) Confucian harmony is not mere agreement but has to be achieved and maintained with creative tension. Under the influence of a Weberian reading of Confucianism as "adjustment" to a world with an underlying fixed cosmic order, Confucian harmony has been systematically misinterpreted in the West as presupposing an invariable grand scheme of things that pre-exists in the world to which humanity has to conform. The book shows that Confucian harmony is a dynamic, generative process, which seeks to balance and reconcile differences and conflicts through creativity. Illuminating one of the most important concepts in Chinese philosophy and intellectual history, this book is of interest to students of Chinese studies, history and philosophy in general and eastern philosophy in particular. (shrink)

This translation and commentary on Xunzi’s Tian Lun argues against naturalistic interpretations of Tian. Tracing the course of interpretation of Xunzi down to the present, discussing some of the influences that affected how he was understood, and raising questions about some contemporary revisionary attempts, Machle suggests unusual lines of interpretation.

Mohism was an ancient Chinese philosophical movement founded in the fifth century B.C.E. by the charismatic artisan Mozi, or "Master Mo." The Mohists advanced a consequentialist ethics that anticipated Western utilitarianism by more than two thousand years and developed fascinating logical, epistemological, and political theories that set the terms of philosophical debate in China for generations. They were the earliest thinkers to outline a just war doctrine and to explain the origin of government from a state of nature. Their epistemology (...) and psychology provide intriguing alternatives to contemporary Western mentalism. The Philosophy of the Mozi is an extensive study of Mohism that immerses readers in the Mohist worldview, situates the movement's rise and decline within Chinese history, and highlights its relevance to modern thought. (shrink)

Solidly grounded in Chinese primary sources, Neo Confucianism: Metaphysics, Mind, and Morality engages the latest global scholarship to provide an innovative, rigorous, and clear articulation of neo-Confucianism and its application to Western philosophy. -/- Contextualizes neo-Confucianism for contemporary analytic philosophy by engaging with today’s philosophical questions and debates Based on the most recent and influential scholarship on neo-Confucianism, and supported by primary texts in Chinese and cross-cultural secondary literature Presents a cohesive analysis of neo-Confucianism by investigating the metaphysical foundations of (...) neo-Confucian perspectives on the relationship between human nature, human mind, and morality Offers innovative interpretations of neo-Confucian terminology and examines the ideas of eight major philosophers, from Zhou Dunyi and Cheng-Zhu to Zhang Zai and Wang Fuzhi Approaches neo-Confucian concepts in an penetrating yet accessible way. (shrink)

This book is about the necessity, and even value, of vulnerability in human experience. In it, Michael Ing brings early Chinese texts into dialogue with questions about the ways in which meaningful things are vulnerable to powers beyond our control; and more specifically, how relationships with meaningful others might compel tragic actions.

Neo-Confucianism is a philosophically sophisticated tradition weaving classical Confucianism together with themes from Buddhism and Daoism. It began in China around the eleventh century CE, played a leading role in East Asian cultures over the last millennium, and has had a profound influence on modern Chinese society. -/- Based on the latest scholarship but presented in accessible language, Neo-Confucianism: A Philosophical Introduction is organized around themes that are central in Neo-Confucian philosophy, including the structure of the cosmos, human nature, ways (...) of knowing, personal cultivation, and approaches to governance. The authors thus accomplish two things at once: they present the Neo-Confucians in their own, distinctive terms; and they enable contemporary readers to grasp what is at stake in the great Neo-Confucian debates. (shrink)

Is the ancient Confucian ideal of he 和, ‘harmony,’ a viable ideal in pluralistic societies composed of people and groups who subscribe to different ideals of the good and moral life? Is harmony compatible with accepting, even encouraging, difference and the freedom to think differently? I start with seminal characterizations of harmony in Confucian texts and then aim to chart ways harmony and freedom can be compatible and even mutually supportive while recognizing the constant possibility of conflict between them. I (...) shall point out how the Confucian notion of harmony resonates with the Indian King Asoka's project of promoting religious pluralism. Along the way, I will make some comments of a ‘meta’ nature about the kind of interpretation I am offering of harmony in the Confucian texts and the use to which I am putting this interpretation by setting it in the context of societies that in important respects are quite different from the ones from which concepts of harmony originally emerged. (shrink)

Metaphors of adorning, crafting, water flowing downward, and growing sprouts appear in the Analects , the Mencius , and the Xunzi 荀子. They express and guide thinking about what there is in human nature to cultivate and how it is to be cultivated. The craft metaphor seems to imply that our nature is of the sort that must be disciplined and reshaped to achieve goodness, while the adorning, water, and sprout metaphors imply that human nature has an inbuilt directionality toward (...) the ethical that should be protected or nurtured. I argue that all the metaphors capture different aspects of human nature and how one must work with these aspects. There is much in contemporary psychology and neuroscience to suggest that the early Confucians were on the right track. It is also argued that they point to a fruitful conception of ethical development that is relational and holistic. (shrink)

I argue that Dai Zhen’s account of sympathetic concern is distinguished from other accounts of sympathy (and empathy) by several features, the most important of which are the following: First, he sees the awareness of our similarities to others as a necessary condition for sympathy but not a constituent of it. Second, the relevant similarities are those that are grounded in our common status as living creatures, and not in our common powers of autonomy or other traits that are often (...) taken to be distinguishing features of persons. Finally, Dai thinks that when we properly sympathize with others, we value their well-being in a way that mimics the way we value our own. This last feature helps to explain two important claims about the place of sympathy in moral action: that it necessarily requires perspective-taking (at least with respect to most other human beings), and that it provides indirect motives to be virtuous, which even imperfect moral agents can draw upon. In the course of making my argument, I identify salient differences between Dai’s variant of sympathy and some of its closest relatives, including Aristotelian pity and Buddhist compassion. (shrink)

This article spells out a forgotten debate in Confucian ethics that concerns the finer points of empathy, sympathy, and perspective-taking (sometimes called ‘role-taking’). The debate’s central question is whether sympathy is more virtuous when it is automatic and other-focused – that is, when we engage in perspective-taking without conscious effort and sympathize without significant reference to our selves or our own feelings.

The writings of the later Mohists are generally taken to contain several updates to the consequentialist ethical view held by the Mohist school. In this paper, I defend one interpretation of those updates and how they may have served, within the Mohists’ argumentative context, to make their views more defensible. I argue that we should reject A.C. Graham’s prominent interpretation, on which the later Mohists’ argumentative strategy is to develop a conception of the a priori and to ground their ethical (...) view in a form of a priori rationalism. I contend, instead, that the strength of the later Mohists’ ethical view comes largely from their adoption of a subjective criterion for identifying what counts as a benefit within their consequentialist view. I show how the adoption of this subjective criterion fits within a larger trend in later Mohist thought of coming to terms with the diversity of people’s evaluative standpoints, and further show how it equips the later Mohists with worthwhile responses to their philosophical rivals. (shrink)

This article argues that strong versions of the situationist critique of virtue ethics are empirically and conceptually unfounded, as well as that, even if one accepts that the predictive power of character may be limited, this is not a fatal problem for early Confucian virtue ethics. Early Confucianism has explicit strategies for strengthening and expanding character traits over time, as well as for managing a variety of situational forces. The article concludes by suggesting that Confucian virtue ethics represents a more (...) empirically responsible model of ethics than those currently dominant in Western philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter reviews how human reasoning and decision making evolves from the cognitive sciences, challenging basic assumptions of objectivism-rationalism along with ethical models based on reason. It emphasizes the significance of effortless attention in human reasoning and suggests that virtue ethics is preferable to authoritative thinking. By examining an early text from China, entitled “Analects of Confucius,” the chapter demonstrates how effortless attention and action can be developed and incorporated into moral behavior. This text is an important source of evidence (...) regarding the earliest examples of virtue ethic in world literature. These findings also reveal the presence of different human thinking systems that work on implicit and explicit levels, with knowledge operating at the implicit level. (shrink)

Exemplars clearly play a significant role in the ethical vision of the Analects. However, while they are often treated as illustrations of the text’s more abstract ethical commitments, I argue that they are better understood to source those commitments. Such is to say that the conceptual schemata of the Analects – its account of human flourishing, the specific virtues it recommends, and its suggested path for self cultivation – originate in the people the text so vividly describes, in the unmediated (...) experiences of admiration and appreciation that these figures inspire. Theory is here an attempt to take our responses to exemplars and query just why we admire them, lifting from the examples they provide more general observations about virtue. Drawing on Linda Zagzebski’s’s recent work, I argue that there are both sound textual reasons and important prudential reasons to treat the Analects as exemplarist virtue ethic. (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)

Sentimental Rules is an ambitious and highly interdisciplinary work, which proposes and defends a new theory about the nature and evolution of moral judgment. In it, philosopher Shaun Nichols develops the theory that emotions play a critical role in both the psychological and the cultural underpinnings of basic moral judgment. Nichols argues that our norms prohibiting the harming of others are fundamentally associated with our emotional responses to those harms, and that such 'sentimental rules' enjoy an advantage in cultural evolution, (...) which partly explains the success of certain moral norms. This has sweeping and exciting implications for philosophical ethics. Nichols builds on an explosion of recent intriguing experimental work in psychology on our capacity for moral judgment and shows how this empirical work has broad import for enduring philosophical problems. The result is an account that illuminates fundamental questions about the character of moral emotions and the role of sentiment and reason in how we make our moral judgments. This work should appeal widely across philosophy and the other disciplines that comprise cognitive science. (shrink)

In an attempt to bridge the vast divide between classical Asian thought and contemporary Western philosophy, Joel J. Kupperman finds that the two traditions do not, by and large, supply different answers to the same questions. Rather, each tradition is searching for answers to their own set of questions--mapping out distinct philosophical investigations. In this groundbreaking book, Kupperman argues that the foundational Indian and Chinese texts include lines of thought that can enrich current philosophical practice, and in some cases provide (...) uniquely sophisticated insights. Special attention is given to the ethical issues of formation and fluidity of self, the nature and possibilities of choice, the compartmentalization of life implicit in some ethical systems, the variations of ethical demands from person to person, and the nature of philosophy itself as a communicative activity. This study will provide a wealth of information for philosophers seeking a closer knowledge of Asian philosophy and general readers with an interest in Eastern thought. (shrink)

This essay argues against the standard reading of Mencius that the emotions are perfectible or that they require perfecting in order to render a person virtuous. Rejecting this perfectibility reading allows us to explore two interesting philosophical points: (1) we can give an account of moral virtue and moral development that is significantly different from broadly Aristotelian accounts and that provides a psychologically realistic model of the Mencian sage; and (2) this account introduces a conception of emotional engagement as active (...) and under a person's control. (shrink)

There are two broad approaches to environmental ethics. The “conservationist” approach on which we should conserve the environment when it is in our interest to do so and the “preservationist” approach on which we should preserve the environment even when it is not in our interest to do so. We propose a new “relational” approach that tells us to preserve nature as part of what makes us who we are or could be. Drawing from Confucian and Daoist texts, we argue (...) that human identities are, or should be, so intimately tied to nature that human interests evolve in relationship to nature. (shrink)

Ordinary moral thought often commits what social psychologists call 'the fundamental attribution error '. This is the error of ignoring situational factors and overconfidently assuming that distinctive behaviour or patterns of behaviour are due to an agent's distinctive character traits. In fact, there is no evidence that people have character traits in the relevant sense. Since attribution of character traits leads to much evil, we should try to educate ourselves and others to stop doing it.

This ambitious book presents a new interpretation of Chinese thought guided both by a philosopher's sense of mystery and by a sound philosophical theory of meaning. That dual goal, Hansen argues, requires a unified translation theory. It must provide a single coherent account of the issues that motivated both the recently untangled Chinese linguistic analysis and the familiar moral-political disputes. Hansen's unified approach uncovers a philosophical sophistication in Daoism that traditional accounts have overlooked. The Daoist theory treats the imperious intuitionism (...) that alienates critical thinkers as a feature of Confucianism alone. Freed from the view that Confucianism is the core of Chinese thought and from myopic Confucian interpretations, Chinese thinkers emerge as unmistakably philosophical. (shrink)

Is morality rational? In this book Gauthier argues that moral principles are principles of rational choice. He proposes a principle whereby choice is made on an agreed basis of cooperation, rather than according to what would give an individual the greatest expectation of value. He shows that such a principle not only ensures mutual benefit and fairness, thus satisfying the standards of morality, but also that each person may actually expect greater utility by adhering to morality, even though the choice (...) did not have that end primarily in view. In resolving what may appear to be a paradox, the author establishes morals on the firm foundation of reason. Gauthier's argument includes an account of value, linking it to preference and utility; a discussion of the curcumstances in which morality is unnecessary; and an application of morals by agreement to relations between peoples at different levels of development and different generations. Finally, he reflects on the assumptions about individuality and community made by his account of rationality and morality. (shrink)

The debate between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas provides a fresh perspective from which Confucian philosophy may be approached. In this paper, focusing on the Lunyu (Analects), I argue that the sayings of Confucius reflect an essentially 'conservative' orientation, finding in tradition a reservoir of insight and truth. There is a critical dimension to it in that ethical reflection and self-cultivation would enable the individual to challenge particular claims of tradition. However, can self-cultivation transcend tradition as a whole and enable (...) the individual to effect radical change? Following the strategy of Habermas' critique of Gadamer, what happens if tradition is systemically corrupt? In this discussion, rather than taking tradition generally I will focus on the concept of ritual (li) to suggest how the Lunyu seeks to crystallise the wisdom of the past into an ethical guide. The conclusion I draw is in the main a Gadamerian one. Committed to a critical appropriation of tradition, Confucian philosophy seeks ethical renewal from within, on the premise that through incremental change self-cultivation can make a real difference in the quest for moral excellence. (shrink)