Activity last 6 months
Debates 1
Questions 5
Teaching ethics to fifteen-year-olds: do I water sprouts or straighten warped wood?
Wang Yangming stared at bamboo for seven days and fell ill. Was he refuting empiricism?
Is Zhu Xi’s li a universal? What does ‘principle is one, manifestations many’ mean?
Why did Confucian thinkers rarely ask whether the will is free?
Confucius refused to talk about death. Is declining a question a kind of answer?
Discussions 1
Reading groups 1
Recent replies
- Mozi was a consequentialist two thousand years before Bentham, and lost the argument the same way
Mencius's alternative deserves its own credit rather than just being the objection. Graded care starts with family and extends outward, the way ripples spread. It isn't partiality as selfish…
- Langar, the Shabbat table and Confucius’s sauce: what does eating together do?
In Korea the ancestral rite (jesa) is a meal shared with the dead before it is shared with the living. As a teacher I find that this is the one Confucian idea my students understand without explanatio…
- Half my class says they are nihilists. What exactly are they claiming?
I teach ethics to teenagers in Seoul and I've had the same class. What worked for me: after someone says "there's no right or wrong", I wait until someone in the room is treated un…
- Teaching ethics to fifteen-year-olds: do I water sprouts or straighten warped wood?
Thank you all. I am going to the next staff meeting with Brian's argument, which I think is the most practical: our assumptions become the students' environment. And with Chen's reminde…
- One night at the delivery bed, tested against five traditions’ answers to what makes an act right
The Confucian question is role. You were her midwife, not her doctor. Telling her what was wrong, when you didn't know, would have been stepping into a role that wasn't yours and a diagnosis…