Activity last six 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
- Is a promise to someone who has died still binding if no one living would know?
There is a line in the Analects (1.11) that my students always find old-fashioned: if for three years after his father's death a son does not change his father's ways, he can be called filia…
- 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've had that exact class. What worked for me: after someone says "there's no right or wrong", I wait until someone in the room is treated unfairly (it doesn't take long) and…
- Teaching ethics to fifteen-year-olds: do I water sprouts or straighten warped wood?
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 reminder that Xunzi wa…