Activity last six months
Debates 5
On the Confucian view there is no self behind your roles, and that is a strength
Calling Wang Fuzhi a materialist hides more than it reveals
Dai Zhen was right: moral principle used to crush desire is itself a cruelty
Knowing without doing is not knowing: Wang Yangming’s strong internalism is simply correct
Questions 2
Discussions 3
Reading groups 1
Recent replies
- The rectification of names, from a translator’s desk: when words and things drift apart
I teach 13.3 every year and I tell my students it is the most political sentence in the Analects. Your last question is the right one. Mencius uses the same logic radically: when asked about a king wh…
- If consent of the governed is the newcomer, what did legitimacy rest on before it?
For the Mencius connection: he quotes an older text saying that Heaven sees as the people see and hears as the people hear. The Mandate of Heaven could be lost by a ruler who made the people suffer. T…
- Mozi was a consequentialist two thousand years before Bentham, and lost the argument the same way
I'll push back on “every sense that matters”. Mohist benefit is not pleasure or individual welfare. It's measured in goods of the state: order rather than chaos, a populous population, suffi…
- I design systems that steer behaviour. Where does my responsibility end?
Wang Yangming would push you harder. For him, knowing and acting are one: to really know that something is wrong already includes the impulse to stop. If you "know" a feature harms players a…
- What exactly is Wang Yangming’s liangzhi, and is it just the Chinese word for conscience?
As a teacher of Taiwanese teenagers, I am happy someone is asking this after the exam rather than before it. Origin. The term is from Mencius, who says that what people can do without learning is thei…