School
Confucianism
Confucianism is the Chinese ethical and political tradition founded on the teachings of Confucius, centred on humaneness, ritual and learning.
It began with Confucius (551–479 BCE) and was developed by Mencius, who held that human nature is good, and Xunzi, who held that it must be shaped by ritual and education. Dong Zhongshu helped make it the official teaching of the Han dynasty, Zhu Xi reworked it in the Song, and Dai Zhen criticised that reworking in the Qing. It spread to Korea and Japan through thinkers such as Yi Hwang (Toegye) and Ogyū Sorai. On this site it answers questions on how to live, character (3.2.3), moral psychology and government.
Thinkers of this school
- Confucius551 – 479 BCE
- Menciustrad. c. 372 – 289 BCE
- Xunzic. 310 – after 238 BCE
- Dai Zhen1724 – 1777
- Ogyū Sorai1666 – 1728
- Dong Zhongshu179 – 104 BCE
Guide: Schools of Philosophy: The Main -isms and the Questions They Answer
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Filial duty, but whose? In most families I know, the daughter-in-law pays it
In my family, and in almost every family I know, when parents grow old the care is done by a woman who is not their daughter. The son has the duty; the son's wife does the work. Nobody says this out loud.…
Started by Thamarai Raman2 replies -
My mother forwards health rumours to the family group. Is correcting her a duty or a disrespect?
My mother is seventy-one and sharp. She is also the main source of health rumours in our family WhatsApp group: lemon water that cures this, a vaccine that causes that, a "doctor in Singapore" who says something terrifying. Each forward comes with…
Started by Nur Aisyah Rahman5 replies -
Is a promise to someone who has died still binding if no one living would know?
Before she died, my husband's grandmother made me promise that the recipe for our bakery's bread would stay in the family. It is not a secret of state. It is flour, water, salt, a little of something, and the way you fold…
Started by Dilnoza Karimova4 replies -
What were Mencius and Xunzi arguing about when they disagreed about human nature?
I'm writing an essay comparing moral development theories, and my tutor suggested the debate between Mencius and Xunzi as a classical example. I understand Mencius said human nature is good and Xunzi said it is bad, but I've read that this is…
Started by Elif Yıldız2 replies -
Teaching ethics to fifteen-year-olds: do I water sprouts or straighten warped wood?
Our school is arguing about a new behaviour policy, and I realised the argument is the old one between Mencius and Xunzi. Mencius says anyone who sees a child about to fall into a well feels alarm and compassion, before any calculation.…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
When sovereignty belongs to God, are rulers more limited or less?
Hebrew and Arabic, the two languages I work between, carry traditions that both, at various points, said that sovereignty ultimately belongs to God. I've noticed that the same premise has been used to reach opposite conclusions. In 1 Samuel 8 the people…
Started by Tal Rosen5 replies -
Where do Ubuntu and Confucian role ethics fit, if they are neither utilitarian, Kantian nor virtue ethics?
I teach capoeira Angola in Salvador, and I am new to academic ethics. In a free course online, the lecturer said there are three main moral theories: consequences, duties and virtues. Then, in a footnote, she said Ubuntu and Confucian ethics “don't…
Started by Jorge Bonfim4 replies -
Adab, li and hexis: is character trained the same way in three traditions?
When a girl comes to learn batik in my mother's workshop, she doesn't begin by drawing. She begins by preparing cloth, heating wax, watching. She learns how to sit, how to hold the canting, how to speak to the older women. After…
Started by Ratna WulandariAnswer first (no replies yet) -
If virtue ethics says ‘do what the virtuous person would do’, how does a beginner use that?
Reading Aristotle slowly, with a pencil, I have hit something that bothers me. I suspect it is a beginner's worry, so forgive me. The summaries I have read say virtue ethics tells you to act as a virtuous person would act in…
Started by Gerrit Venter5 replies -
Why do some translators refuse to render ren as ‘benevolence’?
This question came to me through my work. A French colleague asked me why English translations of the Analects disagree so much about the word 仁, ren: Legge often has "perfect virtue", D. C. Lau "benevolence", Waley and Slingerland "Goodness", others "humaneness",…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
What is music for? Xunzi, Plato and my parish choir
I play the organ at a parish church in Kraków and teach music theory at a secondary school. Every Sunday I see music do something to a congregation that a sermon can't, and I want to know what philosophers have thought that…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 replies -
Can technomoral virtues be cultivated the way Confucian ones are, or is the borrowing too loose?
My students spend most of their waking lives on their phones, so Shannon Vallor's Technology and the Virtues (2016) caught my attention. She argues that rules and impact assessments cannot keep up with technologies that change every year, and that what we…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Did classical Chinese philosophers have a concept of truth, or only of the “admissible”?
This question sits at the centre of my reading of the Later Mohist canons, and I would welcome other views. In 1985 Chad Hansen published an influential paper arguing, roughly, that classical Chinese philosophy did not use a semantic concept of truth,…
Started by Chen Yuting6 replies -
“You are your relationships”: is that Confucius, or a modern reading of him?
I'm a retired teacher reading the Analects slowly with a commentary, and I keep meeting a claim in the secondary literature that I can't quite find in the text. The claim, associated with Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont and their "role ethics",…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies -
Why did Confucian thinkers rarely ask whether the will is free?
A colleague who teaches European philosophy asked me what the Confucians said about free will versus determinism. I realised I had nothing to give him. The tradition talks constantly about effort and cultivation. Xunzi says goodness is the product of deliberate effort.…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
Xunzi says the sages invented ritual and rightness. Does that make him a moral anti-realist?
I came to Xunzi through the debate with Mencius about human nature. That debate is usually told as optimism against pessimism: Mencius thinks we are born with the sprouts of goodness, Xunzi thinks our nature is crooked and goodness comes from deliberate…
Started by Elif Yıldız5 replies -
Confucius refused to talk about death. Is declining a question a kind of answer?
In Book 11 of the Analects, the disciple Zilu asks how to serve ghosts and spirits. Confucius says: you are not yet able to serve people, how could you serve spirits? Zilu asks about death. Confucius replies: you do not yet understand…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu6 replies -
Does Sunzi have an ethics of war, or only an economics of it?
We read The Art of War in the army as a manual, which is how most soldiers meet it. Rereading it in retirement, I am struck by how much of it counsels restraint. It opens by calling war a matter of life…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun4 replies -
Xunzi on “obsession” and modern cognitive bias: the same diagnosis of irrationality?
I study psychology, and this term we covered heuristics and biases: anchoring, availability, confirmation bias, all the ways judgement goes systematically wrong. In the same month I read the chapter of the Xunzi usually translated "Dispelling Obsession" or "Undoing Fixation", and I…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies