School
Neo-Confucianism
Neo-Confucianism is the revival of Confucian thought in Song and Ming China that joined ethics to a metaphysics of principle (li) and vital energy (qi).
It began in the eleventh century with Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai and the brothers Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, and was systematised by Zhu Xi. Wang Yangming later taught that the mind itself is principle and that knowing and acting are one, and Wang Fuzhi stressed qi. In the twentieth century the New Confucians Xiong Shili, Feng Youlan and Mou Zongsan restated it in dialogue with Western philosophy. It also shaped Korea and Japan. On this site it answers questions on substance, universals, laws of nature and moral knowledge (3.1.3).
Thinkers of this school
- Wang Yangming1472 – 1529
- Cheng Yi1033 – 1107
- Mou Zongsan1909 – 1995
- Wang Fuzhi1619 – 1692
- Zhang Zai1020 – 1077
- Cheng Hao1032 – 1085
- Feng Youlan1895 – 1990
- Xiong Shili1885 – 1968
- Zhou Dunyi1017 – 1073
Guide: Schools of Philosophy: The Main -isms and the Questions They Answer
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I design systems that steer behaviour. Where does my responsibility end?
My job is to shape what players want to do next: rewards spaced so that the next one is always just ahead, social features that make leaving feel like letting friends down, events that expire so you return tomorrow. Some of it…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
What exactly is Wang Yangming’s liangzhi, and is it just the Chinese word for conscience?
I grew up in Tainan and met Wang Yangming in high school, where he was something to memorise: “unity of knowledge and action”, “extend liangzhi”, three marks on the exam. Now I design puzzle games and suddenly find him interesting, because liangzhi…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
Neither filling nor drawing out: what the Analects and Xunzi think a learner is
My students in Taipei memorise the Analects for exams, which means they experience Confucian learning as the most extreme form of filling-up imaginable. I keep trying to show them that the texts themselves say something else. The Analects opens with learning and…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Wang Yangming’s unity of knowing and acting, read alongside Anscombe
My students memorise Wang Yangming's slogan, the unity of knowing and acting (zhi xing he yi), without believing a word of it. Obviously, they say, you can know something and not do it. They know they should study. Wang's reply, in Instructions…
Started by Lin Pei-shan4 replies -
Wang Yangming stared at bamboo for seven days and fell ill. Was he refuting empiricism?
I teach ethics at a secondary school in Seoul, and the story my students remember best from the whole Neo-Confucian unit is the bamboo. As a young man, Wang Yangming tried to put Zhu Xi's teaching into practice. Zhu Xi said that…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
In the five Confucian relationships, friendship is the odd one out. Why is it there?
My students memorise Mencius's list of the five relationships for exams: affection between father and son, rightness between ruler and minister, distinction between husband and wife, proper order between elder and younger, and trust (xin) between friends. They memorise it and never…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Calling Wang Fuzhi a materialist hides more than it reveals
Some older textbooks my students find online still call Wang Fuzhi (Chuanshan) a "materialist". The label comes mostly from twentieth-century scholarship that wanted ancestors for a materialist philosophy, and it has a respectable basis: Wang made qi the sole reality and treated…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Dai Zhen was right: moral principle used to crush desire is itself a cruelty
My students memorise Zhu Xi for their exams, and one slogan of the Cheng–Zhu school always sticks: preserve heavenly principle, eliminate human desires. They write it down without blinking. Dai Zhen (1724–1777) blinked. A Qing scholar trained in the philological methods of…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Is Zhu Xi’s li a universal? What does ‘principle is one, manifestations many’ mean?
I teach ethics at a secondary school in Seoul. Toegye is on the 1,000-won note and my students can tell you he was a Neo-Confucian, but not what that means. This term I am trying to explain li (理, "principle" or "pattern")…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
Wang Chong against the omen-readers: a naturalist in the Han dynasty
Among the classics my father left me is one I did not expect to enjoy. Recently I have been reading Wang Chong's Lunheng, and I think he deserves to be far better known outside China. In the Han dynasty a powerful theory…
Started by Liu Mingqiao4 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 -
Knowing without doing is not knowing: Wang Yangming’s strong internalism is simply correct
Every year I teach my students Wang Yangming's slogan that knowledge and action are one, and every year they treat it as an inspirational poster. I want to defend it as a serious thesis about moral motivation. The usual view, in China…
Started by Lin Pei-shan6 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 -
The Four-Seven Debate: what a sixteenth-century exchange of letters teaches about disagreeing well
My students know Toegye's face, not his argument. This year I tried teaching the Four-Seven Debate not as doctrine but as a model of how to disagree. The basics: from 1559 Yi Hwang (Toegye), already the most respected scholar in Korea, exchanged…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu4 replies