Tradition
Chinese
Chinese philosophy is the thought of China, from Confucius, Laozi and Mozi to the Neo-Confucians, centred on ethics, government and the way of nature.
It took shape in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, when Confucians, Daoists, Mohists, Legalists and the School of Names, among them Mencius, Xunzi, Zhuangzi, Han Feizi and Hui Shi, debated human nature, government and language. Buddhism entered China and was transformed there, and from the eleventh century Neo-Confucians such as Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming built new systems, carried on by Wang Fuzhi, Dai Zhen and, in the twentieth century, Mou Zongsan. It answers questions on how to live, human nature, character, government and nature.
-
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 -
Reading group: Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, from the shack to the land ethic
Leopold's A Sand County Almanac was published in 1949, the year after he died helping fight a neighbour's grass fire. It's short, it's beautiful, and its last essay, "The Land Ethic", is one of the founding texts of environmental ethics. I work…
Started by Anand Kurup5 replies -
Does “wrong” mean the same thing in every language, or does each language build in a moral theory?
In the last year I have spent more time translating the word “wrong” than any other. In ordinary Vietnamese, the word we would use most often for “wrong”, sai, also means simply “incorrect”: a wrong answer on a test, a wrong turn.…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
Mencius’s child at the well, seen from a delivery room in Sylhet
I have worked on a maternity ward for nineteen years. Last month a friend lent me a translation of Mencius, and I stopped at the passage about the child at the well and read it three times. Mencius says that anyone who…
Started by Farhana Akter5 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 -
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 -
Reading group: Sima Qian’s postface and his letter to Ren An
My students meet Sima Qian as a name in a list of Han dynasty achievements. I would like to read him properly, as someone who thought hard about what a historian is for. The plan, three weeks: Week 1. The postface to…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 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 -
‘Killing robbers is not killing people’: the Later Mohists on inferences that fail
One passage in the Later Mohist texts seems to me to belong in any discussion of what predicate logic was invented to handle. In the chapter of the Mozi usually called the "Lesser Selection" (Xiaoqu), the Mohists discuss a kind of inference…
Started by Chen Yuting5 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 -
Reading group: Mencius Book 1, the conversations with the kings
Every year I tell my students that Mencius was a political philosopher before he was a theorist of human nature. They don't believe me, because the textbook only gives them the child at the well. So I'd like to read the opening…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
Reading Nāgārjuna as a dialetheist imports a problem he did not have
I keep running into Graham Priest's reading of Nāgārjuna, partly in his own books and partly in the paper he wrote with Jay Garfield on Nāgārjuna and the limits of thought. On that reading, some of Nāgārjuna's claims are true contradictions: the…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Mencius was unfair to Mozi: impartial care does not mean having no father
I've grown tired of how Mohism is introduced: through Mencius's insult. Mencius says that Yang Zhu's "each for himself" means having no ruler, and Mozi's impartial care means having no father, and that people without father or ruler are beasts. Most students…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Dharma, li, sharia, natural law: four words English keeps flattening into “duty” or “law”
Last week an engineering student in the evening class on Indian philosophy that I help with asked a good question: “If dharma is not duty, what is it like? Is there anything in other cultures that works the same way?” I tried…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies -
Zhuangzi and Hui Shi on the bridge: an ancient argument about knowing what someone else knows
What does this part of the system know about what that part knows? I spent forty years on that question as a railway signalling engineer. I found the same question in the most famous conversation in Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi and Hui Shi are…
Started by Liu Mingqiao5 replies -
The fall of Qin refutes Legalism itself, not merely its excesses
I read Han Feizi mostly to understand why the most effective political theory of early China produced the shortest-lived dynasty. The Legalist tradition, from Shang Yang's reforms in the state of Qin in the fourth century BCE to Han Feizi's synthesis in…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
‘Benevolence’ is a better translation of ren than its critics allow
I've been reading the Analects with D. C. Lau's translation, which uses "benevolence" throughout. I keep reading on this site, and in introductions, that this is a false friend: that ren names a condition of full humanity, not a disposition to kindness.…
Started by Henrike Vogel5 replies -
Why insight does not instantly change behaviour: an Abhidhamma account of knowing and not doing
I read the threads here about whether knowing what is right necessarily moves you, and I would like to add the account I have lived with in twelve years of practice. In the Pali discourses, the Buddha says that intention, cetanā, is…
Started by Nirmala Jayasekara5 replies -
Could a culture reason by different logical rules, or is that a colonial myth?
Every year a student in my lycée class asks me some version of this: "Is logic universal, or is it just how Europeans think?" The history makes the question sharp. In the early twentieth century, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl described so-called primitive peoples as…
Started by Khady Sène5 replies -
The five rulings, from obligatory to forbidden: why the middle categories are not just extra boxes
Standard deontic logic has three basic statuses: obligatory, forbidden, and permitted. Anything neither obligatory nor forbidden is simply permitted, and that's the end of it. Islamic jurisprudence has five rulings (al-aḥkām al-khamsa). An act is obligatory (wājib), recommended (mandūb), permissible (mubāḥ), disliked…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Why did argument appear in Greece, India, China and Israel in the same few centuries?
When someone shows me a pattern I want a mechanism. Granting for the moment that something similar happened in several regions between roughly 800 and 200 BCE, with no documented transmission between them, the explanations I've seen are: Material surplus. Iron-age agriculture…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Heraclitus, Vasubandhu, Zhuangzi, Mulla Sadra: four routes to process, or four destinations?
It is often said that four thinkers, with no documented transmission between them, all arrived at a process view of reality: Heraclitus in Greece, Vasubandhu in India, Zhuangzi in China, and much later Mulla Sadra in Safavid Iran. The convergence is real.…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
The Qin collapse did not refute Han Feizi; the Han dynasty quietly proved him right
I read Han Feizi to understand why the Legalists won, at least for a while. The standard story is a morality tale. The Qin adopted Legalism wholesale: uniform law, harsh punishment, rewards for service, no reliance on the ruler's virtue. They unified…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Reading group: Mozi’s “Against Music” and Xunzi’s reply, with the Analects as prelude
The oldest sustained argument I know about whether art is morally good for us took place in warring-states China, and it deserves to be read in full rather than in a footnote. I propose three weeks. Week 1. The Analects on music.…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies -
Wittgenstein said philosophy “leaves everything as it is”. Is quietism a position, or a refusal to have one?
I translate for a living, and this year I have been rereading a book about the Philosophical Investigations. I keep returning to §124: philosophy may not interfere with the actual use of language; it can only describe it; it "leaves everything as…
Started by Claire Dubois5 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 -
Reading group: the Analects, Books 1–4
After a year with Kant I want to read an ethics built on something other than rules. The Analects (Lunyu) were compiled by Confucius's disciples and their students after his death, and they read more like a notebook of conversations than a…
Started by Henrike Vogel4 replies -
A river is not scenery, and environmental aesthetics should stop treating it like a view
In 2017 the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand was recognised in law as a legal person, Te Awa Tupua. The iwi of that river have a saying: Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au, I am the river and…
Started by Aroha Tipene4 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