Which political system is appropriate for China in the foreseeable future? In this dialogue between two scholars with different interpretations of the Confucian tradition, Zhang Qianfan 張千帆 argues that political leaders should be selected by means of electoral democracy, whereas Daniel A. Bell argues that they should be selected according to superior ability and virtue. They...
Max Weber remarks that Confucianism was unconducive to the emergence of capitalism in premodern China because it did not foster trust among strangers, unlike Protestantism in Europe. In response, I propose a tripartite division of trust: (1) empirical trust based on observation; (2) precursory trust that is prereflective, not based on observation, but serves as an indispensable...
Despite a plethora of studies highlighting the significant philosophical differences between classical Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism, little attention has been paid to the distinctive characteristics of the latter as a political tradition. Moreover, contemporary Confucian political theory generally derives its philosophical inspiration from classical Confucianism without...
Mengzi 孟子 and Zhuangzi 莊子 lived around the same time in the mid–Warring States period of ancient China. The historical relation between them is unclear. There is no mention of each other in the texts named after them. But some authors have claimed that characterizations of deformed bodies, the heart-mind, and qi 氣 in the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi are directly critical of...
The Jesuit China mission coincided with a sophisticated attempt to place Chinese and Western concepts of human nature in dialogue with Confucianism. The Jesuits believed that they could facilitate evangelization by drawing upon Confucian concepts to explain the soul. In so doing, they and their Chinese collaborators also pioneered a genre of hybrid philosophical texts, which used...
This article argues that a phenomenological notion of “lived body” emerges in the Zhuangzi’s 莊子 critique of the Confucian body of ritual and morality. It also argues that a philosophical account of body cannot be reduced to a Sinological account. This article draws on the phenomenological distinction between “object body” and “lived body,” especially the “three ontological...
The harmony thesis about a virtuous person, widely held by neo-Aristotelians, supposes that someone highly vulnerable to temptation is not virtuous at all. However, is that the only plausible picture of a virtuous person’s psychology? This essay aims to offer an alternative picture by discussing the account of virtue in the thought of Mengzi 孟子 and his conception of moral...
In this article, I aim to explore and demonstrate a specific mode of transcultural philosophical comparison by introducing an innovative theoretical model that I tentatively call the “method of sublation.” Through an illuminating case study centered around Li Zehou 李澤厚, a prominent figure credited with pioneering this method, its profound potential for generating creative...
Our values possess a previously unrecognized distinctive kind of underlying unity. Discussion here begins with moral values, and it is argued that recent approaches like Scanlon’s and Parfit’s run together moral and rational values in an unintuitive way. A defense is then briefly given of a more intuitively plausible moral approach that focuses on empathy, and it is argued...
This article investigates elements of empathy in the Zhuangzi 莊子. It outlines four prominent aspects of current scholarship on empathy: different types of empathy, the other-centeredness of empathy, empathy as a process and the role empathy plays in responsiveness to others, and interaction between empathy and other capacities. Based on materials from the Zhuangzi that involve...
This article departs from a mereological conceptualization of the Daoist metaphysical system in the Daodejing 道德經. I discuss what parthood status applies to dao 道. Whereas it is quite intuitive that you 有—the region of concrete objects—has parthood relationships and compositions (entities made from parts), the other, undifferentiated region, dao, poses a considerable problem...
It is sometimes assumed that the best people—those whom it would be appropriate to admire and emulate—ought to be free of all moral defects. Numerous contemporary scholars have attributed this assumption to the early Confucian philosophers with moral perfection said to be a necessary condition for sagehood. Drawing upon the early Confucian literature I will argue in support of...
The philosophy of Confucius has often been accused of lacking classical definitions of its core concepts. However, as I shall argue, Confucius systematically used nonclassical definitions—to be precise, operational ones. The notion of operational definition comes from Percy Bridgman’s The Logic of Modern Physics (Bridgman 1927) and means that the definiendum is defined by a set...
While researchers have offered remonstration-oriented, reciprocal, voluntary, and gratitude-based accounts of political obligation in classical Confucianism, I argue that these interpretations are either in conflict with the textual evidence or merely scratch the surface of Confucius’ theory of political obligation without fully elaborating its essence. Instead, I demonstrate...