Comparative Philosophy

“Emotions that Do Not Move”: Zhuangzi and Stoics on Self-Emerging Feelings Abstract This essay develops a comparison between the Stoic and Daoist theories of emotions in order to provide a new interpretation of the emotional life of the wise person according to the Daoist classic Zhuangzi 莊子, and to shed light on larger divergences between the Greco-Roman and Chinese intellectual traditions. The core argument is that both Zhuangzi and the Stoics believed that there is a peculiar kind of emotional responses that emerge by themselves and are therefore wholly natural, since they do not involve evaluative judgment and desire, and distinguished them sharply from emotions, or “passions,” that arise as a result of mistaken evaluative judgments and artificial additions to things as they are, as well as to self-emerging feelings themselves. It is argued that while both Zhuangzi and the Stoics acknowledged the natural and therefore normative status of self-emerging feelings, Zhuangzi assessed them more favorably than the Stoics. The final part of the essay suggests that this divergence can be ultimately traced to different dichotomies that structured the debates in both traditions: rational versus non-rational in the Greco-Roman tradition, and artificial versus natural in the Chinese.

Chen, Fengyuan 陳逢源, Integration and Progress: Historical Thinking in Z hu Xi’s Four Books with Collected Commentaries 融鑄與進程: 朱熹《四書章句集注》之歷史思維

Zhan, Kang 詹康, Contested Notions on the Subjectivity in the Zhuangzi 爭論中的莊子主體論

Reply to C i Jiwei

Early Confucianism is a System for Social-Functional Influence and Probably Does Not Represent a Normative Ethical Theory Abstract To the question “What normative ethical theory does early Confucianism best represent?” researchers in the history of early Confucian philosophy respond with more than half a dozen different answers. They include sentimentalism, amoralism, pragmatism, Kantianism, Aristotelian virtue theory, care ethics, and role ethics. The lack of consensus is concerning, as three considerations make clear. First, fully trained, often leading, scholars advocate each of the theories. Second, nearly all participants in the debate believe that the central feature of early Confucianism is its moral thought. However, these normative ethical theories are logically inconsistent with one another, the third point. The entailment is unavoidable: the majority of scholars of early Confucian normative ethics must be incorrect about their attributions of a normative theory to early Confucianism. It would appear, then, that we need a new dao 道 or pathway for the study of early Confucian moral thought. One alternative is to adopt an immersively interdisciplinary research methodology that pivots on the recognition that early Confucianism is a social-functional system the governing purpose of which is to influence cultural leaders.

Reply to Joseph Chan

Regret and Moral Maturity: A Response to Michael Ing and Manyul I m

Kline, T. C. III, and Justin Tiwald, eds., Ritual and Religion in the Xunzi

Hutton, Eric, Xunzi: The Complete Text

The Limits of Moral Maturity