Henry Rosemont

Chinese Philosophy: A Philosophical Essay on the “State-of-the-Art”

Etat actuel de la philosophie chinoise, etude de ses differentes etapes historique, sociologique et culturelle

Family Reverence (xiao 孝) in the Analects: Confucian Role Ethics and the Dynamics of Intergenerational Transmission

We begin this chapter on family reverence (xiao 孝) from the assumption that within the interpretive framework of the Analects, associated, interpersonal living is taken to be an uncontested, empirical fact. Every person lives and every event takes place within a vital natural, social, and cultural context. Association being a fact, our different roles lived within family and society are nothing more than the stipulation of specific modes of associated living: mothers and grandsons, teachers and neighbors. While we must take associated living as a simple fact, however, the consummate conduct that comes to inspire and to produce virtuosity in the roles lived in family, community, and the cultural narrative broadly—what we have called Confucian role ethics—is an achievement; it is what we are able with imagination to make of the fact of association.

Seeking Ren in the Analects

The Analects reports Confucius describing ren differently to different students. This article presents an approach to reading ren through the lens of the particularities of each student in relation to how they discuss ren with Confucius. It argues for not viewing Confucius as a philosopher expounding a single universal virtue of ren that people can possess, but as a teacher guiding his students toward types of contextually appropriate conduct.

Learning to Emulate the Wise: The Genesis of Chinese Philosophy as an Academic Discipline in Twentieth-Century China ed. by John Makeham (review)

© 2014 by University of Hawai‘i Press history of Chinese thinking about spontaneity, but, when coupled with a critique of the circumstances in which certain social groups have been constrained to live their lives, Li Zhi’s edge shows (p. 75–76). In the concluding chapter the author aims to expand the philosophical significance of Li Zhi beyond the late Ming context and places his philosophy of desire in the context of present-day academic thinking about authenticity. Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) is the main reference point here. The author notes that Li Zhi’s and Taylor’s views on the sources of an ethics of genuineness and the role of writing in its articulation are very similar, and adds that the main contribution a renewed attention to Confucian ethics might offer to contemporary debates about the authentic life is “a deep appreciation of the elements of our human nature that are in fact pure and untainted . . . formed prior to our mastery of language” (p. 102). Could a further engagement with the philosophy of language on both sides lead to an elaboration of the nature of this contribution? In conclusion, Li Zhi, Confucianism and the Virtue of Desire draws welcome attention to a central but still enigmatic figure in Chinese intellectual history. The author is to be commended for working across literary, historical, and philosophical boundaries in shedding light on Li Zhi’s historical significance and intellectual legacy. By recovering Li Zhi from the (sometimes contradictory) modernist readings to which he has heretofore been subjected, this book opens the way to a new intellectual history of the late Ming era.

Solomonic Justice, Rights, and Truth and Reconciliation Commissions: A Confucian Meditation*

This chapter focuses first, on the differing and usually conflicting goals of truth and reconciliation commissions; second, how these goals are best achieved by employing the conceptual apparatus of religion; and third, how a Confucian perspective can place the religious dimensions of the work of reconciliation in a secular framework that does not require grounding in any theological beliefs.