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75The Confucian Conception of FreedomPhilosophy East and West 64 (4): 902-919. 2014.Freedom is intrinsic to a good life. An account of the Confucian conception of the good life must include a reasonable conception of freedom. Studies in Chinese ideas of freedom, however, have been focused mostly on Daoism. A quick survey of some fine books on Chinese philosophy shows little result on Confucian freedom.1 In this essay, I argue that attributing a notion of “free will” to Confucian philosophy has serious limitations; it will be more fruitful to draw on contemporary feminist theori…Read more
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62The Fallacy of the Slippery Slope Argument on AbortionJournal of Applied Philosophy 9 (2): 233-237. 1992.ABSTRACT This paper attempts to show that the acorn–oak tree argument against the slippery slope on the personhood of the fetus is valid and William Cooney's attack on this argument fails. I also argue that the slippery slope argument leads to on undesirable conclusion and should not be used as a valid tool in the debate on the personhood of the fetus
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57Xunzi on the origin of goodness: A new interpretationJournal of Chinese Philosophy 38 (s1): 46-63. 2011.This essay explores a seeming mystery in the philosophy of Xunzi (荀子310-238 BCE), namely how goodness could have emerged in a world of people with only a bad human nature. I will examine existing interpretations and present a new reading of Xunzi. My purpose is to reconstruct a coherent view in Xunzi‟s philosophy as presented in the book of the Xunzi rather than defend the truth of his claims regarding human history.
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52Equality and Inequality in ConfucianismDao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 11 (3): 295-313. 2012.This essay studies equality and inequality in Confucianism. By studying Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, and other classic thinkers, I argue that Confucian equality is manifested in two forms. Numerical equality is founded in the Mencian belief that every person is born with the same moral potential and the Xunzian notion that all people have the same xing and the same potential for moral cultivation. It is also manifested in the form of role-based equality. Proportional equality, however, is the main…Read more
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50Review of Bryan Van norden, Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (2). 2008.
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49When my grandfather stole persimmons... Reflections on confucian filial loveDao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 7 (2): 135-139. 2008.
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48The Confucian Philosophy of HarmonyRoutledge. 2014.Harmony is a concept essential to Confucianism and to the way of life of past and present people in East Asia. Integrating methods of textual exegesis, historical investigation, comparative analysis, and philosophical argumentation, this book presents a comprehensive treatment of the Confucian philosophy of harmony. The book traces the roots of the concept to antiquity, examines its subsequent development, and explicates its theoretical and practical significance for the contemporary world. It a…Read more
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47Mind-body identity revisedPhilosophia 24 (1-2): 105-114. 1994.The materialist thesis that there is a type-type identity between certain mental phenomena and certain physical phenomena has encountered serious criticisms. This paper is to propose a revised form of mind-body identity theory which moves forward from the token identity theory and can stand the major criticism made against the type-type identity theory. In the first part of the paper, through a very brief review of the issue I show what needs to be done; in the second part, I show how my solutio…Read more
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42Confucian Ethics and Care Ethics: The Political Dimension of a Scholarly DebateHypatia 30 (4): 897-903. 2015.
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42The Sage and the Second Sex: Confucianism, Ethics, and Gender (edited book)Open Court Publishing. 2000.This collection of essays by noted scholars in the fields of Asian studies & feminist thought sheds new light on the connections between Confucianism & feminist ethics.
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41Understanding Confucian Philosophy: Classical and Sung-Ming (review) (review)Philosophy East and West 51 (2): 312-314. 2001.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Understanding Confucian Philosophy: Classical and Sung-MingChenyang LiUnderstanding Confucian Philosophy: Classical and Sung-Ming. By Shu-hsien Liu. Westport and London: Praeger, 1998. Pp. xii + 273.Understanding Confucian Philosophy: Classical and Sung-Ming, by Shu-hsien Liu, a leading contemporary Neo-Confucian scholar, aims to present the Confucian tradition [End Page 312] from a contemporary Neo-Confucian perspective …Read more
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35A Confucian Solution to the Fungibility Problem of Friendship: Friends like Family with Particularized VirtuesDao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 18 (4): 493-508. 2019.When asked why we are friends with someone, we often point to her good virtues as reasons. If these are the reasons, we have equal reasons to be friends with anyone with such virtues, and we can even replace current friends with anyone with the same or better virtues without substantive loss in friendship. However, it does not seem right that a particular friend is replaceable by just any other person with the same or better virtues. This is the fungibility problem of friendship. This essay outl…Read more
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35Comparative Philosophy and Cultural PatternsDao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 15 (4): 533-546. 2016.As a genus of philosophy, comparative philosophy serves various important purposes. It helps people understand various philosophies and it helps philosophers develop new ideas and solve problems. In this essay, I first clarify the meaning of “comparative philosophy” and its main purposes, arguing that an important purpose of comparative philosophy is to help us understand cultural patterns. This function makes comparative philosophy even more significant in today’s globalized world.
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34Bell, Daniel A., beyond liberal democracy: Political thinking for an east asian contextDao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 7 (1): 99-102. 2008.
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33The seventeenth international conference for chinese philosophyJournal of Chinese Philosophy 38 (1): 166-166. 2011.
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33Missing Links in The China ModelPhilosophy East and West 69 (2): 568-576. 2019.Daniel A. Bell's recent book The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy makes a significant contribution to political theory, political philosophy, and China studies. The book has already drawn a variety of responses, some of which I believe are due to utter misreadings and misunderstandings. It is therefore important for us to spell out explicitly what kind of work we are dealing with here before we dive into other substantive issues. We should not take this book as an a…Read more
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33The Confucian Ren and Care Debate: Reassessment, Development, and Future DirectionsPhilosophy Compass 17 (9). 2022.It has been three decades since comparative philosophers began to associate the Confucian concept of ren 仁 with contemporary Western care ethics. It would be useful to revisit the issue and to reassess related debates. In this essay, I first contextualize this discourse by tracing the emergence of care as a philosophical concept in the West and explicate the Confucian concept of ren in terms of care as it is formulated in classic texts. Then I respond to challenges, including opposing views from…Read more
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31Doing Chinese Political Philosophy Without “Mat Vendor’s Fallacy”Journal of Chinese Philosophy 34 (2): 155-159. 2007.
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30Characteristics of Confucian Rituals —A Critique of Fan Ruiping’s InterpretationDao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 13 (3): 407-411. 2014.In this paper I argue that Fan Ruiping’s explication of the Confucian notion of li 禮 is problematic in several ways. First, his division of human activities into “social” and “natural” is less than illuminating, as human “natural” activities are already inescapably social. Second, I question the appropriateness for him to characterize li in terms of “closed activities,” as some rituals are evidently open-ended. Third, he seems to have overemphasized the constitutive function of li and understate…Read more
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29Confucian Harmony, Greek Harmony, and Liberal HarmonyDao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 15 (3): 427-435. 2016.In this paper I respond to criticisms from Jiyuan Yu, Yu Kam Por, and Daniel Bell on interpreting Confucian philosophy of harmony and on various views of harmony from Confucian, Greek, liberal and global perspectives.
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25The East Asian Challenge for Democracy: Political Meritocracy in Comparative Perspective (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2013.The rise of China, along with problems of governance in democratic countries, has reinvigorated the theory of political meritocracy. But what is the theory of political meritocracy and how can it set standards for evaluating political progress? To help answer these questions, this volume gathers a series of commissioned research papers from an interdisciplinary group of leading philosophers, historians and social scientists. The result is the first book in decades to examine the rise of politica…Read more
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24Organizational identification and unethical pro-organizational behavior: A culture-moderated meta-analysisEthics and Behavior. forthcoming.In recent years, the adverse implications of organizational identification (OID) have received significant attention in the field of organizational behavior research, particularly as it is considered a critical factor in unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB). Nevertheless, the findings of previous studies are inconsistent. To explain these discrepancies, we performed a meta-analysis of 54 independent studies from January 2010 to April 2023, comprising a total of 14,836 samples, to investig…Read more
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24Review of Zhuiqiu kexue jingshen: Zhong-Xi kexue bijiao yu rongtong de zhexue toushi 追求科學精神: 中西科學比較與融通的哲學透視 by Wang Shanbo 王善博Philosophy East and West 49 (1): 86. 1999.At the twenty-second World Congress of Philosophy held in Seoul, Korea, from July 29 to August 5, 2008, a panel was convened to debate the ideas for a "democracy with Confucian characteristics'' in Daniel A. Bell's Beyond Liberal Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). While all participants welcome the attempt to remedy the shortcomings of liberal democracy with Confucian teachings, Fred Dallmayr worries that Bell's political thinking for an East Asian context may "point beyond…Read more
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22Interpreting Confucius: The Aesthetic Turn and Its ChallengesDao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 17 (2): 247-255. 2018.
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22The Sequential Problem of the Eight Human Aims in the Great LearningPhilosophy East and West 73 (2): 326-344. 2023.Abstract:The Confucian classic Great Learning (Daxue 大學) articulates in a sequence eight human aims for the good life. There have been various interpretations of the relations of these aims. This essay problematizes these interpretations and proposes a solution that the sequence of these Confucian human aims is developmentally temporal yet not stage-exclusive. I illustrate such an account by drawing on the model of Erik Erikson's developmental theory. Accordingly, while there is a temporal progr…Read more
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21Truth in Chinese Philosophy: A Commentary on Bo Mou’s Semantic-Truth Approaches in Chinese PhilosophyComparative Philosophy 12 (2). 2021.
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18Education as a Human Right: A Confucian PerspectivePhilosophy East and West 67 (1): 37-46. 2017.Joseph Chan’s Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times is a milestone in the contemporary study of Confucian political philosophy. In this remarkable work, Chan presents his version of Confucian perfectionism, aiming to balance liberalism and Confucianism as a solution to reconstructing a political philosophy in response to contemporary challenges. I am sympathetic to much of what Chan has to say in the book. I agree that, rather than merely being an ethical theory, Confu…Read more
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18Chinese Metaphysics and its Problems (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2015.This volume of new essays is the first English-language anthology devoted to Chinese metaphysics. The essays explore the key themes of Chinese philosophy, from pre-Qin to modern times, starting with important concepts such as yin-yang and qi and taking the reader through the major periods in Chinese thought - from the Classical period, through Chinese Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism, into the twentieth-century philosophy of Xiong Shili. They explore the major traditions within Chinese philosophy, …Read more
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14In Defense of a Conception of Confucian HarmonyPhilosophy East and West 67 (1): 256-266. 2017.It is a great honor to have colleagues engaging in a meaningful discussion of my book. I appreciate my critics’ thoughtful and constructive criticisms as well as exceedingly generous praises. Due to space limitations, I will confine my response to some key issues raised here. I will begin with Yao Xinzhong’s criticism of my claim and argument on the centrality of harmony in Confucian philosophy. Yao reads my view as being that harmony is the central concept or ideal in Confucian philosophy, whic…Read more
Fairfield, Connecticut, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Chinese Philosophy |
Classical Chinese Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Philosophical Traditions |
Chinese Philosophy |
Classical Chinese Philosophy |
Value Theory |