Wenqing Zhao

What is an emotion? Recent studies of cultural psychology suggest that there is no universally shared way of drawing the boundaries around the domain of emotion. This article extracts, crystallizes, and examines the conception of emotion from the excavated "Xing Zi Ming Chu" (XZMC) text, the most important philosophical work on emotion from early China. This article argues that XZMC presents a philosophically profound way of thinking about emotion, focusing on its normative role, cognitive features, and functional plasticity. Moreover, this article explores how the ancient view offers a critical lens to reassess the prevailing assumption that emotions are first and foremost internal states with phenomenal and/or intentional characteristics. This article highlights the potential for early Chinese philosophy to enrich contemporary conceptualization of emotion and vice versa, suggesting a more cross-cultural approach to philosophizing the category of emotion.

This paper offers a gendered critique of Jason T. Eberl and Matilda Ajibola’s analysis of moral bioenhancement. While they treat the moral subject as a generic agent, I argue that the most obvious real-world candidate for moral bioenhancement is men, specifically with respect to the reduction of violence. Drawing on this gendered perspective, I contend that their analysis neglects the costs of non-enhancement borne by victims, who are disproportionately women and children. I further develop their own Harry Frankfurtian account of first- and second-order desires to show biotechnological interventions could help with the paradigm case of domestic abuse by better aligning the potential perpetrator’s first-order aggressive impulses with their higher-order commitments. Finally, I maintain that any adequate ethics of moral bioenhancement must incorporate an explicit account of the biological underpinnings of aggression and violence.

_Conceptual misalignment refers to the dynamic in which the process of crystallizing ideas and theories from a distant source text in the contemporary anglophone context is accompanied by significant tension, as the original concepts and their anglophone counterparts do not align perfectly. This phenomenon frequently goes undetected or is viewed as merely an obstacle that non-western and/or history of philosophy research projects must surmount to gain relevance in contemporary discussions. Through examining cases from classical Chinese philosophy, this paper aims to elucidate the phenomenon of conceptual misalignment and proposes seeing it not as an obstacle but rather as an important resource of doing philosophy that merits serious attention._.

What is an emotion? Recent studies of cultural psychology suggest that there is no universally shared way of drawing the boundaries around the domain of emotion. In early Chinese philosophy, the abstract category of emotion that superordinates joy, anger, and sadness is sometimes identified with the term qing. This paper extracts, crystallizes, and examines the conception of qing from the excavated “Xing Zi Ming Chu” (XZMC) text, the most important philosophical work on emotion from early China. The paper argues that XZMC presents a philosophically profound way of thinking about emotion, focusing on its normative role, cognitive features, and functional plasticity. Moreover, the paper explores how the ancient view offers a critical lens to reassess the prevailing assumption that emotions are first and foremost internal states with phenomenal and/or intentional characteristics. The paper highlights the potential for early Chinese philosophy to enrich contemporary conceptualization of emotion and vice versa, suggesting a more cross-cultural approach to philosophizing the category of emotion.

The discourse on Confucianism during the early Republican Era has predominantly revolved around debates among intellectuals and societal elites. This study shifts the focus to the grassroots reconstruction of Confucianism undertaken by Wang Fengyi, a peasant theorist, practitioner, and educator who played a pivotal role in the “the Way of the Virtuous” (shanrendao) movement in Northeastern China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wang was a staunch advocator for the education and literacy of peasant women, who occupied the lowest rungs of society. This chapter delves into his moral philosophy of education, which centers around the idea that women’s literacy is a moral issue. Furthermore, this chapter examines the convergence between Wang Fengyi’s gendered moral philosophy of education and the wartime educational ideology and mobilization efforts of the Japanese colonial administration in Manchukuo. This alignment was conducive – during the last years of Wang’s life – to the co-optation of his initiatives by the colonial administration, in their efforts to reach the impoverished underclass in Manchukuo.

This collection offers cutting-edge chapters on themes related to the philosophical work of Owen Flanagan. Flanagan is an influential philosopher in the late 20th and early 21st Century, whose wide-ranging work spans philosophy of mind (especially consciousness, identity, and the self), ethics and moral psychology, comparative philosophy, and philosophical study of psychopathology (especially disorders of self, dreams, and addiction). Flanagan is the author of numerous scholarly and popular articles, and of 10 books. The chapters present proposals for productive interdisciplinary research exploring the mind, ethics, personhood, consciousness, religious cognition, mental disorders, addiction, the narrative self, virtue, the social sciences, forgiveness, or comparative philosophy.

Huang Zongxi (1610–1695) is one of the most important Chinese political philosophers of the seventeenth century. Since the early twentieth century, many prominent interpretations have focused on reading him as a liberal or republican thinker. In this paper, I argue that the similarities that he shares with liberalism and republicanism are superficial at best and ill-construed at worst. Instead, his political philosophy is best read as a distinctive Confucian political moralism. The Confucian moral virtues not only define the conditions under which power is justified but also formulate the common good that the political seeks to express. Moreover, the moral nature of government is congruent with the moral-metaphysical structure of the world. My arguments are based on a close reading of his seminal work on politics and take into account his metaphysics and philosophy of history more broadly.

This essay discusses the tragic news story of a Chinese toddler, Xiao Yueyue 小悅悅, in light of Mencius’ ethical philosophy and modern studies of moral psychology, which help in understanding the problem of passive bystanders that has long vexed the Chinese public. Mencius never said that every person would act to help when a child is in danger; he did not even say that people would feel sympathetic for every child in a real life dangerous situation. He simply asserted the existence of a fragile sprout of sympathy that demands constant cultivation and a proper environment to be grown into actual altruistic behavior. This essay also compares and contrasts Mencius’ theory to the works of Martin Hoffman and Daniel C. Batson and shows some of the ways modern empirical psychology supports Mencius’ understanding of sympathy and altruism