Xingding Liu

This paper defends an expertise-centric account of moral intuition and Confucian sagehood in the Mencius. I argue that we should conceive of sages as moral experts and moral intuitions as intellectual seemings, some of which are expert-like in content and therefore afford prima facie epistemic justification to the moral beliefs that are based on them. Such a proposal rejects an intuition-based moral epistemology in favour of a broadly process reliabilist one. I motivate the proposal by arguing that it allows us to avoid three problems, two of which arise for moral intuitionist readings of Mencius: the problem that such readings posit a mysterious faculty of intuition and that we have difficulty explaining why some but not all relevant moral intuitions epistemically justify beliefs. The third problem arises for both moral intuitionist and connoisseurship readings: the problem that the moral intuitions of Confucian sages are epistemically inaccessible to ordinary people.

How should we conceptualise a philosophical tradition retrospectively defined and continuously shaped by contemporary scholarship? This paper addresses this philosophy-of-historiography question by focusing on Xuanxue, a significant yet underdeveloped domain of Chinese philosophy centered on the corpus of the Wei-Jin (魏晉) Period (220–589 CE) and beyond. Scholarly conceptions of Xuanxue have long been bound by entrenched themes, the ‘Daoist’ label, and rigid periodisation. In contrast, this paper situates Xuanxue within both its historical milieu and the context of ongoing modern interpretations. Drawing heuristically from Wang Bi’s (王弼, 226–249 CE) conceptual interdependence between Name (ming 名) and Actual Situation (shi 實), I propose a new method (HPE) for evaluating Xuanxue conceptions with three criteria: Historical embeddedness, Plurality, and Evolvingness. This research thus offers a philosophically reflexive model for Xuanxue studies and the broader field of cross-cultural philosophy, demonstrating how ancient traditions can be engaged as dynamic intellectual projects.