Chinese Philosophy

Catalog description

In this course, we will immerse ourselves within the philosophical conversation that took place in China during a period from roughly 485-220 B.C.E., a period in which schools of thought like Confucianism, Mohism, and Daoism originally flourished. As we attempt to understand these Chinese thinkers, we will see a familiar picture of human beings using their intelligence to better understand the world around them and to better pursue the project of living together in that world. Within that familiar picture, however, we will also see human beings living in vastly different social conditions from our own, with a different language and different background assumptions, who therefore pursued some different philosophical questions, and came to a number of different philosophical positions than those held in the contemporary world. Our discussion of these ideas will allow us to touch on numerous areas of philosophy, including ethics, social and political philosophy, moral psychology, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, ontology, and meta-ethics. We will focus on both understanding the ideas of Chinese philosophers in their own context, and on how we might draw on them to solve contemporary philosophical and practical puzzles.