Eric L Hutton

This volume presents a comprehensive analysis of the Confucian thinker Xunzi and his work, which shares the same name. It features a variety of disciplinary perspectives and offers divergent interpretations. The disagreements reveal that, as with any other classic, the Xunzi provides fertile ground for readers. It is a source from which they have drawn—and will continue to draw—different lessons.

In more than 15 essays, the contributors examine Xunzi’s views on topics such as human nature, ritual, music, ethics, and politics. They also look at his relations with other thinkers in early China and consider his influence in East Asian intellectual history.

A number of important Chinese scholars in the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE) sought to censor the Xunzi. They thought that it offered a heretical and impure version of Confuciansim. As a result, they directed study away from the Xunzi. This has diminished the popularity of the work.

However, the essays presented here help to change this situation. They open the text’s riches to Western students and scholars. The book also highlights the substantial impact the Xunzi has had on thinkers throughout history, even on those who were critical of it. Overall, readers will gain new insights and a deeper understanding of this important, but often neglected, thinker.

In a recent essay, Chris Fraser claims that Xunzi has a “purely extensional” theory of terms. This paper challenges that interpretation by pointing to places in the Xunzi that suggest the presence of an implicit notion of intension. Fraser’s evidence is drawn mostly from chapter 22 of the text, while the competing evidence comes from outside that chapter. The presence of such competing evidence raises the question of whether there is a genuine inconsistency in the Xunzi, or whether chapter 22 might be re-interpreted as also incorporating a notion of intension. While I favor the latter view, offering a fully developed interpretation along those lines is beyond the scope of the present essay. Therefore, in the absence of an argument for such a reading, I offer what I call a “compromise” position. Namely, I suggest that the material in chapter 22 is perhaps best understood as not representing the whole of Xunzi’s view of terms, but should instead be regarded as a particular response to abuses of language, and hence that if there is a discrepancy between the views presented in chapter 22 and the rest of the text, that discrepancy need not amount to a contradiction in the text.

Confucian thinkers have traditionally stressed the importance of li 禮, or “ritual” as it is commonly translated, and believed that ancient sages had established an ideal set of rituals for people to follow. Now, most scholars of Confucianism understand li as distinct from law, and hence do not typically discuss Confucian sages as great lawgivers. Nevertheless, I suggest that there is something valuable to be learned from considering the similarities and dissimilarities between great lawgivers and the sages. In particular, this essay reviews some of the challenges for, and virtues of, great legislators, and compares and contrasts these with the challenges for, and virtues of, master inventors of ritual, with the aim of showing how such observations might deepen our understanding of the conception of sages in the Confucian tradition, while perhaps also bringing out certain insights about good lawgivers. I end by using these reflections to point to some challenges for developing rituals to fit our modern context.

This is a Chinese translation of a previously unpublished paper of mine that is part of a larger book project on reading Plato through Confucian eyes. The main text of the paper (minus all footnotes) has been posted online for free at:
https://freewechat.com/a/MzI5OTYyMzEwMw==/2247483954/1

A growing number of scholars have come to view Confucians and other Chinese thinkers as virtue ethicists. Other scholars, though, have challenged this classification. This essay discusses some of the problems that surround this debate, points out shortcomings in some of the criticisms that have been made, and offers suggestions about how best to develop a productive discussion about the issue.

For a free copy of this essay, please see:
http://hutton.philosophy.utah.edu/HFZ.pdf

Abstract: Several scholars have recently proposed that Confucianism should be regarded as a form of virtue ethics. This view offers new approaches to understanding not only Confucian thinkers, but also their critics within the Chinese tradition. For if Confucianism is a form of virtue ethics, we can then ask to what extent Chinese criticisms of it parallel criticisms launched against contemporary virtue ethics, and what lessons for virtue ethics in general might be gleaned from the challenges to Confucianism in particular. This paper undertakes such an exercise in examining Han Feizi, an early critic of Confucianism. The essay offers a careful interpretation of the debate between Han Feizi and the Confucians and suggests that thinking through Han Feizi’s criticisms and the possible Confucian responses to them has a broader philosophical payoff, namely by highlighting a problem for current defenders of virtue ethics that has not been widely noticed, but deserves attention.

Comparative studies of Chinese thought in Western languages tend to privilege Western concepts as their tools of analysis. This essay “flips the script” by using an emotion-related concept prominent in early Chinese political philosophy, wei 威, to examine ancient Greek political philosophy. After tracing the conceptual contours of wei, the essay argues that Plato and Aristotle display awareness of the sort of emotional phenomena referenced in early Chinese (especially, early Confucian) discussions of wei. Nevertheless, those phenomena are nowhere nearly as important for Plato and Aristotle as they are in early Chinese discourse about politics. The essay suggests that this difference derives partly from the forms of government on which Plato and Aristotle focus, but that such an explanation would not—from the Chinese perspective—fully justify such neglect of these phenomena. If correct, that observation highlights a potentially important lesson to be learned about politics, even today’s politics.

During the classical period of Chinese philosophy (sixth to third centuries bce), thinkers developed a variety of views about how one ought to live, and about the role of the arts in an ideal life. Music is a primary case over which they contended, and they offered competing arguments about the sorts of music to which one should listen, whether one should listen to it all, and whether one should learn to perform it. This chapter surveys these debates, focusing on the disagreements between three main camps: Confucianism (as seen in the Analects and the Xunzi), Daoism (represented by the Laozi and the Zhuangzi), and Mohism. The chapter also considers how certain Chinese views might prompt us to reconsider our conception of the categories of “ethics” and “the arts” themselves.

Xunzi’s views on ethics can be approached from at least two different perspectives. One, a more historical perspective, seeks to understand how Xunzi relates to the rest of the Chinese tradition, by way of comparison and contrast with other Chinese thinkers. The other perspective is more philosophical, and is concerned with understanding how Xunzi’s ideas fit together, and what are their strengths and weaknesses. This chapter takes the latter approach, since other chapters in this book cover Xunzi’s relation to his historical context. I first survey the main elements of Xunzi’s ethics and highlight the way that his approach pays attention to rules for behavior, social roles, virtues, and consequences of actions. Next, I offer an account of how these various elements relate to each other in Xunzi’s view, and I discuss some of the challenges involved for classifying his ethics in terms of various well-known forms of normative theory. After this reconstruction, the final section of the essay explores points where people may be inclined to object to his ideas, as well as aspects of his view that may still seem plausible and relevant in today’s world.

Among early Chinese thinkers, Xunzi offers some of the most detailed and extensive discussions of moral psychology. While much of that material appears in his remarks about people’s xing 性 (“nature”) and wei 偽 (“deliberate effort”), several other passages that do not explicitly invoke those notions are also relevant to understanding his views on moral psychology. In this chapter I focus primarily on those other passages, since Xunzi’s conceptions of xing and wei are treated extensively elsewhere in this book. In particular, I first discuss his understanding of qing 情 (“dispositions”) and yu 欲 (“desires”). The second section then analyzes Xunzi’s view of ke (“approval”), which plays an important role in his explanation of moral behavior. I review some of the controversies in the English-language scholarship about the relations between yu and ke in Xunzi’s picture of moral motivation, and I defend an interpretation on which Xunzi takes yu and ke to be independent and potentially conflicting sources of motivation that must be harmonized in order for a person to achieve sagehood. The chapter ends with a consideration of how the demand for such harmonization derives from Xunzi’s views about virtue, and notes some questions raised by his position.

The Xunzi was transmitted to Japan as early as the ninth century. However, prior to the Edo period (1603–1867), few people had read the Xunzi. It was not until the early part of the eighteenth century that Japanese studies of Xunzi began to flourish, namely when an important thinker in the intellectual history of the Edo period, Ogyū Sorai 狄生徂徠 (1666–1728), carefully read and commented on the Xunzi. Furthermore, with respect to Japanese intellectual history, Sorai’s own thinking was also stimulated by the Xunzi. Others, ranging from Edo-period Confucians after Sorai down to recent researchers, have especially emphasized this point, and have believed that Sorai’s thought is just a sort of extension of Xunzi’s thought. With regard to this view, the present essay adopts a relatively reserved attitude, however. To speak of its conclusion first, this essay judges that one cannot say that Sorai’s thought is just a sort of Edo-period extension of Xunzi’s thought, but rather it is the case that, based on “Ming dynasty knowledge” and under the guidance of the methodology of kobunjigaku / guwencixue 古文辭學 (“the study of ancient words and phrases”), Sorai uses the Xunzi to reconstruct “the Way of the sages.” The Xunzi is thus indeed an important text that stimulates Sorai’s thought, but there are many intellectual differences between Sorai and Xunzi that need to be clarified. This essay will focus on discussing these questions. Subsequently, based on this study, it will discuss the development of scholarship on Xunzi in Edo Japan after Sorai.

This is a fully annotated bibliography of works relating to Confucius and the Analects. The bibliography is subdivided into the following 14 major sections: General Overviews, Bibliographies—Western Languages, Bibliographies—Asian Languages, Journals and Series, Concordances/Indices to the Analects, The Life of Confucius, Textual History of the Analects, Translations of the Analects, Commentaries on the Analects, Anthologies of Studies on the Analects, Studies Focused on Particular Concepts and Passages, Studies Focused on General Topics, Comparative Studies, Pedagogy.