Inspired by early Confucian texts such as the Analects, Mencius, and Xunzi, defenders of Confucian role ethics argue that persons are constituted by their social roles and relationships. However, this has the puzzling implication that persons cannot survive changes in social roles and relationships. This paper proposes ways to understand this claim by appealing to the notions of essence, material constitution, and four-dimensionalism. In particular, it will be suggested that role ethicists should distinguish biological humans from persons and should say (...) either that (i) persons are materially constituted by biological humans, or that (ii) persons are four-dimensional objects that merely overlap with biological humans. There has thus far not been much contact between early Chinese philosophy and contemporary metaphysics in this vein. A secondary goal of this paper is to demonstrate that views in early Chinese philosophy can be examined within frameworks from contemporary metaphysics, and furthermore, that the results include novel theses not yet recognized in contemporary metaphysics. (shrink)

This article examines the reasons early Confucians offer to support the belief that clothing is formative of its wearer’s character, as well as the arguments other early Chinese texts raise to object to it. It focuses on early Confucian discourses about three representative items of clothing, including the cap used in the coming-of-age ceremony, the accessories made by jade, and a style of clothing named shenyi 深衣. These cases demonstrate that, in early Confucian thought, clothing is said to be able (...) to shape the wearer’s character by registering in the wearer its moral symbolism with both psychological-cognitive and bodily means. While this emphasis on symbolism also invites objections that undermine the normative status early Confucians want to ascribe to a specific style of clothing, their discourses still enrich the current understanding of Confucian self-cultivation, in terms of both its method and goals. (shrink)

The present study examines the four core concepts that underpin the various theories of cultivation of East Asian Confucian philosophy: self, cultivation, transformation, and nurture. The discussion is divided into six sections. The first section, the introduction, explains the significance of the issue in question. The second section examines the substantial notion of “self” as expounded in the Confucian intellectual tradition and the corresponding concept of selfhood or personhood. Confucianism stresses that personal selfhood is based on the freedom of subjectivity, (...) and society’s values and norms originate in this freedom of subjectivity. The third section discusses the functional concept of cultivation, focusing on the fact that in Confucian theories the terms “cultivation” and “body” are always combined to form the concept of “self-cultivation.” Moreover, Confucian thinkers tend to discuss the effort of self-cultivation in the context of a body-mind continuum. Indeed, they often use orientational metaphors in order to describe the efforts entailed by cultivation. The fourth section analyzes the linguistic setting and context of the functional concept of transformation within Confucian philosophy of the concrete self. The term “transformation” indicates clearly that Confucian philosophy is a transformative philosophy. The fifth section analyzes the functional concept of nurture, stressing that Confucius’ two greatest followers, Mencius and Xunzi, represent two opposed approaches to nurturing. Mencius stresses that one should undertake the effort of “nurturing qi,” that is, produce culture through natural cultivation, while Xunzi advocates artificially instilling culture in order to discipline, tame, and order nature. Mencius and Xunzi both turn to the container metaphor in their discussions of self-cultivation. The article concludes that the various cultivation activities advocated by these two disparate Confucians are based on two assumptions: the self coincides with the physical body, and the physical self is steeped in and interactive with the cultural values of society. In sum, the functional concept of self-cultivation is an important pillar of Confucian theories of self-cultivation. (shrink)

Offers three Neo-Confucian understandings of broadening the Way as broadening oneself, through an ongoing process of removing self-boundaries.