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  1. The problem of moral spontaneity in the guodian corpus.Edward Slingerland - 2008 - Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 7 (3):237-256.
    This paper discusses certain conceptual tensions in a set of archeological texts from the Warring States period, the Guodian corpus. One of the central themes of the Guodian corpus is the disanalogy between spontaneous, natural familial relationships and artificial political relationships. This is problematic because, like many early Chinese texts, the Guodian corpus believes that political relationships must come to be characterized by unselfconsciousness and spontaneity if social order is to prevail. This tension will be compared to my earlier work (...)
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  • The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics.Edward Slingerland - 2011 - Ethics 121 (2):390-419.
    This article argues that strong versions of the situationist critique of virtue ethics are empirically and conceptually unfounded, as well as that, even if one accepts that the predictive power of character may be limited, this is not a fatal problem for early Confucian virtue ethics. Early Confucianism has explicit strategies for strengthening and expanding character traits over time, as well as for managing a variety of situational forces. The article concludes by suggesting that Confucian virtue ethics represents a more (...)
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  • Trying not to try.Edward Gilman Slingerland - 2014 - Edinburgh: Canongate.
    Explores "why we find spontaneity so elusive and shows how early Chinese philosophy points the way to happier, more authentic lives"--Dust jacket flap.
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  • Metaphor and Meaning in Early China.Edward Slingerland - 2011 - Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 10 (1):1-30.
    Western scholarship on early Chinese thought has tended to either dismiss the foundational role of metaphor or to see it as a uniquely Chinese mode of apprehending the world. This article argues that, while human cognition is in fact profoundly dependent on imagistic conceptual structures, such dependence is by no means a unique feature of Chinese thought. The article reviews empirical evidence supporting the claims that human thought is fundamentally imagistic; that sensorimotor schemas are often used to structure our understanding (...)
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  • "The Tenuous Self: Wu-wei in the Zhuangzi.Edward Gilman Slingerland - 2003 - In Effortless action: Wu-wei as conceptual metaphor and spiritual ideal in early China. New York: Oxford University Press.
    This book presents a systematic account of the role of the personal spiritual ideal of wu-wei--literally "no doing," but better rendered as "effortless action"--in early Chinese thought. Edward Slingerland's analysis shows that wu-wei represents the most general of a set of conceptual metaphors having to do with a state of effortless ease and unself-consciousness. This concept of effortlessness, he contends, serves as a common ideal for both Daoist and Confucian thinkers. He also argues that this concept contains within itself a (...)
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  • Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior.John M. Doris - 2002 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    This book is a provocative contribution to contemporary ethical theory challenging foundational conceptions of character that date back to Aristotle. John Doris draws on behavioral science, especially social psychology, to argue that we misattribute the causes of behavior to personality traits and other fixed aspects of character rather than to the situational context. More often than not it is the situation not the nature of the personality that really counts. The author elaborates the philosophical consequences of this research for a (...)
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  • Confucian Moral Self Cultivation.Philip J. Ivanhoe - 2000 - Hackett Publishing Company.
    A concise and accessible introduction to the evolution of the concept of moral self-cultivation in the Chinese Confucian tradition, this volume begins with an explanation of the pre-philosophical development of ideas central to this concept, followed by an examination of the specific treatment of self cultivation in the philosophy of Kongzi ("Confucius"), Mengzi ("Mencius"), Xunzi, Zhu Xi, Wang Yangming, Yan Yuan and Dai Zhen. In addition to providing a survey of the views of some of the most influential Confucian thinkers (...)
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  • The paradox of wuwei?Philip J. Ivanhoe - 2007 - Journal of Chinese Philosophy 34 (2):277–287.
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  • Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error.Gilbert Harman - 1999 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99 (1999):315-331.
    Ordinary moral thought often commits what social psychologists call 'the fundamental attribution error '. This is the error of ignoring situational factors and overconfidently assuming that distinctive behaviour or patterns of behaviour are due to an agent's distinctive character traits. In fact, there is no evidence that people have character traits in the relevant sense. Since attribution of character traits leads to much evil, we should try to educate ourselves and others to stop doing it.
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  • Confucian Moral Self Cultivation.Richard Garner & Philip J. Ivanhoe - 1999 - Philosophy East and West 49 (4):533.
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