Self-Realization through Confucian Learning reconstructs Confucian thinker Xunzi's moral philosophy in response to the modern focus on self-realization. Xunzi (born around 310 BCE) claims that human xing ("nature" or "native conditions") is without an ethical framework and has a tendency to dominate, leading to bad judgments and bad behavior. Confucian ritual propriety (li) is needed to transform these human native conditions. Through li, people become self-directing: in control of feelings and desires and in command of their own lives. Siufu Tang explicates Xunzi's understanding of the hierarchical structure of human agency to articulate why and how li is essential to self-realization. Ritual propriety also structures relationships to make a harmonious communal life possible. Tang's focus on self-realization highlights how Confucianism can address the individual as well as the communal and serve as a philosophy for contemporary times.

Explores Xunzi's thought in relation to the early Chinese philosophical context that relied on the natural world.

What does the Confucian heritage mean to modern East Asian education today? Is it invalid and outdated, or an irreplaceable cultural resource for an alternative approach to education? And to what extent can we recover the humanistic elements of the Confucian tradition of education for use in world education? Written from a comparative perspective, this book attempts to collectively explore these pivotal questions in search of future directions in education. In East Asian countries like China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, Confucianism as a philosophy of learning is still deeply embedded in the ways people think of and practice education in their everyday life, even if their official language puts on the Western scientific mode. It discusses how Confucian concepts including rite, rote-learning and conformity to authority can be differently understood for the post-liberal and post-metaphysical culture of education today. The contributors seek to make sense of East Asian experiences of modern education, and to find a way to make Confucian philosophy of education compatible with the Western idea of liberal education. This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

This book bridges the regions of East Asia and the West by offering a detailed and critical inquiry of educational concepts of the East Asian tradition. It provides educational thinkers and practitioners with alternative resources and perspectives for their educational thinking, to enrich their educational languages and to promote the recognition of educational thoughts from different cultures and traditions across a global world. The key notions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian philosophy directly concern the ideals, processes and challenges of learning, education and self-transformation, which can be seen as the western equivalences of liberal education, including the German concept of Bildung. All the topics in the book are of fundamental interest across diverse cultures, giving a voice to a set of long-lasting and yet differentiated cultural traditions of learning and education, and thereby creating a common space for critical philosophical reflection of one's own educational tradition and practice. The book is especially timely, given that the vocabularies in educational discourse today have been dominantly “West centred” for a long time, even while the whole world has become more and more diverse across races, religions and cultures. It offers a great opportunity to philosophers of education for their cross-cultural understanding and self-understanding of educational ideas and practices on both personal and institutional levels.

The third edition of Ivanhoe and Van Norden's acclaimed anthology builds on the strengths of previous editions with the addition of new selections for each chapter; selections from Shen Dao; a new translation of the writings of Han Feizi; selections from two texts, highly influential in later Chinese philosophy, the Great Learning and Mean; and a complete translation of the recently discovered text Nature Comes from the Mandate. Each section of this volume begins with a brief Introduction and concludes with a lightly annotated Selective Bibliography. Also included are four appendices: Important Figures, Important Periods, Important Texts, and Important Terms. Additional materials, including study questions for selected chapters, will be available on the Title Support Page for this volume on the Hackett Publishing Company website: www.hackettpublishing.com/rccp-support in spring 2023.

Goldin thus begins the book by asking the basic question "What are we reading?" while also considering why it has been so rarely asked. Yet far from denigrating Chinese philosophy, he argues that liberating these texts from the mythic idea that they are the product of a single great mind only improves our understanding and appreciation. By no means does a text require single and undisputed authorship to be meaningful; nor is historicism the only legitimate interpretive stance. The first chapter takes up a hallmark of Chinese philosophy that demands a Western reader's cognizance: its preference for non-deductive argumentation. Chinese philosophy is an art (hence the title) he demonstrates, more than it is a rigorous logical method. Then comes the core of the book, eight chapters devoted to the eight philosophical texts divided into three parts: Philosophy of Heaven, Philosophy of the Way, and Two Titans at the End of an Age. .