Holding an Aristotelian Mirror to Confucian Ethics?
نویسنده
چکیده
It is an honor to be part of this book symposium on YU Jiyuan’s splendid book. The best way of repaying the honor, I believe, is to engage actively and critically with the issues Yu has raised. However, in this essay I will only be able to discuss selected aspects of this extremely rich, ambitious, erudite, and inspiring book. I shall focus on three of its most impressive achievements. The book’s first achievement is that Yu has redefined comparative philosophy by doing it “critically” and “philosophically.” He does it “critically” in the sense that both sides of the comparison are subjected to critical examination; neither is regarded as an unquestioned authority. It is one of the book’s strengths that the author is an Aristotle scholar by training, and the book is as much about Confucians as about Aristotle. In fact, as he has made Confucians seem more Aristotelian, Yu’s Aristotle has taken on some Confucian characteristics. Yu also does comparative philosophy “philosophically” in the sense that he tries to discover whether the two ethical systems are true. Yu thinks that it is not enough to have provided coherent interpretations of Confucian and Aristotle’s ethics; he also wants to know whether each of them is true. In other words, Yu is interested in not only getting the right interpretations of Confucian and Aristotle’s ethics but also whether they have got ethics right. In the end he reaches the conclusion that “neither Aristotle nor the Confucians are completely right or completely wrong” (Yu 2007: 6). Yu’s second achievement is that he has given us coherent interpretations of Confucian and Aristotle’s ethics. The first thing a reader would notice about the book is that Yu’s style of thinking can be characterized in Aristotelian adjectives, such as “systematic,” “meticulous,” “patient,” and “perceptive.” But Yu is also an Aristotelian in a deeper sense: he has mastered Aristotle’s method of “saving the phenomena,” as Dao (2011) 10:359–375 DOI 10.1007/s11712-011-9231-4
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