Learning from Asian philosophy: Chinese versus Western ethics

Abstract

Abstract Over the years I have pursued an interest in classical Asian philosophies that began when, as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I was one of three students in a seminar on Chinese philosophy offered by the great Confucian scholar H. G. Creel. It seemed to me, and has continued to seem to me, that much Asian philosophy raised important questions and provided useful insights that were largely missing from the Western philosophy that was central to my professional training. My interest in Asian philosophy, in short, has been largely in terms of what I could take from it and bring to problems in contemporary philosophy—chiefly ethical philosophy. There is much in classical Asian philosophy that can be used in the way that most teachers of philosophy in Britain and America use, say, Descartes or John Locke: as reminders of problems or lines of thought that we might have forgotten about or ignored, and as suggestive philosophical activity that we can continue, revise, or debate in our own ...