Morality and Religiousness: The Original Formulation

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A symposium on “morality and religiousness, Chinese and Western” would most probably need to recount the historical context and the pristine philosophical formulation of the debate on the problematic relationships between these two terms, which are to be found in the very first transcultural experience between China and Europe launched by the “accommodation” strategy of the Jesuits in their approach to seventeenth- to eighteenth-centuries Chinese elite values and culture. This presentation will deal with the original formulation of the “morality and religiousness” question as applied to the Neo-Confucian tradition, as well as with its repercussions on later developments down to contemporary debates.