Representing tradition: an analysis of Tu Weiming’s Confucianism

Abstract

This paper begins by rehearsing a debate, which took place in the 1980s in the journal Philosophy East and West on whether Mencius was a true successor to Confucius, which has recently prompted a new debate on the topic of tradition and true succession in social epistemology. Rejecting the understanding of tradition in this latter debate as often aloof from the world and as of limited use for the investigation of concrete cases, I turn to the Confucian tradition and to Tu Weiming as one of its current representatives. My interest lies in the ways Tu represents and reconstructs the Confucian tradition and I intend to offer analyses based on two sets of selected English writings asking questions such as: Which textual references does Tu explicitly or only implicitly foreground as crucial to his understanding of the tradition that he is taken to represent? What vocabulary does he use to articulate the contents of the tradition? The paper ends with some thoughts on the question of true succession in Confucianism, stressing the importance of domains of representation and the addressed audiences, in an attempt to enrich the mentioned debates in current social epistemology.