Seok, Bongrae, Embodied Moral Psychology and Confucian Philosophy

Abstract

How can Confucian philosophy provide a useful path toward understanding the basic processes of human moral psychology? This is the question that SEOK Bongrae’s new book Embodied Moral Psychology and Confucian Philosophy strives to answer. To the uninitiated, Confucian philosophy will be an unlikely resource, even an anachronism with respect to current issues in philosophy, especially with regard to issues in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. However, a revival of Confucian ideas is taking place, with articles, conferences, monographs, and edited volumes devoted to its relevance to a variety of areas of current philosophy, both analytic and continental. Seok’s book is a fine example from this trend. Trained in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science at the University of Arizona, Seok has turned to the Confucian tradition for insights that can extend our understanding of how the human mind makes moral decisions. Seok divides his book into two parts. The first is a background on embodied cognition and how Confucian philosophy is a natural candidate for explorations of embodiment. The second explores and elucidates particular aspects of Confucian moral psychology and then brings them into dialogue with current debates in moral psychology, specifically, with regard to the character/situationist debate. In the five chapters of these two sections, Seok makes a convincing case for the importance of what he calls situated Confucian virtue. Seok’s problematic lies in the question of how understanding moral psychology from the perspective of embodiment can further our understanding of moral values, virtues, duties, and actions. He is exploring, he says, “the possibility that moral perception, reasoning, decision making, and action are served by embodied processes” (48). So he begins the book with a lucid introduction to several perspectives on embodiment, with explanations of situated cognition, embedded cognition, grounded cognition, enactive cognition, and, finally, adaptive cognition, which he adopts as his own approach. This approach, he says, “focuses on interactive and adaptive relations Dao DOI 10.1007/s11712-014-9411-0