Drawing an analogy between Wang Yangming's endeavor to know ethical truth and Descartes' quest for epistemic certainty, this paper proposes a reading of Wang's doctrine of the unity of knowing and acting to the effect that the doctrine does not express an ethical teaching about how the knowledge that is already acquired is to be related to acting, but an epistemological claim as to how we know ethical truths. A detailed analysis of Wang's relevant texts is offered to support the claim.
In this paper, Mou Zongsan’s (牟宗三, 1909–1995 CE) Kantian interpretation of Confucianism will be surveyed with a focus on Mou’s ideas of moral metaphysics and autonomy. After a brief account of the development of Confucianism up to the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE) and Ming dynasty (1368–1644 CE) (§1) and some initial attempts to articulate Confucian ideas in terms of Western philosophy (§2), Mou’s Kantian interpretation of Confucianism will be presented in §3 and criticized in §4. It is argued that Mou uses the Kantian dichotomy of autonomy and heteronomy to describe the traditional rivalry between two primary schools of Neo-Confucianism. While Mou neglects Kant’s claim that the autonomy of the will gives the principle by means of which it is to determine the content of the moral law, he appeals to Kant’s idea that human beings as free agents are members of the intelligible world to propose a Confucian moral metaphysics. In §5, Mou’s Confucianism’s metaphysical and religious characteristics are further criticized.
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