Antionio Cua. Conceptual Analysus of Confucian Ethics

Abstract

Antonio Cua’s work represents strongly the conceptual analysis approach to today’s study of Chinese philosophy, in particular that of Confucian ethics. In many of his publications, he has dealt with Confucian ethical key concepts, such as humanity (ren) ( ), rightness (yi) ( ), ritual or propriety (li) ( ), shame (chi) ( ), paradigmatic individual ( junzi) ( ), etc., in Confucian ethics and he always approaches them in a way to put them under philosophical explication. Cua understands “explication” as “an activity aiming at the elucidation of notions and distinctions within the context of philosophical problems.”As I see it, this philosophical method is not an isolated invention of Antonio Cua as a modern Chinese scholar. In fact, it has its historical background long before the impact of analytical philosophy in China. My reading of the history of Chinese philosophy is therefore quite different from the stereotyped presumption that China does not have an analytic tradition, or that it emphasizes intuitive thought and does not conceive philosophy as an exercise in conceptual analysis, and thereby it is different from Western philosophy, where, in Kant’s terms, philosophical knowledge is the “knowledge gained by reason from concepts,”2 or, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, philosophy is the `discipline that consists in creating concepts`.