Exercise: Perfect Rituals
The activity helps motivate the Confucian focus on the relationship between ritual activity (li) and ethics.
Lesson: Daoism, Dao, and Metaphor
Daoism is the philosophy of the Way (dao), but an immediate problem is that, as the famous opening lines of the Daodejing tells us, dao ‘cannot be spoken of’. Although the early Daoists offer us different arguments about why dao is ineffable, they agree that it is not amenable to literal propositional description. But this does not mean that we are left empty-handed, for we can draw upon other ways of speaking…
Lesson: Virtues and Moral Rules
Can a morally great / virtuous person choose the right thing to do in every situation all by herself, or does she need to follow moral rules as guides?
Unit: Lynching, the Milgram Experiments, and the Question of Whether “Human Nature Is Good”
This is a two-week unit. Day one is on the history of lynching in the United States, featuring lynching photography and Ida B. Wells. Day two is Mengzi on human nature (with Rousseau as secondary reading). Day three is Xunzi on human nature (with Hobbes as secondary reading). Days four and five are the Milgram video and John Doris on situationism.