Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Mencius

This book is about the philosophical, historical, and interpretative aspects of Mencius. It explores his influence, reception, and relevance in China from the third century BCE to the present, as well as offers comparative studies of Mencius and major figures in the history of Chinese and Western philosophy. With 34 accessible articles written by leading philosophers and scholars, the Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Mencius provides both broad pictures and in-depth discussions regarding the work of one of the most important and influential Chinese philosophers. It covers his normative ethics, meta-ethics, political philosophy, epistemology and moral psychology. The last section of the volume, “Mencius and Western Philosophers: Comparative Perspectives,” explicitly puts him in dialogue with major Western philosophers. The Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Mencius serves as an essential volume for college students, graduate students, and scholars who study and teach Mencius as well as Chinese philosophy and comparative philosophy in general.    

Chapter 1 Introduction.- Section I: Mencius in the Classical Context (Pre-Qin to the Han Period).- Chapter 2 Unravelling the Connections Between the Mozi and the Mencius.- Chapter 3 Mencius in the Han Dynasty.- Chapter 4 The Mencius in the Context of Recently Excavated Texts.- Chapter 5 Mengzi’s Theory of Human Nature and Its Role in the Confucian Tradition.- Chapter 6 Two Visions of Confucianism: Mencius and Xunzi.- Chapter 7 Mencius, Zhuangzi and “Daoism”.- Section II: Mencius and Neo-Confucianism.- Chapter 8 CHENG Hao and CHENG Yi’s Appropriations of the Mencius.- Chapter 9 ZHU Xi’s Appropriation of Mencius’s Thought: From a Hermeneutic to a Developmental Approach.- Chapter 10 Mencius and WANG Yangming.- Chapter 11 Mencius and WANG Fuzhi.- Chapter 12 Jeong Dasan’s Interpretation of Mencius: Heaven, Way, Human Nature, and the Human Heart.- Section III: Social and Political Thought.- Chapter 13 Mengzi’s View on the Public and the Private.- Chapter 14 Mencius and Early Chinese Political Thought.- Chapter 15 Mencius and the New Confucianism’s Pursuit of Democracy.- Chapter 16 Mencius’s Political Philosophy of Ren Government: Human Dignity and Distributive Justice.- Chapter 17 Mencius and Political Rhetoric.- Chapter 18 Hermeneutics in the Mencius: Methods, Context, Divergence.- Chapter 19 Mencius and Japanese Confucian Philosophy.- Section IV: Ethics and Epistemology.- Chapter 20 Ming ? and Acceptance.- Chapter 21 MOU Zongsan’s Interpretation of Mencius’s Moral Philosophy.- Chapter 22 Eudaimonism in the Mencius: Fulfilling Human Nature.- Chapter 23 Is Mencius a Consequentialist? Rethinking the Relationship between Yi (Righteousness) and Li (Benefit) in the Mencius.- Chapter 24 Mencius’s Theory as a System of the Gongfu to be Human and to Live a Good Human Life.- Chapter 25 Epistemology in the Mencius.- Section V: Moral Psychology and Moral Development.- Chapter 26 Feeling, Reflection, and Reasoningin the Mencius.- Chapter 27 Mencius on Moral Psychology.- Chapter 28 The Mencian Triplet of Ceyin Zhi Xin: Perceptive, Affective, and Motivational.- Chapter 29 Mencius’s Moral Psychology and Contemporary Cognitive Science.- Section VI: Mencius and Western Philosophers: Comparative Studies.- Chapter 30 Mencius and Augustine: A Feminine Face in the Personal, the Social, and the Political.- Chapter 31 Self-determination and the Metaphysics of Human Nature in Aristotle and Mencius.- Chapter 32 Mencius and Aquinas.- Chapter 33 Mencius and Hume.- Chapter 34 Mencius, Dewey, and “Developmental” Human Nature.

Yang Xiao is Professor of Philosophy at Kenyon College. He has been the book review editor of Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy since 2005, and was the president of International Society for Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Philosophy in 2014-7. He is the co-editor of Moral Relativism and Chinese Philosophy: David Wong and His Critics (2014).

Kim-chong Chong is Professor Emeritus at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He also taught at the National University of Singapore from 1980-2003. He is the author of Early Confucian Ethics: Concepts and Arguments (2007), and Zhuangzi’s Critique of the Confucians (2016). He is also the editor of Dao Companion to the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi (2022).