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Persons Emerging

Three Neo-Confucian Perspectives on Transcending Self-Boundaries

Galia Patt-ShamirSeries: SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture
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Pages
276
Year
2021
Language
English

About

Offers three neo-Confucian understandings of broadening the Way as broadening oneself, through an ongoing process of removing self-boundaries.

Persons Emerging explores the renewed idea of the Confucian person in the eleventh-century philosophies of Zhou Dunyi, Shao Yong, and Zhang Zai. Galia Patt-Shamir discusses their responses to the Confucian challenge that the Way, as perfection, can be broadened by the person who travels it. Suggesting that the three neo-Confucian philosophers undertake the classical Confucian task of "broadening the way," each proposes to deal with it from a different angle: Zhou Dunyi offers a metaphysical emerging out of the infinitude-finitude boundary, Shao Yong emerges out of the epistemological boundary between in and out, and Zhang Zai offers a pragmatic emerging out of the boundary between life and death.

Through the lens of these three Song-period China philosophers, the idea of "transcending self-boundaries" places neo-Confucian philosophies within the global philosophical context. Patt-Shamir questions the Confucian notions of person, Way, and how they relate to human flourishing to highlight how the emergence of personhood demands transcending metaphysical, epistemological, and moral self-boundaries.

Galia Patt-Shamir is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tel-Aviv University, Israel. She is the author of To Broaden the Way: A Confucian-Jewish Dialogue, and, in Hebrew, Tongshu — Text and Commentary and A Human Riddle: Human Nature in Chinese Philosophy.

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