NOTES

FOREWORD

    1.  Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Minutes on Education in India,” in Selected Writings, ed. John Clive and Thomas Pinney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 241.

    2.  Nicholas Tampio, “Not All Things Wise and Good Are Philosophy,” Aeon, September 13, 2016, https://aeon.co/ideas/not-all-things-wise-and-good-are-philosophy.

    3.  Suzy Q. Groden, trans., The Symposium of Plato (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 61 (Stephanus 189e–190b).

    4.  Wilfred Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (1962), quoted in “Wilfrid Sellars,” by Willem deVries, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/sellars/.

1. A MANIFESTO FOR MULTICULTURAL PHILOSOPHY

The epigraphs to chapter 1 are from Immanuel Kant, Physical Geography, translated in Julia Ching, “Chinese Ethics and Kant,” Philosophy East and West 28, no. 2 (April 1978): 169; and Martin Luther King, Jr., “Address Delivered at Poor People’s Campaign Rally” (March 19, 1968; Clarksdale, Mississippi), cited in James Cone, Risks of Faith (Boston: Beacon, 1999), 152n20 (original transcript of speech archived at the King Center, Atlanta, GA, document 680323-02).

    1.  Tyson made this comment in an interview with Chris Hardwick (who majored in philosophy) on Nerdist Podcast, episode 139, uploaded November 11, 2011, http://nerdist.com/nerdist-podcast-139-neil-degrasse-tyson/. Rubio made his assertion during the Republican candidates’ debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on November 10, 2015, which is available at The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=110908.

    2.  For the sources to these claims and a more detailed response to critics of the study of philosophy, see chapter 4.

    3.  Ranking philosophy departments is, of necessity, a controversial matter. My ranking here follows the 2014–15 Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR), www.philosophicalgourmet.com/. (Full disclosure: I am on the advisory board for the PGR.) For critiques of the PGR, see Katherine S. Mangan, “175 Philosophy Professors Blast Ranking of Graduate Programs,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 18, 2002, http://chronicle.com/article/175-Philosophy-Professors/34484/.

    4.  CUNY Graduate Center (Hagop Sarkissian), Duke University (David Wong), University of California, Berkeley (Kwong-loi Shun), University of California, Riverside (Eric Schwitzgebel), University of Connecticut (Alex McLeod), and University of Michigan (Sonya Ozbey). An additional two top-fifty institutions deign to allow members of another department to cross-list their courses in philosophy: Georgetown University (Erin Cline) and Indiana University at Bloomington (Aaron Stalnaker). (Departments often cross-list courses reluctantly and under pressure. And the fact that a course in another department is cross-listed does not ensure that students in philosophy with an interest in that topic are supported and encouraged.) In Canada, Edward Slingerland teaches in the philosophy department at the University of British Columbia.

    5.  University of Hawaii (Franklin Perkins), University of Oklahoma (Amy Olberding), and University of Utah (Eric Hutton). European philosophy departments are not much better. See Carine Defoort, “ ‘Chinese Philosophy’ at European Universities: A Threefold Utopia,” Philosophy East and West (forthcoming). See also Defoort, “Is There Such a Thing as Chinese Philosophy? Arguments of an Implicit Debate,” Philosophy East and West 51, no. 3 (2001): 393–413.

    6.  Indian philosophy is taught at the CUNY Graduate Center (Graham Priest), State University of New York, Buffalo (Nic Bommarito), University of Texas at Austin (Stephen Phillips), University of New Mexico (John Bussanich and John Taber), Binghamton University (Charles Goodman), and University of Hawaii (Arindam Chakrabarti). At Harvard, Parimil Patil teaches a cross-listed course on Indian philosophy. The phrase “less commonly taught philosophies (LCTP)” is modeled on “less commonly taught languages (LCTL),” an expression used to refer conveniently to the otherwise heterogeneous collection of languages that are outside the “mainstream” languages taught in most US secondary and postsecondary schools.

    7.  Michigan State University (Kyle Powys Whyte) and University of Oregon (Scott L. Pratt).

    8.  Top philosophy doctoral programs with specialists on some area in Africana philosophy (which includes both African and African American philosophy) include Binghamton, Columbia, CUNY Graduate Center, Emory, Harvard, Michigan State, New York University, Purdue, Rutgers, Pennsylvania State, Stony Brook, Texas A & M, University of Connecticut, and Vanderbilt.

    9.  Richard D. McKirahan and Patricia Curd, trans., A Presocratics Reader: Selected Fragments and Testimonia, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011), 58, no. 6 (B6). Although I tease Parmenides here, he is undeniably a great thinker. For a discussion, see Vishwa Adluri, Parmenides, Plato, and Mortal Philosophy (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012).

  10.  See Bertrand Russell, “Descriptions” (from Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy), in Classics of Analytic Philosophy, ed. Robert R. Ammerman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990), 15–24; and Peter F. Strawson, “On Referring,” in Ammerman, Classics of Analytic Philosophy, 315–34. For an entire book devoted to the debate, see Stephen Neale, Descriptions (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).

  11.  Javier C. Hernández, “China’s Tech-Savvy, Burned-Out and Spiritually Adrift, Turn to Buddhism,” New York Times, September 7, 2016, http://nyti.ms/2bTGFPG; Ian Johnson, “The Rise of the Tao,” New York Times, November 5, 2010, http://nyti.ms/1ABiTcq. On President Xi’s interest in Confucianism, see chapter 3.

  12.  Daniel Bell, The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Joseph Chan, Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Jiang Qing, A Confucian Constitutional Order: How China’s Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Future, ed. Daniel Bell and Ruiping Fan, trans. Edmund Ryden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). I discuss Xi’s use of Confucius in chapter 3.

  13.  I discuss what is distinctive about philosophy in chapter 5.

  14.  Lee H. Yearley, Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).

  15.  Later books that have developed virtue ethics interpretations of Confucianism include May Sim, Remastering Morals with Confucius and Aristotle (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Bryan W. Van Norden, Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Jiyuan Yu, The Ethics of Confucius and Aristotle: Mirrors of Virtue (New York: Routledge, 2007); and Stephen Angle, Sagehood: The Contemporary Significance of Neo-Confucian Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  16.  Erin Cline, Confucius, Rawls, and the Sense of Justice (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). See also my review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, review no. 38 of July 2013, http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/41386-confucius-rawls-and-the-sense-of-justice/.

  17.  Erin Cline, Families of Virtue: Confucian and Western Views on Childhood Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

  18.  Eric Schwitzgebel, “Human Nature and Moral Development in Mencius, Xunzi, Hobbes, and Rousseau,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 24 (2007): 147–68. See also Schwitzgebel, “Zhuangzi’s Attitude Toward Language and His Skepticism,” in Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the “Zhuangzi,” ed. Paul Kjellberg and Philip J. Ivanhoe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 68–96.

  19.  Aaron Stalnaker, Overcoming Our Evil: Human Nature and Spiritual Exercises in Xunzi and Augustine (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2009).

  20.  David Wong, Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Owen Flanagan, The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

  21.  Martha Nussbaum, “Golden Rule Arguments: A Missing Thought,” in The Moral Circle and the Self, ed. Chong Kim-chong and Tan Sor-hoon (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 2003); Nussbaum, “Comparing Virtues,” Journal of Religious Ethics 21, no. 2 (1993): 345–67; Alasdair MacIntyre, “Incommensurability, Truth, and the Conversation Between Confucians and Aristotelians About the Virtues,” in Culture and Modernity, ed. Eliot Deutsch (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), 104–22; MacIntyre, “Once More on Confucian and Aristotelian Conceptions of the Virtues,” in Chinese Philosophy in an Era of Globalization, ed. Robin R. Wang (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 151–62.

  22.  See Yasuo Deguchi, Jay L. Garfield, and Graham Priest, “The Way of the Dialetheist: Contradictions in Buddhism,” Philosophy East and West 58, no. 3 (July 2008): 395–402, and the special issue of Philosophy East and West—63, no. 3 (July 2013)—devoted to discussion of their work. See also Graham Priest, One: Being an Investigation Into the Unity of Reality and Its Parts, Including the Singular Object Which Is Nothingness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 167–235; and my review in Dao 15 (2016): 307–10.

  23.  For an accessible presentation, see A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989), 150–55. Christoph Harbsmeier gives what is perhaps the definitive overview of ancient Chinese philosophy of language: Harbsmeier, Language and Logic, vol. 7, pt. 1, in Science and Civilisation in China, ed. Joseph Needham (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  24.  Myisha Cherry and Eric Schwitzgebel, “Like the Oscars, #PhilosophySoWhite,” Los Angeles Times, March 4, 2016, www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0306-schwitzgebel-cherry-philosophy-so-white-20160306-story.html.

  25.  Kyle Whyte, “Indigenous Research and Professional Philosophy in the US,” Philosopher, blog, February 3, 2017, https://politicalphilosopher.net/2017/02/03/featured-philosopher-kyle-whyte/.

  26.  Bryan W. Van Norden, “Three Questions About the Crisis in Chinese Philosophy,” APA Newsletter on the Status of Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies 8, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 3–6, https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.apaonline.org/resource/collection/2EAF6689–4B0D-4CCB-9DC6-FB926D8FF530/v08n1Asian.pdf.

  27.  Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden, “If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is,” The Stone, blog, New York Times, May 11, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/opinion/if-philosophy-wont-diversify-lets-call-it-what-it-really-is.html.

  28.  “What’s Your Take on the Recent NYTimes Article Advocating Diversification in Philosophy Departments in the West?” www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/4j0un6/whats_your_take_on_the_recent_nytimes_article/. An especially insightful online response to critics of our piece is Amy Olberding, “When Someone Suggests Expanding the Canon,” http://dailynous.com/2016/05/13/when-someone-suggests-expanding-the-canon/. Other interesting online discussions (pro and con) include Brian Leiter, “Anglophone Departments Aren’t ‘Departments of European and American Philosophy,’ ” Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, May 11, 2016, http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2016/05/anglophone-departments-arent-departments-of-european-and-american-philosophy.html; John Drabinski, “Diversity, ‘Neutrality,’ Philosophy,” http://jdrabinski.com/2016/05/11/diversity-neutrality-philosophy/; Meena Krishnamurthy, “Decolonizing Analytic Political Philosophy,” Philosopher, blog, June 3, 2016, https://politicalphilosopher.net/2016/06/03/meenakrishnamurthy/; and Justin Smith, “Garfield and Van Norden on Non-European Philosophy,” www.jehsmith.com/1/2016/05/garfield-and-van-norden-on-non-european-philosophy-.html.

  29.  Patricia McGuire, comment on Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden, “If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is,” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/opinion/if-philosophy-wont-diversify-lets-call-it-what-it-really-is.html#permid=18491745.

  30.  Shawn (no last name supplied), comment on Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden, “If Philosophy Won’t Diversify,” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/opinion/if-philosophy-wont-diversify-lets-call-it-what-it-really-is.html#permid=18491934.

  31.  George Joseph, The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

  32.  Josh Hill, comment on Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden, “If Philosophy Won’t Diversify,” New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/opinion/if-philosophy-wont-diversify-lets-call-it-what-it-really-is.html#permid=18495750.

  33.  Anthony Kennedy, Majority Opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges 576 U.S. 3 (2015).

  34.  Antonin Scalia, Dissenting Opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges 576 U.S. 8n22 (2015).

  35.  Ibid., 9. For a discussion of Kennedy’s invocation of Confucius, Scalia’s dissent, and Chinese reactions, see Bryan W. Van Norden, “Confucius on Gay Marriage,” Diplomat, July 13, 2015, http://thediplomat.com/2015/07/confucius-on-gay-marriage/.

  36.  “The East Pediment: Information Sheet,” www.supremecourt.gov/about/eastpediment.pdf.

  37.  Masimo Pigliucci, “On the Psuedo-Profundity of Some Eastern Philosophy,” Rationally Speaking, May 23, 2006, http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2006/05/on-pseudo-profoundity-of-some-eastern.html.

  38.  Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van Norden, eds., Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), 65–66.

  39.  Ibid., 145.

  40.  Ibid., 223.

  41.  Ibid., 327–32, 339–51.

  42.  Justin Tiwald and Bryan W. Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy: Han Dynasty to the 20th Century (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014), 101.

  43.  Ibid., 80–86. Discussed in chapter 2.

  44.  Ibid., 266–68. Discussed in chapter 2.

  45.  Ibid., 321–27.

  46.  Ibid., 375–85.

  47.  Ibid., 370–75.

  48.  For the relevant portion of The Sutra of the Teaching of Vimalakirti, see Robin R. Wang, ed., Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture: Writings from the Pre-Qin Period Through the Song Dynasty (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 272–77. For Li Zhi and Li Dazhao, see Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 300–4 and 359–61, respectively.

  49.  John Maynard Keynes, Two Memoirs (London: Kelly Hart-Davis, 1949), 243–44. This passage was brought to my attention by Sarah Mattice.

  50.  Surama Dasgupta, An Ever-Expanding Quest of Life and Knowledge (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1971), 74.

  51.  D. Kyle Peon, “Yes—Let’s Call Philosophy What It Really Is,” Weekly Standard, May 19, 2016, www.weeklystandard.com/yes-lets-call-philosophy-what-it-really-is/article/2002458.

  52.  Nicholas Tampio, “Not All Things Wise and Good Are Philosophy,” Aeon, https://aeon.co/ideas/not-all-things-wise-and-good-are-philosophy. See Jay Garfield’s foreword to this book for a detailed dissection of Tampio’s essay.

  53.  Christopher Cullen, Astronomy and Mathematics in Ancient China: The Zhou Bi Suan Jing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  54.  Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. “Siger De Brabant” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911).

  55.  Peter K. J. Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 76.

  56.  Even if it turns out that, as a matter of historical fact, Greek philosophy developed in complete isolation from Indian and African philosophy, this would not demonstrate that the latter was not philosophy. The important point to learn from Park is that it is not an a priori truth that “all philosophy begins in Greece.”

  57.  David E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800, 3rd ed. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 100–4.

  58.  Leibniz, Introduction to Novissima Sinica (1697), cited in Franklin Perkins, Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 146.

  59.  For discussions, see Robert Louden, “ ‘What Does Heaven Say?’ Christian Wolff and Western Interpretations of Confucian Ethics,” in Confucius and the “Analects”: New Essays, ed. Bryan W. Van Norden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 73–93; and Donald F. Lach, “The Sinophilism of Christian Wolff (1679–1754),” Journal of the History of Ideas 14, no. 4 (October 1953): 561–74.

  60.  Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 128.

  61.  Derk Bodde, “Chinese Ideas in the West,” unpublished essay prepared for the Committee on Asiatic Studies in American Education (March 9, 1948), http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/chinawh/web/s10/ideas.pdf. (I am indebted to Mark Csikszentmihalyi for bringing Quesnay’s interest in China to my attention.) On king Shun, see Analects 15.5.

  62.  Ronald Reagan quoted Daodejing 60 in his State of the Union Address on January 25, 1988, archived at The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=36035.

  63.  Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy, 69–95.

  64.  Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 73–92.

  65.  Kant AA xxv.2 1187–1188, cited in Mark Larrimore, “Sublime Waste: Kant on the Destiny of the ‘Races,’ ” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, supplemental volume 25 (1999): 111–12. I learned of Kant’s discussion of race in his lectures on anthropology from an excellent talk by Peter K. J. Park, “Kant’s Colonial Knowledge and His Greek Turn,” American Philosophical Association, Baltimore, MD, January 6, 2017.

  66.  Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, ed. Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 61. If you really want to be horrified, see the passage from Hume that Kant approvingly quotes, ibid., 58n82.

  67.  Kant AA xxv.2 843, cited in Larrimore, “Sublime Waste,” 111.

  68.  Immanuel Kant, Physical Geography, translated in Ching, “Chinese Ethics and Kant,” 169. All of us interested in Kant’s views on China are deeply indebted to Helmuth von Glasenapp, ed., Kant und die Religionen des Ostens, Beihefte zum Jahrbuch der Albertus-Universität Königsberg/Pr. 5 (Kitzingen-Main: Holzner, 1954).

  69.  Immanuel Kant, Physical Geography, cited in Gregory M. Reihman, “Categorically Denied: Kant’s Criticism of Chinese Philosophy,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 11, no. 1 (March 2006): 63n22.

  70.  David E. Mungello, Drowning Girls in China: Female Infanticide Since 1650 (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 3. Infanticide by drowning (never hanging) was the preferred method in China, and it resulted in a quick death, as opposed to the European preference for infanticide by abandonment, which resulted in a slow, lingering death.

  71.  Ibid.

  72.  Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 134–39. For a more detailed discussion see Mungello, Drowning Girls in China, 14–62. Christian missionaries and Chinese Christian converts also took part in charitable efforts to save children (99–115).

  73.  G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Greek Philosophy to Plato, trans. E. S. Haldane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 121. In their brilliant The Nay Science: A History of German Indology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee note that Hegel was also seminal in expelling Indian philosophical texts from the philosophical canon and relegating them solely to philology and social history.

  74.  G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. Ruben Alvarado (Aalten, Netherlands: WordBridge, 2011), 124.

  75.  Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome, trans. William Dickson, vol. 4 (New York: Scribner’s, 1887), 726.

  76.  Alston Hurd Chase, Time Remembered (San Antonio: Parker, 1994), 2.1, www.pa59ers.com/library/Chase/time2–1n2.html.

  77.  Herbert Fingarette, Confucius—the Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper, 1972), vii.

  78.  Martin Heidegger, What Is Philosophy? trans. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde (New York: Twayne, 1958), 29–31, cited in Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy, 4. Heidegger’s views on Asian philosophy varied over the course of his career. At one point, he began to collaborate on a translation of the Daodejing, which he said had anticipated his own philosophical views. However, his final view of philosophy was ethnocentric. See Taylor Carman and Bryan W. Van Norden, “Being-in-the-Way: A Review of Heidegger and Asian Thought,” Sino-Platonic Papers 70 (February 1996): 24–34.

  79.  Du Xiaozhen and Zhang Ning, Delida zai Zhongguo jiangyanlu [Lectures by Derrida in China] (Beijing: Zhongyang Bianyi, 2002), 139, cited in Carine Defoort and Ge Zhaoguang, “Editors’ Introduction,” Contemporary Chinese Thought 37, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 3 and 9n14.

  80.  Gayatri Spivak, “Translator’s Preface,” in Of Grammatology, by Jacques Derrida, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), lxxxii. For a detailed critique of Derrida’s Orientalism, see Jin Suh Jirn, “A Sort of European Hallucination: On Derrida’s ‘Chinese Prejudice,’ ” Situations 8, no. 2 (2015): 67–83.

  81.  Eugene Park, “Why I Left Academia: Philosophy’s Homogeneity Needs Rethinking,” November 3, 2014, www.huffingtonpost.com/hippo-reads/why-i-left-academia_b_5735320.html.

  82.  Said, Orientalism, 40.

  83.  Ibid., 38.

  84.  Eric Schwitzgebel, “Why Don’t We Know Our Chinese Philosophy?” APA Newsletter on the Status of Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies 1, no. 1 (2001): 27.

  85.  Joel J. Kupperman, Classic Asian Philosophy: A Guide to the Essential Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 58.

  86.  When you do read the Analects and Daodejing, I recommend translations that contextualize the texts for you. For the sayings of Confucius, I recommend Edward Slingerland’s translation, Analects: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003). For the Daodejing (also written Tao Te Ching, the Classic of the Way and Virtue, attributed to Laozi), I strongly recommend you first read carefully the “Outline Introduction to the Laozi,” by Wang Bi (226–249) in Richard John Lynne, trans., The Classic of the Way and Virtue: A New Translation of the “Tao-te Ching” of Laozi as Interpreted by Wang Bi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), and only then read the Daodejing itself. My bibliography of “Readings on Less Commonly Taught Philosophies” at http://bryanvannorden.com lists some anthologies of secondary essays that will also help with the Analects and the Daodejing. There are actually only a handful of passages in the Changes (Yijing, also written I Ching, the Classic of Changes) that are philosophically important. Just read the selections in Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 42–54.

  87.  Schwitzgebel, “Why Don’t We Know Our Chinese Philosophy?” 26.

  88.  For selections from the Analects, Daodejing, Mozi, Mengzi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, and Hanfeizi, see Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy. On Shen Dao, see Eirik L. Harris, The Shenzi Fragments: A Philosophical Analysis and Translation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

  89.  For selections, see Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy. In chapter 2, I discuss more specifically the philosophical interest of several Confucian, Buddhist, and Neo-Confucian philosophers.

  90.  Justin E. H. Smith, The Philosopher: A History in Six Types (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 2.

  91.  Ibid., 9.

  92.  Personal communication from Robin R. Wang, President of the SACP, June 4, 2016.

  93.  See www.mapforthegap.com/about.html.

  94.  Leiter, “Anglophone Departments Aren’t ‘Departments of European and American Philosophy.’ ”

  95.  Augustine (City of God, bk. 5, chap. 8) attributes the quoted phrase to Seneca (c. 4 BCE–65 CE), but Seneca (letter 108) is quoting a poem by Cleanthes (fl. 300 BCE).

2. TRADITIONS IN DIALOGUE

The epigraphs to chapter 2 are from Terence, The Self-Tormentor, act 1, scene 1, and Confucius, Analects, 12.5.

    1.  Machiavelli (1469–1527) is also a defensible choice as the founding figure of modern political philosophy.

    2.  See Descartes, “Third Set of Objections, by a Famous English Philosopher, with the Author’s Replies,” in Philosophical Essays and Correspondence, ed. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000).

    3.  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Parts One and Two, ed. Herbert W. Schneider (New York: Macmillan, 1958), “Of Darkness from Vain Philosophy and Fabulous Traditions,” 9. (For the sake of readability, I omitted a parenthesis present in the original quotation.)

    4.  David Hume (1711–76) has a particularly interesting critique of substantialist views of the self that has been compared to Buddhist views. For what I think is a decisive critique of Buddhist interpretations of Hume, see Ricki Bliss, “On Being Humean About the Emptiness of Causation,” in The Moon Points Back, ed. Yasuo Deguchi, Jay Garfield, Graham Priest, and Koji Tanaka (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 67–96.

    5.  More precisely, Descartes argued that both souls and physical objects are dependent for their existence on a third substance, God.

    6.  Aristotle, Categories, 1.5.

    7.  Aristotle wrestles with the notion of substance, seemingly without reaching any resolution, in Metaphysics, book 6.

    8.  René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), second meditation, 21.

    9.  Aristotle, Metaphysics, 7.3.

  10.  Descartes, Meditations, 22. Yes, he says “robots” (automata). Simple mechanical automata existed in seventeenth-century Europe, and were much discussed.

  11.  Ibid.

  12.  Ibid., 21.

  13.  For a very readable survey of some major approaches to this topic, see John Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978).

  14.  Descartes, Meditations, 21.

  15.  Jay Garfield, Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 122–74.

  16.  N. K. G. Mendis, trans., The Questions of King Milinda: An Abridgement of the Milindpañha (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1993), 29. Cf. Peter Harvey, trans., Questions of King Milinda, in Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings, ed. William Edelglass and Jay Garfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 272.

  17.  Mendis, Questions of King Milinda, 30.

  18.  Peter Harvey, trans., “Extract from the Mahā-nidāna Sutta, the ‘Great Discourse on Causal Links,’ ” in Edelglass and Garfield, Buddhist Philosophy, 271. The Buddha’s position does not need to reject the mind-body identity thesis (that our mental states are somehow identical with physical states). Instead, his argument can be interpreted as a dilemma: the claim that the self is identical with physical states as we ordinarily understand them violates our intuition that the self is conscious; the claim that the self is identical with physical states that are also conscious states is vulnerable to the arguments given in the body of the text against identifying the self with conscious states.

  19.  Devamitta Thera, ed., Aṅguttara-nikāya (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Pali Text Society, 1929), 700, quoted in Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught, rev. ed. (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1974), 25–26.

  20.  Plato, Cratylus 402a, quoted in Daniel W. Graham, “Heraclitus,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015 ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/heraclitus/.

  21.  Mendis, Questions of King Milinda, 47–48.

  22.  Ibid., 48–49.

  23.  Ibid., 29. Cf. Harvey, Questions of King Milinda, 272.

  24.  Mendis, Questions of King Milinda, 30.

  25.  Ibid., 31. Cf. Harvey, Questions of King Milinda, 273.

  26.  Mendis, Questions of King Milinda, 31.

  27.  Ibid.

  28.  I am expressing my own opinion about how the doctrine of no-self should be applied to abortion. Buddhist clergy, philosophers, and laity do not have a unified stance on this topic. For a sampling of perspectives, see Damien Keown, Buddhism and Bioethics (New York: Macmillan, 1995); Michael G. Barnhart, “Buddhism and the Morality of Abortion,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 5 (1998): 276–97; William R. LaFleur, Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Damien Keown, ed., Buddhism and Abortion (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998).

  29.  The two major philosophical schools of Mahāyāna are Madhyamaka and Yogacara. Fazang is a figure in Huayan Buddhism, which is largely Madhyamaka, but (like Chinese Buddhism in general) tends to be syncretic. See Jay L. Garfield and Jan Westerhoff, Yogacara and Madhyamaka: Allies or Rivals? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

  30.  Fazang, “The Rafter Dialogue,” in Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy: Han Dynasty to the 20th Century, ed. Justin Tiwald and Bryan W. Van Norden (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014), 80–86.

  31.  Fazang, “Essay on the Golden Lion,” in Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 88. “Cause” here is often translated as “condition,” because the notion is broader than our concept of efficient causation. As the example of the rafter and the building suggests, “condition” includes conceptual dependence.

  32.  See James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin, 2008), 321–22.

  33.  Ibid., 9–31.

  34.  As Francis C. Cook explains, “my ‘fatherness’ is completely dependence [sic] on the ‘sonness’ of my son to the same extent that his ‘sonness’ is dependent on my ‘fatherness.’ ” Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra (State Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), 83.

  35.  Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 4, 39.

  36.  Ibid., chap. 14, 112 (italics in original). It has been disputed whether Hobbes is a strict psychological egoist. At the least, Hobbes thinks human benevolence and sympathy, if they do exist, are so weak that they cannot play any substantial role in justifying or maintaining a political system.

  37.  Ibid., chap. 13, 105.

  38.  Ibid., chap. 14, 110.

  39.  Ibid., chap. 13, 105.

  40.  Ibid., chap. 13, 107. The phrase “state of nature” was coined by John Locke (1632–1704), but it is also used to describe other positions that appeal to the state of humans prior to government.

  41.  This is only a partial analogy, since what makes The Walking Dead interesting is that it explores the ways in which benevolence, integrity, and loyalty can find a place even in the most desperate situations. However, the primary characters repeatedly encounter people who have been reduced to a genuinely Hobbesian state, like the citizens of Terminus. (Sorry for the spoiler, but, come on, you knew Terminus was going to be a bad place. It’s called “Terminus,” after all.) The classic Twilight Zone episode “The Shelter” (1961) gives a brief and chilling expression of a Hobbesian view of human nature, suggesting what would happen among suburban neighbors during a nuclear attack if there were not enough room in the fallout shelter for all of them.

  42.  Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 14, 110 (this entire passage is in italics in the original).

  43.  Ibid., chap. 17, 139.

  44.  Ibid., chap. 15, 120.

  45.  Analects 2.3 in Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van Norden, eds., Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), 5.

  46.  “Ritual” (or “rites”) is one of the most intriguing concepts that Confucianism can offer Western philosophy. For discussions, see Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (New York: HarperCollins, 1972); Kwong-loi Shun, “Ren and Li in the Analects,” in Confucius and the “Analects”: New Essays, ed. Bryan W. Van Norden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 53–72.

  47.  Mengzi 1A1, in Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 117–18.

  48.  Mengzi 2A6, in Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 129.

  49.  Mengzi 7B16, in Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 155. More literally, the Chinese states “humaneness [rén 仁] is human [rén 人].”

  50.  Martin L. Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  51.  Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1998), pt. 1, chaps. 4–5, 100–38.

  52.  A classic essay on this topic is Robert L. Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1971): 35–57. Trivers’s paper is often misinterpreted as arguing that seemingly altruistic actions are actually self-interested; however, his actual view is that “the emotion of sympathy has been selected to motivate altruistic behavior;… crudely put, the greater the potential benefit to the recipient, the greater the sympathy and the more likely the altruistic gesture, even to strange or disliked individuals” (49, emphasis mine).

  53.  Mengzi 3B9, in Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 134–35.

  54.  Mengzi 1A7, in Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 122.

  55.  Analects 12.18, in Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 37.

  56.  Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 201. “Substance” here is literally “body.” It is not being used in quite the same sense as “substance” in the Western tradition, but the differences are not important for grasping the basics of the argument.

  57.  Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 88. “Dharma” here refers to an instance of one of the Five Aggregates.

  58.  For the Confucian critique, see Han Yu, “A Memorandum on a Bone of the Buddha,” and Lu Xiangshan, “Letter to Wang Shunbo”; for a Buddhist response, see Huiyuan, On Why Buddhist Monks Do Not Bow Down Before Kings, all in Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy.

  59.  Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 152.

  60.  Ibid., 174.

  61.  President Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at a Campaign Event in Roanoke, VA,” White House Office of the Press Secretary, July 13, 2012, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/07/13/remarks-president-campaign-event-roanoke-virginia.

  62.  Some of the outraged businessmen that Republicans paraded before the media had benefited extensively from government contracts. See Andrew Rosenthal, “You Didn’t Build That,” New York Times, July 27, 2012, http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/you-didnt-build-that/.

  63.  Although Robinson Crusoe has become a symbol for the possibilities of individual achievement, those who have actually read the novel know that it is more about how very dependent we are upon the civilization we have inherited (symbolized by the things Crusoe salvages from the shipwreck he survived) and faith in God. (There is also an imperialistic subtext in the work.)

  64.  On the similarities and differences between Hobbes and the Mohists, see Bryan W. Van Norden, Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 163. See also Angus C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989), 45–46.

  65.  Eirik L. Harris, trans., The Shenzi Fragments: A Philosophical Analysis and Translation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

  66.  My formulation differs in its details from MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 51–61. However, I think he would recognize my version.

  67.  Jean Baptiste Molière, The Hypochondriac, trans. A. R. Waller, in The Plays of Molière (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1907), vol. 2, section 5, 235. Molière’s play premiered 1673. In 1651, Hobbes had applied the same critique to the Aristotelian explanation of “heaviness”: “But if you ask what they mean by heaviness, they will define it to be an endeavor to go to the center of the earth. So that the cause why things sink downward is an endeavor to be below—which is as much as to say that bodies descend or ascend because they do.” Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 46, 13.

  68.  Descartes, Meditations, third meditation, 31.

  69.  Thomas Hobbes, “An Answer to Bishop Bramhall’s Book,” in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. William Molesworth, vol. 4 (London: John Bohn, 1840), 299.

  70.  Patrick Suppes, “Aristotle’s Concept of Matter and Its Relation to Modern Concepts of Matter,” Synthese 28 (1974): 27–50. See chapter 4 for more on Aristotle’s contributions to the development of science.

  71.  See Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Humanism of Existentialism,” in Existentialism: Basic Writings, ed. Charles Guignon and Derk Pereboom (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 290–308. For an alternative formulation of a very similar position, see R. M. Hare, “A Moral Argument,” from Freedom and Reason, 1963, reprinted in Twentieth Century Ethical Theory, ed. Steven M. Cahn and Joram G. Haber (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995), 386–99.

  72.  The literature on this topic is already immense, but in addition to MacIntyre’s After Virtue, some of the seminal works include Elizabeth Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33 (1958): 1–19; Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 1978); Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); John McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” Monist 62 (1979): 331–50; Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2001); Martha Nussbaum, “Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach,” in The Quality of Life, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 242–70; Michael Slote, From Morality to Virtue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Christine Swanton, Virtue Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  73.  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 33–34 (ii.1, 1103a).

  74.  Ibid., 34 (ii.1, 1103a–b).

  75.  Ibid., 40 (ii.4, 1105b).

  76.  Ibid. (ii.4).

  77.  Mengzi 4B19, translation slightly modified from Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 140.

  78.  See Lee H. Yearley, Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 59–61; Philip J. Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 17–18, 32–33, 59–60, 101–102; and Jonathan Schofer, “Virtues in Xunzi’s Thought,” in Virtue, Nature, and Agency in the “Xunzi,” ed. Thornton Kline and Philip J. Ivanhoe (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 71–72.

  79.  Xunzi, “An Exhortation to Learning,” cited in Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 256. I think Confucius himself viewed moral cultivation as re-formation, but this would be heatedly disputed by many interpreters.

  80.  Xunzi, “Human Nature Is Bad,” cited in Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 298.

  81.  Xunzi, “An Exhortation to Learning,” cited in Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 260.

  82.  See Eric Schwitzgebel, “Human Nature and Moral Development in Mencius, Xunzi, Hobbes, and Rousseau,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 24 (2007): 147–68. I borrow the terminology of “the what” and “the why” of ethics from Myles Burnyeat, “Aristotle on Learning to Be Good,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. A. O. Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 69–92.

  83.  See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile: Or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic, 1979); and Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 27–46 (passim).

  84.  Mengzi 1A7, in Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 119.

  85.  Mengzi 1A7, in Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 120.

  86.  David Wong, “Reasons and Analogical Reasoning in Mengzi,” in Essays on the Moral Philosophy of Mengzi, ed. Xiusheng Liu and Philip J. Ivanhoe (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 187–220.

  87.  This is suggested by the seminal essay on this passage, David S. Nivison, “Motivation and Moral Action in Mencius,” in The Ways of Confucianism, ed. Bryan W. Van Norden (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1996), 91–119.

  88.  Mozi 45, “Lesser Selections,” translation mine but see Nivison, “Motivation and Moral Action in Mencius,” 97–98, for the comparison of Mengzi’s use of the term and the Mohist one.

  89.  Edward Slingerland argues plausibly that “In order to engage in or guide an abstract process such as education or self-cultivation, we must inevitably make reference to some sort of metaphorical schema, and the schema we invoke will have entailments that will serve as important determinants of our practical behavior.” Slingerland, Effortless Action: Wu-Wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 270 (emphasis in original).

  90.  Lu Xiangshan, Recorded Sayings, cited in Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 253.

  91.  Prichard, “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” in Cahn and Haber, Twentieth Century Ethical Theory, 47.

  92.  Ibid., 43n7.

  93.  Fans of modern Western ethics will no doubt argue that I have given short shrift to more subtle intuitionists like Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) or naturalists like Hume, who argue that practical reasoning has a substantial role to play in regard to means-end reasoning and clarifying the nature of potential objects of our intuitions or emotions. I agree that I need to say more to explain why I don’t find accounts like theirs satisfactory. However, as I note at the end of this chapter, the point is not whether we agree about who is right in the philosophical debate among Buddhists, Confucians, Aristotelians, intuitionists, and naturalists. What is important is to admit that it is a philosophical debate.

  94.  Great Learning, commentary 6, in Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 191–92. The commentary section of the Great Learning is traditionally attributed to Confucius’s disciple Zengzi (early fifth century BCE); however, more recent scholarship suggests that it is of unknown authorship and dates from the late third century BCE.

  95.  See Analects 10.8 and Analects 1.3, 2.8, respectively.

  96.  For example, Wing-tsit Chan has “love a beautiful color.” A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, trans. Wing-tsit Chan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 89. Chan’s Source Book was a great achievement for its era. However, his translations have largely been superseded. Similar comments apply to Yu-lan Fung, A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. Derk Bodde, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952). See my bibliography of readings on the less commonly taught philosophies at http://bryanvannorden.com for better choices.

  97.  Analects 9.18. The orthodox commentary of Zhu Xi explicitly links this passage to the Great Learning: “Loving a lovely sight and hating a hateful odor are Sincerity. Loving Virtue like one loves sex—this is to Sincerely love Virtue. However, people are seldom able to do this.” Zhu Xi, Lunyu jizhu, commentary on Analects 9.18, cited in Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 191n44.

  98.  One might argue that this example is intrinsically sexist. It certainly assumes what critic Laura Mulvey referred to as “the male gaze,” in her classic essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. The authors of the Great Learning and over two millennia of Confucian commentators typically envisioned the “lovely sight” in question as a beautiful woman, a woman who was excluded from higher education and public office, and whose sexuality was a potentially dangerous distraction from Virtue. However, the situation is more complex than it appears at first. Generations of Confucians were quite aware that many an emperor was led to disaster by the influence of a handsome male lover. Furthermore, both male and female readers today can sympathize with the example of being drawn to someone erotically, even though they will conceptualize it according to their own tastes.

  99.  Wang Yangming, “Questions on the Great Learning,” cited in Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 241–42 (glosses in original translation).

100.  There is a classic debate in ethics over unity vs. conflict as ideals of psychological health. When Jesus demands that a demon name itself, it replies, “My name is Legion: for we are many” (Mark 5:9, KJV). This suggests that the evil are divided within themselves. On the other hand, Walt Whitman celebrates psychic conflict when he asks, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” “Song of Myself.”

101.  Cheng Yi, Er Chengji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2004), 1:16, cited in Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 159.

102.  Great Learning, classic, in Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 189 (emphasis mine).

103.  Zhu Xi, Zhuzi yulei (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1986), 1:148, cited in Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 181.

104.  David S. Nivison was the first to note the significance of weakness of will as an issue in Chinese philosophy. See especially “The Philosophy of Wang Yangming,” in The Ways of Confucianism, by David S. Nivison, ed. Bryan W. Van Norden (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 249–60.

105.  Wang Yangming, A Record for Practice (Chuan xi lu), §5, cited in Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 267.

106.  Wang Yangming, A Record for Practice, §5, cited in Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 267.

107.  One of the classic Western essays on internalism is Donald Davidson, “How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?” in Essays on Actions and Events, 2nd ed. (New York: Clarendon, 2001), 21–42. Intriguingly, Davidson thanks David S. Nivison, a leading scholar of Chinese philosophy, in the acknowledgments to this anthology (xx).

108.  Wang Yangming, A Record for Practice, §5, cited in Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 267 (italics in original translation).

109.  Frank Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” Philosophical Quarterly 32, no. 127 (1982): 127–36.

110.  Wang Yangming, A Record for Practice, §5, cited in Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 268.

111.  Wang Yangming, A Record for Practice, §5, cited in Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 268 (glosses in original translation).

112.  Nivison, “The Philosophy of Wang Yangming,” 218.

113.  Wang Yangming, A Record for Practice, §5, cited in Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 268.

114.  Eric Schwitzgebel, “The Moral Behavior of Ethicists and the Role of the Philosopher,” in Experimental Ethics, ed. H. Rusch, M. Uhl, and C. Luetge (New York: Palgrave, 2014); Schwitzgebel, “Do Ethicists Steal More Books?” Philosophical Psychology 22 (2009): 711–25; Schwitzgebel, “Are Ethicists Any More Likely to Pay Their Registration Fees at Professional Meetings?” Economics and Philosophy 29 (2013): 371–80; Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust, “The Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors: Relationships Among Self-Reported Behavior, Expressed Normative Attitude, and Directly Observed Behavior,” Philosophical Psychology 27 (2014): 293–327; Schwitzgebel and Rust, “Do Ethicists and Political Philosophers Vote More Often Than Other Professors?” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2010): 189–99; Schwitzgebel and Rust, “The Self-Reported Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors,” Philosophical Psychology 27 (2014): 293–327; Schwitzgebel and Rust, “Ethicists’ and Non-Ethicists’ Responsiveness to Student Emails: Relationships Among Expressed Normative Attitude, Self-Described Behavior, and Experimentally Observed Behavior,” Metaphilosophy 44 (2013): 350–71; Eric Schwitzgebel, Joshua Rust, Linus Huang, Alan Moore, and Justin Coates, “Ethicists’ Courtesy at Philosophy Conferences,” Philosophical Psychology 35 (2012): 331–40.

115.  Analects 2.15, cited in Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 6.

116.  Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation.

117.  Zhu Xi, Zhuzi yulei, 190, cited in Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, 184.

118.  James Maffie, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2014).

119.  Thomas M. Norton-Smith, The Dance of Person and Place: One Interpretation of American Indian Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).

120.  Dale Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Toward a Critical Indigenous Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).

121.  Anne Waters, ed., American Indian Thought (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003).

122.  Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

123.  Kwazi Wiredu, Philosophy and an African Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

3. TRUMP’S PHILOSOPHERS

The epigraphs to chapter 3 are from Donald J. Trump, Announcement of Presidential Candidacy, June 16, 2015, New York, NY; Mao Zedong, “Mount Liupan,” translation mine but see Willis Barnstone, ed., The Poems of Mao Zedong (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 68–69 for the Chinese text and an alternative translation; Richard Nixon, “Exchange with Reporters at the Great Wall of China,” February 24, 1972. (In context, Nixon’s comment is not as silly as it sounds.)

    1.  近平, “青年要自觉践行社会主义核心价值观” (speech delivered May 4, 2014, uploaded July 20, 2015), http://cpc.people.com.cn/xuexi/n/2015/0720/c397563–27331773.html. Translation mine.

    2.  Days after the election, Trump acknowledged that it could be “part wall, part fence” (interview with Lesley Stahl, “The 45th President,” 60 Minutes, aired November 13, 2016). A few weeks after that, he admitted that parts of the border do not need a wall “because you have, you know, you have mountains, you have other things” (interview with Sean Hannity, Fox News, December 1, 2016, http://insider.foxnews.com/2016/12/01/donald-trump-hannity-his-election-victory-message-protesters). This version of Trump’s plan would involve no change from current policy, since the border already has a combination of walls, fences, and natural barriers.

    3.  Trump, Announcement of Presidential Candidacy.

    4.  Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, “Migration Flows Between the US and Mexico Have Slowed—and Turned Toward Mexico,” Pew Research Center, November 19, 2015, www.pewhispanic.org/2015/11/19/chapter-1-migration-flows-between-the-u-s-and-mexico-have-slowed-and-turned-toward-mexico/#number-of-unauthorized-mexican-immigrants-declines.

    5.  Richard Pérez-Peña, “Contrary to Trump’s Claims, Immigrants Are Less Likely to Commit Crimes,” New York Times, January 26, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/us/trump-illegal-immigrants-crime.html.

    6.  The prevalence of the us vs. them mindset is illustrated by a comment from Representative Robert Pittenger (R, NC). When asked what motivated those who protested a police shooting in Charlotte, he asserted: “The grievance in their minds is—the animus, the anger—they hate white people because white people are successful and they’re not.” “NC Congressman: ‘Protestors Hate White People Because They’re Successful,’ ” New York Post, September 22, 2016, http://nypost.com/2016/09/22/nc-congressman-protesters-hate-white-people-because-theyre-successful/. (Videos and photographs show what is clearly a multiracial group of protestors.)

    7.  Since the election, some conservatives have crowed that Trump’s victory shows how out of touch the intellectual elite is with mainstream America. See Charles C. Camosy, “Trump Won Because College-Educated Americans Are out of Touch,” Washington Post, November 9, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/09/trump-won-because-college-educated-americans-are-out-of-touch/. However, the reality is that 53 percent of those who voted opposed Donald Trump, Clinton won the plurality of the popular vote, and she won “big league” among both Americans under thirty and people of color (who constitute the fastest-growing share of the US population). The future does not look bright for those who supported Trump.

    8.  Bob Herbert, “Righting Reagan’s Wrongs?” New York Times, November 13, 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/opinion/13herbert.html.

    9.  Alexander P. Lamis, ed., Southern Politics in the 1990s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 8. The Atwater interview was not noticed by the mainstream media until it was cited in an editorial by Bob Herbert, “Impossible, Ridiculous, Repugnant,” New York Times, October 6, 2005, www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/opinion/impossible-ridiculous-repugnant.html. The audio recording of the interview is archived at Rick Perlstein, “Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy,” Nation, November 13, 2012, www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/.

  10.  Andrew Jacobs, “Confucius Statue Vanishes Near Tiananmen Square,” New York Times, April 22, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/04/23/world/asia/23confucius.html.

  11.  I have visited Mao’s mausoleum on several occasions. On each visit, I have been told that the body is not available for viewing because it is being “cleaned.” I am beginning to think that he just doesn’t want to see me.

  12.  Chris Buckley, “Mocking Mao Backfires for Chinese TV Host,” Sinosphere, blog, New York Times, April 9, 2015, http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/joking-about-mao-lands-tv-host-in-hot-water/.

  13.  Nonetheless, the amount of support for Mao, at least as a symbol, is often surprising to first-time visitors to China. A nontrivial number of young people, who have no firsthand knowledge of the Cultural Revolution, actually seem nostalgic about it. See Kiki Zhao, “Graduates’ Red Guard Photos Cast Doubts on What They Learned,” Sinosphere, blog, New York Times, June 26, 2014, http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/graduates-red-guard-photos-cast-doubt-on-what-they-learned/. I have even met intellectuals who were “rusticated” during the Cultural Revolution (sent to do hard labor in the countryside) who feel that China under Mao had a positive moral spirit that is lacking in China today.

  14.  Paul Gewirtz, “Xi, Mao, and China’s Search for a Usable Past,” China File, January 14, 2014, www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/viewpoint/xi-mao-and-chinas-search-usable-past.

  15.  See, for example, Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).

  16.  Fu Danni, “Life Is Meaningless, Say China’s Top Students,” Sixth Tone, November 23, 2016, www.sixthtone.com/news/life-meaningless-say-china’s-top-students.

  17.  This is very similar to the view developed in Mengzi 6A15, cited in Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van Norden, eds., Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), 151.

  18.  Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Aaron Asher (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996), 4.

  19.  I originally developed the ideas in the preceding paragraph in “Zhuangzi’s Ironic Detachment and Political Commitment,” Dao 15, no. 1 (March 2016): 1–17.

  20.  I was the only philosopher at the conference who was not Chinese. When I showed my son the official group photograph of the conference, he quipped, “Where’s Waldo?”

  21.  Chris Buckley and Didi Tatlow, “Cultural Revolution Steeled a Schoolboy, Now China’s Leader,” New York Times, September 25, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/09/25/world/asia/xi-jinping-china-cultural-revolution.html. After the Cultural Revolution, Xi studied chemical engineering and later earned an LLD from Tsinghua University (the MIT of China).

  22.  我觉得我们当时那一代青年成长履历就是红卫兵时代跟着激动，那是一种情绪，那是一种氛围；到了文化革命理想破灭，最后变得甚至是一种虚无的。(央视《东方时空》省委书记系列专访:习近平) November 16, 2003, http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2003–11–16/11182145564.shtml. My thanks to Professor Wu Wanwei for locating the Chinese original of this quotation. English translation from Jonathan Watts, “Choice of ‘Princeling’ as the Country’s Next President Came as a Shock to Many,” Guardian, October 26, 2007, www.theguardian.com/world/2007/oct/26/china.uknews4.

  23.  Max Fisher, “Trump, Taiwan and China: The Controversy, Explained,” New York Times, December 3, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/12/03/world/asia/trump-taiwan-and-china-the-controversy-explained.html.

  24.  See Chris Buckley, “Xi Touts Communist Party as Defender of Confucius’s Virtues,” Sinosphere, blog, New York Times, February 13, 2014, http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/xi-touts-communist-party-as-defender-of-confuciuss-virtues/.

  25.  Xi Jinping, How to Read Confucius and Other Chinese Classical Thinkers, ed. Fenzhi Zhang (Jericho, NY: CN Times Books, 2015), 55. (This book consists of brief excerpts from Xi’s speeches where he mentions classical Chinese texts, along with the editor’s comments.) Xi is quoting Analects 2:1; translation from Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 5. On the Confucian emphasis on rule by moral suasion rather than brute force, see chapter 2.

  26.  Xi, How to Read Confucius, 101–2. Xi was quoting the Great Learning, commentary 3, which states that the sage-king Tang had the following phrase inscribed on his bathtub: “Genuinely renew yourself daily. Day by day renew yourself, and continue to do so each day.” As Zhu Xi (1130–1200) explains, the sage meant that “people cleanse their minds to remove evil just like they bathe their bodies to remove dirt.” See Zhu Xi, Daxue jizhu (translation mine).

  27.  Xi, How to Read Confucius, 264–65. Xi is quoting Analects 2.4; translation from Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 5. He does exactly the same thing with the phrase “at fifty, I understood Heaven’s mandate” (also from Analects 2.4) in commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and France (Xi, How to Read Confucius, 168–69).

  28.  Xi, How to Read Confucius, 185–86. Xi is quoting Analects 13.20; translation from Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 40.

  29.  Mengzi 4B11, cited in Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 139.

  30.  Kant, “On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concern,” in Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993).

  31.  习近平, “青年要自觉践行社会主义核心价值观.” Translation mine. These quotations are largely drawn from the Analects of Confucius, and the Mengzi, but some are from other classics, including the Classic of Changes and Record of Rites.

  32.  Ahmed Ali, trans., Al-Qur’an: A Contemporary Translation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

  33.  Jessica Taylor, “Citing ‘Two Corinthians’ Trump Struggles to Make the Sale to Evangelicals,” NPR, January 18, 2016, www.npr.org/2016/01/18/463528847/citing-two-corinthians-trump-struggles-to-make-the-sale-to-evangelicals.

  34.  Jenna Johnson, “Donald Trump Likes That Proverbs Verse That Might Not Exist,” Washington Post, September 16, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/09/16/donald-trump-likes-that-proverbs-verse-that-might-not-exist/.

  35.  Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 54–57.

  36.  Matt K. Lewis, Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Betrayed the Reagan Revolution to Win Elections (and How It Can Reclaim Its Conservative Roots) (New York: Hachette, 2016), xii.

  37.  Ibid., 26.

  38.  Ibid. (italics mine). Lewis’s book is the best presentation of a moderate conservative position that I have read. However, not all those on the right are so well intentioned. In response to a suggestion that the GOP needs to extend its demographic base beyond older white voters, Representative Steve King (R, IA) replied, “This ‘old white people’ business does get a little tired.… I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?” Reporter Chris Hayes asked, “Than white people?” “Than Western civilization itself,” King replied. “It’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That’s all of Western civilization.” (Interview with Chris Hayes at the Republican National Convention, MSNBC, cited in Philip Bump, “Rep. Steve King Wonders What ‘Sub Groups’ Besides Whites Made Contributions to Civilization,” Washington Post, July 18 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/18/rep-steve-king-wonders-what-sub-groups-besides-whites-made-contributions-to-civilization/.)

  39.  Lewis, Too Dumb to Fail, 98.

  40.  Ibid., 99.

  41.  See ibid., 4; Nussbaum, “Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach,” in The Quality of Life, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 242–70.

  42.  Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 221–22.

  43.  William F. Buckley, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” rev. ed. (Washington: Regnery Gateway, 1986). At a GOP fundraiser during the 1960s, my parents (both lifelong Republicans) met Buckley. My mother gushed, “I love you! I love you! I love you!” Buckley flashed his famous smile and said, “Can’t you make up your mind?”

  44.  Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).

  45.  Richard Bernstein, “In Dispute on Bias, Stanford Is Likely to Alter Western Culture Program,” New York Times, January 19, 1988, www.nytimes.com/1988/01/19/us/in-dispute-on-bias-stanford-is-likely-to-alter-western-culture-program.htm.

  46.  Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 35–36.

  47.  Ibid., 37.

  48.  Ibid., 36. Bloom studied under Leo Strauss, who made similar claims about the need for myths in his seminal The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

  49.  Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 60.

  50.  Ibid., 94.

  51.  Sam Levin, “After Brock Turner: Did the Stanford Sexual Assault Case Change Anything?” Guardian, September 1, 2016, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/01/brock-turner-stanford-assault-case-did-anything-change.

  52.  Belinda-Rose Young, Sarah L. Desmarais, Julie A. Baldwin, and Rasheeta Chandler, “Sexual Coercion Practices Among Undergraduate Male Recreational Athletes, Intercollegiate Athletes, and Non-Athletes,” Violence Against Women, May 30, 2016.

  53.  See Jean Edward Smith, Bush (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016), 13–14; and Gwenda Blair, The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 241. Bush the Younger and Trump are not isolated incidents. See Daniel Golden, The Price of Admission (New York: Broadway, 2007) for an exposé of how the wealthy routinely buy admission into elite colleges for their children.

  54.  Award-winning author Jennine Capó Crucet, the first person in her family to attend college, explains how absolutely incomprehensible and terrifying everything about college was to her and her family, including things so obvious to most students that they are never explained. “Taking My Parents to College,” New York Times, August 22, 2015, http://nyti.ms/1Lr81YG.

  55.  Hendrik Hertzberg, “Buckley, Vidal, and the ‘Queer’ Question,” New Yorker, July 31, 2015, www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/buckley-vidal-and-the-queer-question.

  56.  White House Press Briefing by Deputy Press Secretary Larry Speakes, October 15, 1982. See the brief documentary film with the audio of the exchange by Scott Calonic, “When AIDS Was Funny,” December 1, 2015, http://video.vanityfair.com/watch/the-reagan-administration-s-chilling-response-to-the-aids-crisis.

  57.  The statement was in a direct mailing sent out over the signature of Gregory T. Angelo, president of the Log Cabin Republicans (a pro-LGBT conservative group), cited in Steve Rothaus, “Log Cabin Republicans: Party Passes ‘Most Anti-LBGT Platform’ in GOP History,” Miami Herald, July 12, 2016, www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/gay-south-florida/article89235362.html.

  58.  Will Drabold, “Here’s What Mike Pence Said on LGBT Issues Over the Years,” Time, July 15, 2016, http://time.com/4406337/mike-pence-gay-rights-lgbt-religious-freedom/.

  59.  See Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (New York: Penguin, 2001). Bellow, who wrote the foreword to The Closing of the American Mind, explicitly stated in interviews that Bloom is the model for the title character of this roman à clef.

  60.  D. T. Max, “With Friends Like Saul Bellow,” New York Times, April 16, 2000, www.nytimes.com/2000/04/16/magazine/with-friends-like-saul-bellow.html. This review is an informative and insightful discussion of the general issue of the relationship between Bloom and Bellow’s Ravelstein.

4. WELDERS AND PHILOSOPHERS

The quotation from Johst that is one of the epigraphs to chapter 4 is literally “Whenever I hear culture … I unlock my Browning” (“Wenn ich Kultur höre … entsichere ich meinen Browning”). The line is from a play written by Johst, and the ellipsis is in the original, indicating a pause, not text left out. A Browning is a kind of semiautomatic pistol, and to “unlock” it is to take the safety off. See Quote/Counterquote, July 7, 2014, www.quotecounterquote.com/2011/02/whenever-i-hear-word-culture.html. See below for the epigraph quotation of Marco Rubio.

    1.  “Republican Candidates’ Debate in Milwaukee Wisconsin,” American Presidency Project, November 10, 2015, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=110908.

    2.  For an interactive chart that will allow you to compare the lifetime earnings of specific majors, see www.payscale.com/college-salary-report/degrees-and-majors-lifetime-earnings.

    3.  Bourree Lam, “The Earning Power of Philosophy Majors,” Atlantic, September 3, 2015, www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/09/philosophy-majors-out-earn-other-humanities/403555/.

    4.  “Value of Philosophy: Charts and Graphs,” DailyNous, http://dailynous.com/value-of-philosophy/charts-and-graphs/.

    5.  Ibid.

    6.  See Paul Jung, MD, “Major Anxiety,” www.amsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Major-Anxiety.doc; “Philosophy for Pre-Law and Pre-Med,” Philosophy Department, UC Davis, http://philosophy.ucdavis.edu/undergraduate-program/philosophy-for-pre-law-and-pre-med-students; and “Philosophy a Practical Choice,” Department of Philosophy, Belmont University, www.belmont.edu/philosophy/general_information/. See also “Kaveh Kamooneh’s Student Resource Pages,” www2.gsu.edu/~phlkkk/foryou.html#MCAT.

    7.  Emily P. Walker, “New MCAT: Hard Science No Longer Sole Aim,” MedPage Today, n.d., www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/GeneralProfessionalIssues/31219.

    8.  David Silbersweig, “A Harvard Medical School Professor Makes the Case for Liberal Arts and Philosophy,” Washington Post, December 24, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/12/24/a-harvard-medical-school-professor-makes-the-case-for-the-liberal-arts-and-philosophy/.

    9.  In chapter 5, I shall discuss the distinctive contribution that philosophy makes to the humanities and social sciences.

  10.  Examples include Yuanpei College of Peking University, College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Tokyo, Ashoka University, Delhi, College of Liberal Studies of Seoul National University, S. H. Ho College of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Yale-NUS College in Singapore. See Sergei Klebnikov, “The Rise of Liberal Arts Colleges in Asia,” Forbes, June 3, 2015, www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2015/06/03/the-rise-of-liberal-arts-colleges-in-asia/. A representative view is expressed by Po Chung, cofounder of the multinational corporation DHL, who explained that the liberal arts education he received at Whittier College in the United States paid off in his career in ways that he never expected. Consequently, he is now an ardent supporter of the growing liberal arts programs in Hong Kong (“How General Education Can Sharpen Hong Kong’s Edge,” South China Morning Post, October 23, 2012).

  11.  “Transcript: Marco Rubio: ‘I Ask the American People, Do Not Give in to Fear,’ ” Los Angeles Times, March 15, 2016, www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-prez-marco-rubio-speech-transcript-20160315-story.html.

  12.  Donovan Slack, “Whoops! Carly Fiorina Falls off Stage,” USA Today, May 2, 2016, www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/05/02/whoops-carly-fiorina-falls-ted-cruz/83831470/.

  13.  Phil Mattingly, “Ben Carson’s Longshot Presidential Bid Suddenly Looks a Lot More Realistic,” Bloomberg Politics, October 15, 2014, www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014–10–15/carsons-longshot-presidential-bid-suddenly-looks-a-lot-more-realistic.

  14.  For discussions, see R. Bett, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Skepticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); John Cooper, “Arcesilaus: Socratic and Sceptic,” in Knowledge, Nature, and the Good: Essays on Ancient Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Katja Vogt, “Ancient Skepticism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2015 ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/skepticism-ancient/.

  15.  For discussions of the various Western philosophical schools in this era, see Gisela Striker, Essays on Hellenistic Epistemology and Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); and John M. Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

  16.  Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. 38. See Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, abridged by Frank C. Bourne (Garden City, NY: Nelson Doubleday, 1963), 579.

  17.  Ibid., 239–40.

  18.  Ibid., 580.

  19.  For a more up-to-date account, see Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

  20.  Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 579.

  21.  Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1966).

  22.  Jean Edward Smith, Bush (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016), 14.

  23.  Matt K. Lewis, Too Dumb to Fail (New York: Hachette, 2016), 105.

  24.  The earliest political use of “Palinize” may be due to Sebastian Mallaby of the Washington Post in “McCain’s Convenient Untruth,” September 7, 2008, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/07/AR2008090701950.html.

  25.  “Sarah Palin: Mama Grizzlies,” YouTube, July 8, 2010, https://youtu.be/oF-OsHTLfxM?t=33s.

  26.  Schiff continues: “An actual grizzly mom is a single mom.… What Mama Grizzly wouldn’t believe in school lunches, health insurance and quality childcare? Who’s going to look after the kids while she’s off hunting?” Gail Collins and Stacy Schiff, “Of Mama Grizzly Born?” New York Times, August 18, 2010, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/of-mama-grizzly-born/. Palin is eminently easy to mock, but she is also a tragic figure, as her former supporter and editor, Matt K. Lewis, reminds us. Lewis, “You Betcha I Was Wrong About Sarah Palin,” Daily Beast, January 28, 2015, www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/28/you-betcha-i-was-wrong-about-sarah-palin.html.

  27.  Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Anchor, 2007), 114.

  28.  On Lincoln’s fondness for Euclid, see David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 142–43; and Henry Ketcham, The Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: A. L. Burt, 1901), 64–65. For the influence of Pericles on Lincoln, see Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).

  29.  See Patricia Zengerle, “Huntsman Wouldn’t Be the Only U.S. President to Speak Chinese,” Reuters, January 9, 2012, http://blogs.reuters.com/talesfromthetrail/2012/01/09/huntsman-wouldnt-be-the-only-u-s-president-to-speak-chinese/, and Georgius Agricola, De Re Metalica, trans. Herbert Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover (New York: Dover, 1950).

  30.  President Ronald Reagan, Televised Speech from the Oval Office, March 4, 1987. Reagan also believed that the Chernobyl nuclear accident fulfilled a prophecy in the Bible. Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, rev. ed. (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), 679. Haines Johnson probably gives the best overall assessment of Reagan: “He was much more than he seemed to his detractors, who continually disparaged him, and much less than his partisan followers believed him to be.” Johnson, Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years, rev. ed. (New York: Anchor, 1992), 41.

  31.  George W. Bush, Campaign Speech at Bentonville, Arkansas, November 6, 2000.

  32.  Donald J. Trump, Campaign Rally in Hilton Head Island, SC, November 25, 2016, video archived at http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/30/trump-i-know-words-i-have-the-best-words-obama-is-stupid-video/. As if to prove my point that the Democratic and Republican parties have traded identities, Trump has hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office, and laid a wreath on Jackson’s grave. Jamelle Bouie, “Donald Trump Sees Himself in Andrew Jackson,” Slate, March 15, 2017, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/03/donald_trump_sees_himself_in_andrew_jackson_they_deserve_one_another.html.

  33.  Francis Perraudin, “Scott Walker Dodges Question About Evolution Beliefs During Trade Visit to UK,” Guardian, February 11, 2015, www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/11/scott-walker-special-relationship-trade-cheese-republican-chris-christie.

  34.  Brian Tashman, “Rafael Cruz: Evolution Is a Communist Lie,” Right Wing Watch, November 4, 2013, www.rightwingwatch.org/content/rafael-cruz-evolution-communist-lie-gay-rights-endanger-children.

  35.  Michael Hainey, “All Eyez on Him,” GQ, November 19, 2012, www.gq.com/story/marco-rubio-interview-gq-december-2012.

  36.  Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961), 113–16.

  37.  Ibid., bks. 11–13.

  38.  Francis Bacon, “Of Atheism,” in Essays, ed. John Pitcher (New York: Penguin, 1986), 107.

  39.  Including Marilyn McCord Adams, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoffer, Rudolf Bultmann, Hermann Cohen, Gustavo Gutierrez, Stanley Hauerwas, Bernard Lonergan, Jürgen Moltmann, Reinhold Neibuhr, Karl Rahner, Rashid Rida, Franz Rosenzweig, Elizabeth Stuart, Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad, and Paul Tillich.

  40.  Including Elizabeth Anscombe, Martin Buber, Michael Dummett, Bas van Fraassen, Emmanuel Levinas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Nicholas Rescher, Paul Ricoeur, Eleonore Stump, and Charles Taylor.

  41.  Cannon, President Reagan, 30. The transcript of the relevant press conference is archived as Alex C. Kaempfer, “Press Conference of Governor Ronald Reagan,” February 28, 1967, http://chronicle.com/items/biz/pdf/Reagan_press_conference_02–28–1967.pdf.

  42.  Cited in Dan Berrett, “The Day the Purpose of College Changed,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 26, 2015, http://chronicle.com/article/The-Day-the-Purpose-of-College/151359/.

  43.  Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004, www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html. Suskind does not name the speaker, but he has been identified as Rove. See Mark Danner, “Words in a Time of War: On Rhetoric, Truth, and Power,” in What Orwell Didn’t Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics, ed. András Szántó (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), 23.

  44.  The exception is Rand Paul, whose educational background is bizarre. He was studying biology and English when he dropped out of college and somehow got admitted to medical school. He is now an ophthalmologist who founded his own accreditation agency so that he would not have to be accredited by the state. The original board members of this agency were Paul himself (as president), his wife Kelley (as vice president), and his father-in-law (as secretary). “Rand Paul’s Doctor Credentials Questioned for Lacking Top Board’s Certification,” Associated Press, June 14, 2010, www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/06/14/rand-pauls-doctor-credentials-questioned-lacking-boards-certification.html.

  45.  John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 373.

  46.  Ibid., 372.

  47.  Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 70. On his experience interrogating leading Nazis, see ibid., 7–8.

  48.  Ibid., 71.

  49.  See Berrett, “The Day the Purpose of College Changed.”

  50.  Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 17–18.

  51.  Thomas Jefferson, preamble to “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd, Charles T. Cullen, John Catanzariti, Barbara B. Oberg, et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 2:526–27.

  52.  Galileo, The Assayer, in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. Stillman Drake (New York: Anchor, 1957), 237–38.

  53.  A seminal work on this point is Alexandre Koyré, “Galileo and Plato,” Journal of the History of Ideas 4, no. 4 (October 1943): 400–28.

  54.  R. J. Hankinson, “Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 162–63.

  55.  Aristotle himself was influenced by Plato’s method of dichotomous division. For an introduction to the issues, see Montgomery Furth, “Aristotle’s Biological Universe: An Overview,” in Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology, ed. Allan Gotthelf and James G. Lennox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 21–52. For more on Aristotle’s contribution to biology, see Max Delbrück, “Aristotle-totle-totle,” in Of Microbes and Life, ed. Jacques Monod and Ernest Borek (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 50–55.

  56.  Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, 252–256. Galileo couches his point in hypothetical terms, but this is presumably because he was wary of making unqualified assertions that would get him in trouble with the Inquisition.

  57.  “Rapport fait a l’Académie Royale des Sciences, par MM. Fougerous, Cadet & Lavoisier, d’une observation, communiquée par M. l’abbé Bachela, sur une Pierre qu’on pretend être tombée du ciel pendant un orage,” Observations sur la Physique (June 1772): 63–76, cited in Matt Salusbury, “Meteor Man,” Fortean Times 265 (August 2010), http://mattsalusbury.blogspot.com/2010/08/meteor-man-from-fortean-times-265.html.

  58.  Arthur Fine, The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism, and the Quantum Theory, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

  59.  Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1989), §18, 24.

  60.  Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 117. For more on medieval Scholastic criticisms and refinements of Aristotle’s view, see ibid., 115–23.

  61.  Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 16.

  62.  Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990), 155.

  63.  Matt Warman, “Stephen Hawking Tells Google ‘Philosophy Is Dead,’ ” Telegraph, May 17, 2011, www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8520033/Stephen-Hawking-tells-Google-philosophy-is-dead.html. I have a philosophical colleague who was at a public lecture that Hawking gave on the problem of free will and determinism. He said he was honored to have been invited, but wanted to slink out in embarrassment after hearing the talk. He explained: “If Hawking’s talk were turned in as an essay in a freshman philosophy course, it would have earned a B+ at best.” Sounds like Stephen should keep his day job.

  64.  This distinction comes from Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

  65.  Albert Einstein, Letter to Thornton, December 7, 1944, Einstein Archive, 61–574.

  66.  Erwin Schrödinger, Nature and the Greeks (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 95.

  67.  It goes without saying that I just used the rhetorical device of apophasis.

  68.  John Cleese, “Ideas Transform,” public service announcements by John Cleese in honor of the hundredth anniversary of the American Philosophical Association, 2000, www.publicphilosophy.org/media/100YearsofPhilosophyInAmerica/18-IdeasTransform.mp3.

5. THE WAY OF CONFUCIUS AND SOCRATES

The epigraphs at the beginning of chapter 5 are from Plato, Republic, bk. 1, 352d (translation mine), and Analects 7.6, cited in Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van Norden, eds., Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), 21.

    1.  As I have noted in other publications, we can further divide relativism according to whether claims are taken to be relative to individuals or cultures. This gives us four possibilities: subjective ethical relativism, cultural ethical relativism, subjective cognitive relativism, cultural cognitive relativism. See Bryan W. Van Norden, “Competing Interpretations of the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi,” Philosophy East and West 46, no. 2 (April 1996): 248; and Van Norden, review of Scott Cook, ed., Hiding the World in the World, China Review International 12, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 1–2.

    2.  Plato, Theatetus 170e; Mozi, “Canon” B79, translation in Angus C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989), 185.

    3.  This point is made very convincingly by Justin E. H. Smith in The Philosopher: A History in Six Types (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

    4.  I am influenced here by Richard Rorty’s notion that hermeneutics is “abnormal discourse”: “Normal discourse (a generalization of Kuhn’s notion of ‘normal science’) is any discourse (scientific, political, theological, or whatever) which embodies agreed-upon criteria for reaching agreement; abnormal discourse is any which lacks such criteria.” Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 11.

    5.  I am indebted to an anonymous referee and to Wendy Lochner for encouraging me to address the issues raised in this paragraph and the next.

    6.  Alasdair MacIntyre, “Incommensurability, Truth, and the Conversation Between Confucians and Aristotelians About the Virtues,” in Culture and Modernity, ed. Eliot Deutsch (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), 113.

    7.  Aristotle’s Organon and Descartes’s Discourse on Method are just two classic examples of philosophical works whose authors think they have solved the problem of correct methodology. And neither Confucius nor the Buddha thinks there is any fundamental methodological problem that they have yet to solve. See also Smith, The Philosopher, on the variety of conceptions of philosophy.

    8.  Wang Chong, Balanced Inquiries, chap. 24, “Dao xu.” (Translation mine, but compare Alfred Forke, trans., Lun-hêng, part 1, Philosophical Essays of Wang Ch’ung [1907].)

    9.  The conclusion of George Lucas’s film THX 1138 invokes the Platonic allegory of the cave.

  10.  Plato, Republic (Stephanus 514a–517b), trans. G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 186–89.

  11.  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 10, chap. 4. (My translation, but compare Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985], 276.)

  12.  Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), chap. 2.

  13.  Lee H. Yearley, Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 144–68; and Bryan W. Van Norden, “Mencius on Courage,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 21, no. 1 (September 1997), ed. Peter French, Theodore Uehling, and Howard Wettstein, 237–56.

  14.  Analects 1.2, cited in Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 3. See also the discussion of the passage in Zhu Xi’s commentary, cited in Tiwald and Van Norden, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014), 195–96.

  15.  I am not denying that they also engage in the other forms of philosophical dialogue I have identified, but it would be presumptuous of me to assert that they do based on my current level of knowledge.

  16.  Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 63–64.

  17.  Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 1.

  18.  Hillary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1981), 1–21.

  19.  Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 199–201.

  20.  Philippa Foot, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,” in Virtues and Vices (New York: Clarendon, 1993), 19–32.

  21.  David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

  22.  Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), chap. 3, “The New Riddle of Induction.”

  23.  Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 171.

  24.  Bryan W. Van Norden, “Unweaving the ‘One Thread’ of Analects 4.15,” in Confucius and the “Analects”: New Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 216–36.

  25.  Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990), 161.

  26.  Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (London: Unwin, 1975), 149. Russell also discussed how important the poetry of Shelley (35) and Blake (55) had been to him.

  27.  That such a horrible experience of a friend’s suffering could have a positive effect on one’s character illustrates Iris Murdoch’s insight that “the kind of suffering which brings wisdom cannot be named and cannot without blasphemy be prayed for.” Murdoch, The Nice and the Good (New York: Penguin, 1978), 56.

  28.  Plato, Seventh Letter, in Paul Friedländer, Plato: An Introduction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 5. Some question whether the Seventh Letter is authentic; see, for example, Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede, The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter, ed. Dominic Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). However, I am inclined to agree with my old teacher, Charles Kahn, that the arguments against its authenticity are unpersuasive. See Kahn, review of Buryneat and Frede, The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, November 9, 2015, http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/62135-the-pseudo-platonic-seventh-letter/.

  29.  Iain King, “Thinkers at War: John Rawls,” Military History Monthly, June 13, 2014, www.military-history.org/articles/thinkers-at-war-john-rawls.htm.

  30.  John Rawls, “Fifty Years After Hiroshima,” Dissent (Summer 1995), www.dissentmagazine.org/article/50-years-after-hiroshima-2.

  31.  Ved Mehta, The Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 50.

  32.  James Stockdale, “The World of Epictetus,” in Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life, 3rd ed., ed. Christina Sommers and Fred Sommers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1993), 658–74.

  33.  See chapter 4.

  34.  See chapter 3.

  35.  Stockdale, “World of Epictetus,” 670–71.

  36.  King, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1986), 372.

  37.  Ibid., 291.

  38.  Ibid., 46–48.

  39.  Plato, Apology, 38a (translation mine).