A Panoramic History of Traditional Chinese Ethics

This book traces the trajectory of traditional Chinese ethics from West Zhou Dynasty (1046－771 BC) through Qing Dynasty (1616—1912) and covers a myriad of Chinese philosophers who have expressed their ideas about the relationships between Heavenly Dao vs. Earthly Dao, Good vs. Evil, Morality vs. Legality, Knowledge vs. Behavior, Motive vs. Result, Righteousness vs. Profitability, Rationality vs. Animality. In this book, the readers can find Confucius’s discussion on Rite and Benevolence, Lao Zi’s meditation on Inaction of Great Dao, Zhuang Zi’s elaboration on “Transcendental Freedom”, Mohist utilitarian “Universal Love”, and Mencian theory of “Primordial Good Humanity”, to name just a few phenomenal figures. A compact yet elaborate, panoramic yet profound guidebook to traditional Chinese ethical thought, this book is an excellent window to showcase traditional Chinese mental and spiritual legacy.
 
Composed, translated, and proofread by brilliant scholars, it produces a fluent and coherent English discourse of Chinese morality and ethics, nimbly spinning together the threads of Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and other ideological schools with brief references to the historical situation. Consequently, it provides English readers, especially those curious about Chinese psychology and rationality, with thought-provoking and horizon-expanding perspectives, and provides Chinese readers, especially those of philosophy and translation, with a great number of typical and characteristic quotes of archaic Chinese that have never been translated before. Ultimately, it is a fundamental threshold to learning about Chinese people, Chinese culture, Chinese morality, Chinese mentality, Chinese policy, and Chinese diplomacy.

Professor Yi-ting ZHU (朱贻庭) is an expert of Chinese philosophy and ethics at the Department of Philosophy of East China Normal University, and the honorary Chair of Shanghai Society of Ethical Studies. Long committed to the studies of classic Chinese ethics, he has won many distinguished prizes, among which “A Prize for Lifelong Achievement” issued by Chinese Society of Ethics is of greatest significance. Besides more than a hundred of essays in various academic journals, he has composed such monographs as A History of Traditional Chinese Ethics, Six Distinctive Aspects of Traditional Chinese Morality, and Contemporary Chinese Moral Orientation, compiled such dictionaries as A Great Dictionary of Ethics, A Dictionary of Applied Ethics, and served as one of the major compilers of 6th and 7th editions of A Grand Chinese Lexicon Dictionary《辞海》.


Professor Xiaofei Matthew WEI (魏啸飞) is a scholar of American history and Jewish American literature at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Visiting Scholar of Harvard University (2007) and Columbia University (2013). He has single-handedly chaired several academic projects, such as The National Projects of Social Sciences (2011, 2016) and The Gilder Lehman Institute Project (New York, 2007). Having authored a number of essays and monographs, his English textbook A Panoramic History of American Civilization for Colleges (2008, revised in 2013) is now of considerable influence in the country and has won once an Excellence Prize of Shanghai Municipal Committee of Education (2011) and twice the Grand Excellence Prize of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (2011, 2015).


Professor Corey L. Twitchell, a Gerald Westheimer Fellow and a scholar of Classical Languages and Literatures at the Department of Languages & Philosophy, Southern Utah University, USA.
He has done a great deal of proofreading work and translated into English Judaism for Christians: Menasseh Ben Israel (1604-1657) by Sina Rauschenbach (Lanham, MD:Lexington Books, October 2019), and Tzimtzum: God and the Origins of the World  by Christoph Schulte (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, under contract, forthcoming 2020). 


Professor Barry D. Steben, who learned the history of Chinese thoughts and religion at the University of British Columbia, and obtained his Ph.D. of East Asian philosophy at the University of Toronto, claims highly fluent Mandarin Chinese plus strong background in classical Chinese, and 18 years of university teaching in East Asia, such as Chinese University of Hong Kong, National Taiwan University, National University of Singapore, and Shanghai International Studies University. He has composed such representative works as “Dao Companion to Japanese Confucian Philosophy”, “Nishi Amane and the Birth of ‘Philosophy’ and ‘Chinese Philosophy’ in Early Meiji Japan”, “The Culture of Music and Ritual in Pre-Han Confucian Thought: Exalting the Power of Music in Human Life”, and “Wang Yangming Learning and the Path to Wisdom in the Philosophy of Ōshio Heihachirō”.