Introduction to Chinese Philosophy - Article Review

According to the article “Introduction to Chinese Philosophy” that we reviewed in class, Confucius had a great influence on the development of the Chinese culture. Confucius traveled the world looking for a ruler that would listen to the things he had to say. Confucius stressed the importance of high moral behavior. Confucius’s ideas influenced values and the habits of thoughts of the Chinese culture. His most important topic included the role of gentleman in society, humanity, filial piety, and proper governing.

​Through the practice of behavioral dialogues, Confucius taught that moral excellence was achieved meaning, a humane or virtuous disposition was expressed through prescribed exchanges of respect that would be performed ritualistically between cultured individuals. (David W. Black 2014)

The function of a moral reconstruction practice Confucius calls the ‘‘rectification of names.’’ To lead the charge in the ‘‘rectification of names’ is something that Confucius said that the top priority of a government would be. According to the article (Confucius on Educational Failure) Confucius wasn't worried , for example, about the popular names we might assign to a non-living object or the purely denotative names we could relate with a game or a placid weather pattern. Instead he focuses on the names that are given to groups of people and to the establishment and traditions such people represent. Even here he seems most concerned not with just any group of people but only with those individuals holding a certain status or social station in life.

Strongly, Confucius expressed objection to this when he says, ‘‘Let a ruler be a ruler, a subject be a subject, a father be a father, and a son a son’’.

It is ideally possible that by edict, diploma, or even right of birth the names of ‘‘ruler’’ or ‘‘teacher’’ can be applied to individuals; but, for Confucius, these names always connote an ideal pattern of behavior that is embedded in their meticulous usage and that allows ‘‘a ruler to be a ruler.’’

To get a better understanding of Plato’s ideal city it was best viewed as one that promoted an authoritarian type of communitarianism (Paul Ramsey 2009), and it is this state that has much in common with the educational aims and assumptions of today’s political Right, a label, although prima facie overly simplistic, still retains some intellectual value.

Plato’s ideal society (Paul Ramsey 2009), the contents of poetry, drama, and all other mechanisms of cultural transmission are carefully censored soothed can provide the natives with the values needed to preserve the polis in its perfect form. The young natives are then educated with the uncontaminated cultural arts through a public system of education, thus reproducing the social ideals in the coming generations.

A society that elevates cohesion and stability to the supreme virtues of a state, a society that has conserved the best of the past and present to achieve communal solidarity was the view of Plato’s idea city.

I would like, for some reason to think that people would not need someone telling them what to do, when to do, how, or even why to do something or even being and example for one individual to make the right choices in life. People are stubborn though, and we sometimes don't like to listen to good advice or wisdom. We sometimes tend to take it upon ourselves to act in such a manner that we embarrass ourselves or our families.

Evil lives inside quite a few people in this world, and it takes a toll on the ones that try to do right day in and day out. I don't think a Philosopher-King is needed to control an individual, I simply think that one must be able to control whats burning inside of them, and become there own example, or even a positive one for someone else.

​Plato (427?-347? B.C.) and Confucius (ca. 551-479 B.C.) lived only about half a century apart, but in two culturally unrelated worlds. The influence of these two thinkers on humankind can be measured only on the grandest scale of time and space. For about two and a half millennia, the thoughts of Plato and Confucius have shaped all aspects of life in those two largest cultural spheres that are known, respectively, as the West and the East. To compare Platonic and Confucian thought is to embark on an expedition back to the fountainheads of Western and Eastern cultures. By comparing the ideas of Plato and Confucius, we can observe similarities and differences between these cultures at their infancy and better understand why the two great traditions would develop as they did. For this reason, Plato-Confucius