Selections from Confucius' Analects
For Tuesday, please read some selected passages from the Analects of Confucius. Here is the list of passages: Download file
Read all the passages in one topic area together and make notes about two matters: what Confucius is saying and your questions about his view. Bring these notes to class on Tuesday.
Also, in the Stanford Encyclopedia, search Confucius, and read the full article on Chinese Ethics that shows up on the first page of search results and the section on ethical commensurablity from the article Comparative Philosophy: Chinese and Western.
Note: these articles are difficult, and I don't expect you to understand them completely. From the article on ethical commensurability, try to understand in a general way what topics in Western ethics are like those discussed by Confucius -- in particular, how the interest in virtue ethics connects to his moral advice, and how the discussion of rights raises questions about his moral view. You don't need to read beyond the discussion of Confucius, in this section. In the article "Chinese Ethics," again there is more material than you can digest easily. Look for information about just this: on what points did contemporaries and later philosophers disagree with Confucius. What were the anti-Confucian schools like? For this purpose, the accounts of the schools that were close to Confucius in time, say within 500 years of him, are much more important than the accounts of later movements, and the accounts of schools arising in response to his teaching are more important than accounts of Taoist and Buddhist views.
The point in reading these is to get a general orientation on two matters: (1) in what ways are Western philosophers interested in Confucius, and (2) what alternatives to his view were current in Chinese thought?