American Comparative Philosophy Expert Tim Connolly Visited WHU

From May 11 to 13, associate professor Tim Connolly, a US expert on Comparative Philosophy, director of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of the East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, was invited to visit our university, and he delivered a lecture entitled "Competing Interpretations of Early Confucian Ethics".

Professor Connolly firstly introduced the main research results on Confucian ethics which were recently published in the English-speaking world, and analyzed two representative viewpoints. One view is to interpret Confucian ethics somewhat similar to the western Aristotelian virtue ethics, believing that Confucian regards the virtues of the man as a fundamental characteristic, and how to cultivate moral virtue is the main question; the other view regards Confucian as role ethics, and it believes that Confucian ethics is absent in the West and is purely Chinese thinking. Professor Connolly believes that both viewpoints hold water to some extent, but we cannot simply generalize a person as virtue or role, both of which are fundamental, virtues are manifested through role, but it does not equal to roles.