Mencius

Sunday, 10 February 2013

CHINESE CULTURE--- MENCIUS SPEAKS part 1(ENGLISH SUBS) .mp4

From the Sacred Works of Mencius: Gong Sun Chou I - P1/2

Temple of Mencius and Meng Family Mansion，Shandong, China

Mencius Moldbug: How to Reboot the US Government

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China
China (ⁱ/ˈtʃaɪnə/; Chinese: 中国; pinyin: Zhōngguó; see also Names of China), officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is the world's most-populous country, with a population of over 1.3 billion. Covering approximately 9.6 million square kilometres, the East Asian state is the world's second-largest country by land area, and the third- or fourth-largest in total area, depending on the definition of total area.
The People's Republic of China is a single-party state governed by the Communist Party of China. It exercises jurisdiction over 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four directly controlled municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing), and two mostly self-governing special administrative regions (Hong Kong and Macau). Its capital city is Beijing. The PRC also claims Taiwan—which is controlled by the Republic of China (ROC), a separate political entity—as its 23rd province, a claim controversial due to the complex political status of Taiwan and the unresolved Chinese Civil War. The PRC government denies the legitimacy of the ROC.

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Qufu
Qufu (Chinese: 曲阜; pinyin: Qū fù; Wade–Giles: Ch'ü¹-fu⁴) is a city in southwestern Shandong province, People's Republic of China. It is located at 35° 36′ northern latitude and 117° 02′ east, about 130 kilometres (81 mi) south of the provincial capital Jinan and 45 kilometres (28 mi) northeast of the prefecture seat at Jining. Qufu has an urban population of about 60,000, the entire administrative region has about 650,000 inhabitants.
Qufu is the hometown of Confucius, who is traditionally believed to have been born at the nearby Mount Ni. The city contains numerous historic palaces, temples and cemeteries. The three most famous cultural sites of the city, collectively known as San Kong (三孔), i.e. "The Three Confucian [sites]", are the Temple of Confucius (Chinese: 孔庙; pinyin: Kǒng miào), the Cemetery of Confucius (Chinese: 孔林; pinyin: Kǒng lín), and the Kong Family Mansion (Chinese: 孔府; pinyin: Kǒng fǔ). Together, these three sites have been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1994.

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Shandong
Coordinates: 36°24′N 118°24′E / 36.4°N 118.4°E / 36.4; 118.4
Shandong (help·info) (simplified Chinese: 山东; traditional Chinese: 山東; pinyin: Shāndōng; Wade–Giles: Shan¹-tung¹) is a coastal province of the People's Republic of China, and is part of the East China region. Shandong has played a major role in Chinese history from the beginning of Chinese civilization along the lower reaches of the Yellow River and served as a pivotal cultural and religious site for Taoism, Chinese Buddhism, and Confucianism. Shandong's Mount Tai is the most revered mountain of Taoism and one of the world's sites with the longest history of continuous religious worship. The Buddhist temples in the mountains to the south of the provincial capital of Jinan were once among the foremost Buddhist sites in China. The city of Qufu is the birthplace of Confucius, and was later established as the center of Confucianism. Shandong's location at the intersection of ancient as well as modern north-south and east-west trading routes have helped to establish it as an economic center. After a period of political instability and economic hardship that began in the late 19th century, Shandong has emerged as one of the most populous (95,793,065 inhabitants at the 2010 Census) and most affluent provinces in the People's Republic of China (GDP of 3.94 trillion CNY in 2010).

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Yuan Dynasty
The Yuan Dynasty (Chinese: 元朝, p Yuán Cháo; Mongolian: Их Юань улс) was the branch of Mongol Borjigin dynasty established by Kublai Khan. Although the Mongols had ruled northern China for decades, it was not until 1271 that Kublai Khan officially proclaimed the dynasty in the traditional Chinese style. His realm – the Great Yuan Empire (t 大元帝國, s 大元帝国, p Dà Yuán Dìguó) – was by this point isolated from the other khanates and controlled only most of present-day China and its surrounding areas including modern Mongolia. It was the first non-Han dynasty to rule all of China and lasted until 1368, after which its remnants in Mongolia were known as the Northern Yuan.
The Yuan is considered both a successor to the Mongol Empire and as an imperial Chinese dynasty. In official Chinese histories, the Yuan Dynasty bore the Mandate of Heaven, following the Song Dynasty and preceding the Ming Dynasty. Although the dynasty was established by Kublai Khan, he placed his grandfather Genghis Khan on the imperial records as the official founder of the dynasty as Taizu.

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Zoucheng
Zoucheng (Chinese: 邹城市; pinyin: Zōuchéng Shì) is a county-level city in the south of Shandong province in China. Historically, the name Zouxian, in a variety of transcriptions, was used for the city as well.
Zoucheng is located about 20km south of the city of Qufu, and like Qufu, is administratively under the prefecture-level city of Jining.
The philosopher Mencius was born in Zoucheng, and there are four famous sites in the city relating to Mencius, including the Mencius Temple (simplified Chinese: 孟庙; traditional Chinese: 孟廟; pinyin: Mèng Miào), the Mencius Family Mansion (Chinese: 孟府; pinyin: Mèng Fǔ), the Mencius Forest (Chinese: 孟林; pinyin: Mèng Lín, 35°28′42.27″N 117°2′56.11″E / 35.4784083°N 117.0489194°E / 35.4784083; 117.0489194), and Mencius' Mother's Forest (Chinese: 孟母林; pinyin: Mèng Mǔ Lín, 35°29′29.97″N 116°58′49.09″E / 35.4916583°N 116.9803028°E / 35.4916583; 116.9803028).
The Mencius Temple, which covers an area of more than 4 hectares (9.9 acres) on the south side of town, has five courtyards and sixty-four halls and rooms. It was built in 1037. The Mencius Mansion, where his descendants lived, is adjacent to the temple, and has 116 halls and rooms.

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Alasdair MacIntyre
Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (born 1929) is a Scottishphilosopher primarily known for his contribution to moral and political philosophy but known also for his work in history of philosophy and theology. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics (CASEP) at London Metropolitan University, and an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was born 12 January 1929 in Glasgow, to John and Emily (Chalmers) MacIntyre. He was educated at Queen Mary College, London, and has a Master of Arts from the University of Manchester and from the University of Oxford. He began his teaching career in 1951 at Manchester University. He taught at the University of Leeds, the University of Essex and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, before moving to the USA in around 1969. MacIntyre has been something of an intellectual nomad, having taught at many universities in the US. He has held the following positions:

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Aristotle
Aristotle (Ancient Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης, Aristotélēs) (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. Aristotle's writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing morality, aesthetics, logic, science, politics, and metaphysics.
Aristotle's views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics. In the zoological sciences, some of his observations were confirmed to be accurate only in the 19th century. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century into modern formal logic. In metaphysics, Aristotelianism had a profound influence on philosophical and theological thinking in the Islamic and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages, and it continues to influence Christian theology, especially the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church. His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics. All aspects of Aristotle's philosophy continue to be the object of active academic study today. Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues (Cicero described his literary style as "a river of gold"), it is thought that the majority of his writings are now lost and only about one-third of the original works have survived.

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Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal world.
Schopenhauer's most influential work, The World as Will and Representation, claimed that the world is fundamentally what humans recognize in themselves as their will. His analysis of will led him to the conclusion that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fully satisfied. The corollary of this is an ultimately painful human condition. Consequently, he considered that a lifestyle of negating desires, similar to the ascetic teachings of Vedanta, Buddhism and the Church Fathers of early Christianity, was the only way to attain liberation.
Schopenhauer's metaphysical analysis of will, his views on human motivation and desire, and his aphoristic writing style influenced many well-known thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche,Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein,Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and Jorge Luis Borges.

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Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo ( /ɒˈɡʌstɨn/ or /ˈɔːɡəstɪn/;Latin: Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis; November 13, 354 – August 28, 430), also known as Augustine, St. Augustine, St. Austin,St. Augoustinos, Blessed Augustine, or St. Augustine the Blessed, was Bishop of Hippo Regius (present-day Annaba, Algeria). He was a Latin philosopher and theologian from Roman Africa. His writings were very influential in the development of Western Christianity.
According to his contemporary, Jerome, Augustine "established anew the ancient Faith." In his early years he was heavily influenced by Manichaeism and afterward by the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus. After his conversion to Christianity and baptism in AD 387, Augustine developed his own approach to philosophy and theology, accommodating a variety of methods and different perspectives. He believed that the grace of Christ was indispensable to human freedom, and he framed the concepts of original sin and just war.
When the Western Roman Empire was starting to disintegrate, Augustine developed the concept of the Catholic Church as a spiritual City of God (in a book of the same name), distinct from the material Earthly City. His thoughts profoundly influenced the medieval worldview. Augustine's City of God was closely identified with the Church, the community that worshipped God.

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Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza and later Benedict de Spinoza (24 November 1632 – 21 February 1677) was a Dutch philosopher. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death. By laying the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment^{[citation needed]} and modern biblical criticism, he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy. His magnum opus, the posthumous Ethics, in which he opposed Descartes's mind–body dualism, has earned him recognition as one of Western philosophy's most important contributors. In the Ethics, "Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely." Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said of all contemporary philosophers, "You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all."
Spinoza's name in different languages is Hebrew: ברוך שפינוזה‎ Baruch Spinoza, Portuguese: Benedito or Bento de Espinosa and Latin: Benedictus de Spinoza; in all these languages, the given name means "the Blessed". Spinoza was raised in the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. He developed highly controversial ideas regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the nature of the Divine. The Jewish religious authorities issued a cherem (Hebrew: חרם, a kind of ban, shunning, ostracism, expulsion, or excommunication) against him, effectively excluding him from Jewish society at age 23. His books were also later put on the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books.

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Bernard Williams
Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams (21 September 1929 – 10 June 2003) was an English moral philosopher, described by The Times as the most brilliant and most important British moral philosopher of his time. His publications include Problems of the Self (1973), Moral Luck (1981), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), and Truth and Truthfulness (2002). He was knighted in 1999.
As Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, Williams became known internationally for his attempt to reorient the study of moral philosophy to history and culture, politics and psychology, and in particular to the Greeks. Described as an analytic philosopher with the soul of a humanist, he saw himself as a synthesist, drawing together ideas from fields that seemed increasingly unable to communicate with one another. He rejected scientism, and scientific or evolutionary reductionism, calling "morally unimaginative" reductionists "the people I really do dislike." For Williams, complexity was irreducible, beautiful, and meaningful.

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Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero ( /ˈsɪsɨroʊ/; Classical Latin: [ˈkɪkɛroː]; January 3, 106 BC – December 7, 43 BC; sometimes anglicized as Tully), was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, orator, political theorist, Roman consul and constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.
He introduced the Romans to the chief schools of Greek philosophy and created a Latin philosophical vocabulary (with neologisms such as humanitas, qualitas, quantitas, and essentia) distinguishing himself as a linguist, translator, and philosopher.
Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited for initiating the 14th-century Renaissance. According to Polish historian Tadeusz Zieliński, "Renaissance was above all things a revival of Cicero, and only after him and through him of the rest of Classical antiquity." The peak of Cicero's authority and prestige came during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and his impact on leading Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume, and Montesquieu was substantial. His works rank among the most influential in European culture, and today still constitute one of the most important bodies of primary material for the writing and revision of Roman history, especially the last days of the Roman Republic.

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Confucius
Confucius (551–479 BC) was a Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher of the Spring and Autumn Period of Chinese history.
The philosophy of Confucius emphasized personal and governmental morality, correctness of social relationships, justice, and sincerity. His followers competed successfully with many other schools during the Hundred Schools of Thought era only to be suppressed in favor of the Legalists during the Qin Dynasty. Following the victory of Han over Chu after the collapse of Qin, Confucius's thoughts received official sanction and were further developed into a system known as Confucianism.
Confucius is traditionally credited with having authored or edited many of the Chinese classic texts including all of the Five Classics, but modern scholars are cautious of attributing specific assertions to Confucius himself. Aphorisms concerning his teachings were compiled in the Analects, but only many years after his death.
Confucius's principles had a basis in common Chinese tradition and belief. He championed strong family loyalty, ancestor worship, respect of elders by their children (and in traditional interpretations of husbands by their wives), and family as a basis for ideal government. He espoused the well-known principle "Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself", an early version of the Golden Rule.

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David Hume
David Hume (7 May [O.S. 26 April] 1711 – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and scepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist.
Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic "science of man" that examined the psychological basis of human nature. In stark opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behaviour, saying: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." A prominent figure in the sceptical philosophical tradition and a strong empiricist, he argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding instead that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. Thus he divides perceptions between strong and lively "impressions" or direct sensations and fainter "ideas", which are copied from impressions. He developed the position that mental behaviour is governed by "custom"; our use of induction, for example, is justified only by our idea of the "constant conjunction" of causes and effects. Without direct impressions of a metaphysical "self", he concluded that humans have no actual conception of the self, only of a bundle of sensations associated with the self.

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Derek Parfit
Derek Parfit (born December 11, 1942; China) is a British philosopher who specializes in problems of personal identity, rationality and ethics, and the relations between them. His 1984 book Reasons and Persons (described by Alan Ryan in The Sunday Times as "something close to a work of genius") has been very influential. His most recent book, On What Matters (2011), has already been widely discussed, having circulated in draft form for many years. He has worked at Oxford for the whole of his academic career, and is presently an Emeritus Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is also a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at New York University, Harvard University, and Rutgers University. He is married to the philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards.
Derek Parfit was born in Chengdu, China to Norman and Jessie Parfit (née Browne), both medical doctors who had moved to Western China in order to teach preventive medicine in missionary hospitals. The family returned to the United Kingdom about a year after Parfit was born, settling in Oxford. Parfit was sent to Eton. He later read Modern History at the University of Oxford, graduating in 1964. In 1965-66 he was Harkness Fellow at Columbia University and Harvard University. He abandoned historical studies for philosophy during the time he held the fellowship. He then returned to Oxford, spending many decades as a fellow of All Souls College.

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Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche ( /ˈniːtʃə/;German pronunciation: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈniːtsʃə]; October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) was a German philosopher, poet, cultural critic and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism.
Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism, nihilism and postmodernism. His style and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth have resulted in much commentary and interpretation, mostly in the continental tradition. His key ideas include the death of God, the Übermensch, the eternal recurrence, the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy, perspectivism and the will to power. Central to his philosophy is the idea of "life-affirmation", which involves an honest questioning of all doctrines that drain life's expansive energies, however socially prevalent and radical those views might be.

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Gaozi
Gaozi (Chinese: 告子; pinyin: Gàozĭ; Wade–Giles: Kao-tzu; literally "Master Gao"; ca. 420-350 BCE), or Gao Buhai (告不害), was a Chinese philosopher during the Warring States Period. Gaozi's teachings are no longer extant, but he was a contemporary of Mencius (ca. 372-289 BCE), and most of our knowledge about him comes from the Mencius book (6) titled "Gaozi".
Warring States philosophers disputed whether human nature is originally good (Mencius) or evil (Xunzi). The "Gaozi" chapter begins with a famous metaphor about a type of willow tree (qiliu (杞柳). (Qi was also an ancient place name, best known through the four-character idiom qirenyoutian [杞人憂天, "person from Qi who worried heaven might fall"] "groundless fears; superfluous worry".)
The philosopher [Gao] said, 'Man's nature is like the [qi]-willow, and righteousness is like a cup or a bowl. The fashioning benevolence and righteousness out of man's nature is like the making cups and bowls from the [qi]-willow.'
Mencius replied, 'Can you, leaving untouched the nature of the willow, make with it cups and bowls? You must do violence and injury to the willow, before you can make cups and bowls with it. If you must do violence and injury to the willow in order to make cups and bowls with it, on your principles you must in the same way do violence and injury to humanity in order to fashion from it benevolence and righteousness! Your words, alas! would certainly lead all men on to reckon benevolence and righteousness to be calamities.'

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Henry Sidgwick
Henry Sidgwick (31 May 1838 – 28 August 1900) was an English utilitarian philosopher and economist. He was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research, a member of the Metaphysical Society, and promoted the higher education of women. His work in economics has also had a lasting influence.
He was born at Skipton in Yorkshire, where his father, the Reverend W. Sidgwick (d. 1841), was headmaster of the local grammar school, Ermysted's Grammar School. Henry himself was educated at Rugby (where his cousin, subsequently his brother-in-law, Edward White Benson – later Archbishop of Canterbury – was a master), and at Trinity College, Cambridge. While at Trinity, Sidgwick became a member of the Cambridge Apostles. In 1859 he was senior classic, 33rd wrangler, chancellor's medallist and Craven scholar. In the same year he was elected to a fellowship at Trinity, and soon afterwards became a lecturer in classics there, a post he held for ten years.
In 1869, he exchanged his lectureship for one in moral philosophy, a subject to which he had been turning his attention. In the same year, deciding that he could no longer in good conscience declare himself a member of the Church of England, he resigned his fellowship. He retained his lectureship, and in 1881 was elected an honorary fellow. In 1874 he published The Methods of Ethics (6th ed. 1901, containing emendations written just before his death), by common consent a major work, which made his reputation outside the university. John Rawls called it the "first truly academic work in moral theory, modern in both method and spirit."

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Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (German pronunciation: [ɪˈmaːnu̯eːl ˈkant]; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher from Königsberg (today Kaliningrad of Russia), who researched, lectured, and wrote on philosophy and anthropology during the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century. At the time, there were major successes and advances in the sciences (for example, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Robert Boyle) applying reason and logic.
Kant’s major work, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He hoped to end an age of speculation where objects outside experience were used to support what he saw as futile theories, while opposing the skepticism of thinkers such as Descartes, Berkeley and Hume.
He stated:
Kant proposed a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in reverse, saying that:
Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history. These included the Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 1788) and the Metaphysics of Morals (Die Metaphysik der Sitten, 1797), which dealt with ethics. And the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), which looks at aesthetics and teleology. He aimed to resolve disputes between empirical and rationalist approaches. The former asserted that all knowledge comes through experience; the latter maintained that reason and innate ideas were prior. Kant argued that experience is purely subjective without first being processed by pure reason. He also said that using reason without applying it to experience only leads to theoretical illusions. The free and proper exercise of reason by the individual was both a theme of the Enlightenment, and of Kant's approaches to the various problems of philosophy.

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James Legge
James Legge (Chinese: 理雅各; December 20, 1815 – November 29, 1897) was a noted Scottish sinologist, a Scottish Congregationalist, representative of the London Missionary Society in Malacca and Hong Kong (1840–1873), and first professor of Chinese at Oxford University (1876–1897). In association with Max Müller he prepared the monumental Sacred Books of the East series, published in 50 volumes between 1879 and 1891.
James Legge was born at Huntly, Aberdeenshire, and educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and then Kings College, Aberdeen. After studying at the Highbury Theological College, London, he went in 1839 as a missionary to China, but remained at Malacca three years, in charge of the Anglo-Chinese College there. The College was subsequently moved to Hong Kong, where Legge lived for nearly thirty years. A Chinese Christian, Keuh Agong accompanied Legge when he moved in 1844. He returned home to Huntly, Aberdeenshire, in 1846–7, taking with him three Chinese students. Legge and the students were received by Queen Victoria before his return to Hong Kong.

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Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham ( /ˈbɛnθəm/; 15 February 1748 – 6 June 1832) was an English author, jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He is best known for his advocacy of utilitarianism and animal rights, and the idea of the panopticon.
His position included arguments in favour of individual and economic freedom, usury, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalising of homosexual acts. He argued for the abolition of slavery and the death penalty and for the abolition of physical punishment, including that of children. Although strongly in favour of the extension of individual legal rights, he opposed the idea of natural law and natural rights, calling them "nonsense upon stilts."
He has come to be considered the founding figure of modern utilitarianism, through his own work and that of his students. These included his secretary and collaborator on the utilitarian school of philosophy, James Mill; James Mill's son John Stuart Mill; John Austin, legal philosopher; and several political leaders, including Robert Owen, a founder of modern socialism. He has been described as the "spiritual founder" of University College London (UCL), though he played little direct part in its foundation.

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John Rawls
John Bordley Rawls (February 21, 1921 - November 24, 2002) was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard University.
His magnum opus, A Theory of Justice (1971), was hailed at the time of its publication as "the most important work in moral philosophy since the end of World War II," and is now regarded as "one of the primary texts in political philosophy." His work in political philosophy, dubbed Rawlsianism, takes as its starting point the argument that "most reasonable principles of justice are those everyone would accept and agree to from a fair position." Rawls employs a number of thought experiments — including the famous veil of ignorance — to determine what constitutes a fair agreement in which "everyone is impartially situated as equals," in order to determine principles of social justice. He is one of the major thinkers in the tradition of liberal political philosophy.^{[citation needed]} English philosopher Jonathan Wolff argues that "while there might be a dispute about the second most important political philosopher of the 20th century, there could be no dispute about the most important: John Rawls. His student Samuel Freeman says that Rawls’s work will be recognized 'for centuries to come.'"

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John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill, FRSE (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873) was a British philosopher, political economist and civil servant. He was an influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy. He has been called "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century". Mill's conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham. Hoping to remedy the problems found in an inductive approach to science, such as confirmation bias, he clearly set forth the premises of falsification as the key component in the scientific method. Mill was also a Member of Parliament and an important figure in liberal political philosophy.
John Stuart Mill was born on Rodney Street in the Pentonville area of London, the eldest son of the Scottish philosopher, historian and economist James Mill, and Harriet Burrow. John Stuart was educated by his father, with the advice and assistance of Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place. He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing, and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age other than his siblings. His father, a follower of Bentham and an adherent of associationism, had as his explicit aim to create a genius intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham had died.

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Joseph Butler
Joseph Butler (18 May 1692 O.S. – 16 June 1752) was an English bishop, theologian, apologist, and philosopher. He was born in Wantage in the English county of Berkshire (now Oxfordshire). He is known, among other things, for his critique of Thomas Hobbes's egoism and John Locke's theory of personal identity. During his life and after his death, Butler influenced many philosophers, including David Hume, Thomas Reid, and Adam Smith.
The son of a Presbyterian linen-draper, he was destined for the ministry of that church, and—along with future archbishop Thomas Secker—entered Samuel Jones's dissenting academy at Gloucester (later Tewkesbury) for that purpose. Whilst there, he entered into a secret correspondence with the conformist controversialist Samuel Clarke; his letters were taken to Gloucester post office by Secker, who also collected Clarke's responses from there. Clarke later published this correspondence. In 1714, Butler decided to enter the Church of England, and went to Oriel College, Oxford. After holding various other high positions, he became rector of the rich living of Stanhope.

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Karl Barth
Karl Barth ((1886-05-10)May 10, 1886 – December 10, 1968(1968-12-10)) (pronounced "Bart") was a Swiss Reformed theologian whom many scholars hold to be among the most important thinkers of the 20th century; Pope Pius XII described him as the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas. Beginning with his experience as a pastor, he rejected his training in the predominant liberal theology typical of 19th-century European Protestantism.
Instead he embarked on a new theological path initially called dialectical theology, due to its stress on the paradoxical nature of divine truth (e.g., God's relationship to humanity embodies both grace and judgment). Other critics have referred to Barth as the father of neo-orthodoxy — a term emphatically rejected by Barth himself. The most accurate description of his work might be "a theology of the Word." Barth's theological thought emphasized the sovereignty of God, particularly through his interpretation of the Calvinistic doctrine of election.

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King Zhou of Shang
King Zhou (Chinese: 紂王; pinyin: Zhòu Wáng) was the pejorative posthumous name given to Di Xin (Chinese: 帝辛; pinyin: Dì Xīn), the last king of the Shang Dynasty of ancient China. He is also called Zhou Xin (紂辛; Zhòu Xīn). He may also be referred to by adding "Shang" (商 Shāng) in front of any of his names. Note that Zhou (紂) is a completely different character from the "Zhou" (周) used by the succeeding Zhou Dynasty. In Chinese, 紂 also refers to a horse crupper, the part of a saddle or harness most likely to be soiled by the horse.
In the Records of the Grand Historian, Sima Qian wrote that Di Xin, in the early part of his reign, had abilities which surpassed those of the ordinary man, was quick-witted and quick-tempered. In legend, he was intelligent enough to win all of his arguments, and he was strong enough to hunt wild beasts with his bare hands. He was the younger brother of Wei Zi and Wei Zhong and father of Wu Geng. His father Di Yi had two brothers, Ji Zi and Bi Gan. Di Xin added to the territory of Shang by battling the tribes surrounding it, including the Dongyi to the east.

wn.com/King_Zhou_of_Shang
Lu Jiuyuan
Lu Jiuyuan (Chinese: 陸九淵; Pinyin: Lù Jiǔyuān) or Lu Xiangshan (陆象山; Pinyin: Lù Xiàngshān) (1139–1192) was a Chinese scholar and philosopher who founded the school of the universal mind, the second most influential Neo-Confucian school. He was a contemporary and the main rival of Zhu Xi.
In China, Japan, and Western countries, he is known by his honorific name rather than his private name.
In his own words, Lu said, "The universe is my mind, and my mind is the universe." Unlike Zhu's emphasis of li, which is the principle that contains and underlies all things and beings, Lu brought forward the concept of the heart/mind as the ultimate one or source that encompasses everything including the universe and the principle. The unity of the mind expressed in the work of Lu means that the mind of humanity and the mind of the Way (Dao) are one and the same. This is in direct opposition to Zhu Xi's idea that the mind of Humanity and the mind of the Way are separate and distinct from each other. Zhu Xi also claimed that every individual thing possesses its own unique material force (chi) distinct from the principle (li). Lu vehemently opposed this dualistic doctrine and further emphasized that everything is connected and originated from the heart/mind.

wn.com/Lu_Jiuyuan
Mencius
Mencius (Chinese: 孟子; pinyin: Mèng Zǐ; Wade–Giles: Meng Tzu; Zhuyin Fuhao: ㄇㄥˋ ㄗˇ, most accepted dates: 372 – 289 BCE; other possible dates: 385 – 303/302 BCE) was a Chinese philosopher who was arguably the most famous Confucian after Confucius himself.
Mencius, also known by his birth name Meng Ke or Ko, was born in the State of Zou, now forming the territory of the county-level city of Zoucheng (originally Zouxian), Shandong province, only thirty kilometres (eighteen miles) south of Qufu, Confucius' birthplace.
He was an itinerant Chinese philosopher and sage, and one of the principal interpreters of Confucianism. Supposedly, he was a pupil of Confucius' grandson, Zisi. Like Confucius, according to legend, he travelled China for forty years to offer advice to rulers for reform. During the Warring States Period (403–221 BCE), Mencius served as an official and scholar at the Jixia Academy in the State of Qi (1046 BCE to 221 BCE) from 319 to 312 BCE. He expressed his filial devotion when he took an absence of three years from his official duties for Qi to mourn his mother's death. Disappointed at his failure to effect changes in his contemporary world, he retired from public life.

wn.com/Mencius
Mozi
Mozi (Chinese: 墨子; pinyin: Mòzǐ; Wade–Giles: Mo Tzu, Lat. as Micius, ca. 470 BC – ca. 391 BC), original name Mo Di (墨翟), was a Chinese philosopher during the Hundred Schools of Thought period (early Warring States Period). Born in Tengzhou, Shandong Province, China, he founded the school of Mohism, and argued strongly against Confucianism and Daoism. During the Warring States Period, Mohism was actively developed and practiced in many states, but fell out of favour when the legalist Qin Dynasty came to power. During that period, many Mohist classics were ruined when Qin Shi Huang carried out the burning of books and burying of scholars. The importance of Mohism further declined when Confucianism became the dominant school of thought during the Han Dynasty, until mostly disappearing by the middle of the Western Han Dynasty. Mozi is known by children throughout Chinese culture by way of the Thousand Character Classic, which records that he was saddened when he saw dyeing of pure white silk, which embodied his conception of austerity (simplicity, chastity).

wn.com/Mozi
Paul Tillich
Paul Johannes Tillich (August 20, 1886 – October 22, 1965) was a German-American theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher. Tillich was one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the 20th century. Among the general public, he is best known for his works The Courage to Be (1952) and Dynamics of Faith (1957), which introduced issues of theology and modern culture to a general readership. Theologically, he is best known for his major three-volume work Systematic Theology (1951–63), in which he developed his "method of correlation": an approach of exploring the symbols of Christian revelation as answers to the problems of human existence raised by contemporary existential philosophical analysis.
Tillich was born on August 20, 1886, in the small village of Starzeddel Silesia which was then part of Germany. He was the oldest of three children, with two sisters: Johanna (b. 1888, d. 1920) and Elisabeth (b. 1893). Tillich’s Prussian father Johannes Tillich was a conservative Lutheran pastor of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces; his mother Mathilde Dürselen was from the Rhineland and was more liberal. When Tillich was four, his father became superintendent of a diocese in Schönfliess, a town of three thousand, where Tillich began elementary school. In 1898, Tillich was sent to Königsberg Chojna to begin gymnasium. At Königsberg, he lived in a boarding house and experienced loneliness that he sought to overcome by reading the Bible. Simultaneously, however, he was exposed to humanistic ideas at school.

wn.com/Paul_Tillich
Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian philosopher who is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He specialises in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, preference utilitarian perspective.
He has served, on two occasions, as chair of philosophy at Monash University, where he founded its Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1996, he unsuccessfully stood as a Greens candidate for the Australian Senate. In 2004, he was recognised as the Australian Humanist of the Year by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies. He has been voted one of Australia's ten most influential public intellectuals. Singer serves on the Advisory Board of Incentives for Global Health, the NGO formed to develop the Health Impact Fund proposal.
Outside academic circles, Singer is best known for his book Animal Liberation, widely regarded as the touchstone of the animal liberation movement. Not all members of the animal liberation movement share this view, and Singer himself has said the media overstates his status. His views on that and other issues in bioethics have attracted attention and a degree of controversy.

wn.com/Peter_Singer
Philippa Foot
Philippa Ruth Foot (née Bosanquet; 3 October 1920 – 3 October 2010) was a British philosopher, most notable for her works in ethics. She was one of the founders of contemporary virtue ethics. Her later career marked a significant change in view from her work in the 1950s and 1960s, and may be seen as an attempt to modernize Aristotelian ethical theory, to show that it is adaptable to a contemporary world view, and thus, that it could compete with such popular theories as modern deontological and utilitarian ethics. Some of her work was crucial in the re-emergence of normative ethics within analytic philosophy, especially her critique of consequentialism. A familiar example is the continuing discussion of an example of hers referred to as the trolley problem. Foot's approach was influenced by the later work of Wittgenstein, although she rarely dealt explicitly with materials treated by him.
Foot's works of the late 1950s were meta-ethical in character: that is, they pertained to the status of moral judgment and speech. The essays Moral Arguments and Moral Beliefs, in particular, were crucial in overturning the rule of non-cognitivism in analytic approaches to ethical theory in the preceding decades.

wn.com/Philippa_Foot
Plato
Plato ( /ˈpleɪtoʊ/; Greek: Πλάτων, Plátōn, "broad"; 424/423 BC – 348/347 BC) was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science. In the words of A. N. Whitehead:
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.
Plato's sophistication as a writer is evident in his Socratic dialogues; thirty-six dialogues and thirteen letters have been ascribed to him. Plato's writings have been published in several fashions; this has led to several conventions regarding the naming and referencing of Plato's texts. Plato's dialogues have been used to teach a range of subjects, including philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric, and mathematics.

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Socrates
Socrates ( /ˈsɒkrətiːz/; Greek: Σωκράτης, Ancient Greek pronunciation: [sɔːkrátɛːs], Sōkrátēs; c. 469 BC – 399 BC) was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary Aristophanes. Many would claim that Plato's dialogues are the most comprehensive accounts of Socrates to survive from antiquity.
Through his portrayal in Plato's dialogues, Socrates has become renowned for his contribution to the field of ethics, and it is this Platonic Socrates who also lends his name to the concepts of Socratic irony and the Socratic method, or elenchus. The latter remains a commonly used tool in a wide range of discussions, and is a type of pedagogy in which a series of questions are asked not only to draw individual answers, but also to encourage fundamental insight into the issue at hand. It is Plato's Socrates that also made important and lasting contributions to the fields of epistemology and logic, and the influence of his ideas and approach remains strong in providing a foundation for much western philosophy that followed.

wn.com/Socrates
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (/ˈsɔrən ˈkɪərkəɡɑrd/ or /ˈkɪərkəɡɔr/; Danish: [ˈsɶːɐn ˈkiɐ̯ɡəɡɒːˀ] ( listen)) (5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian and religious author. He was a critic of idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel. He was also critical of the state and practice of Christianity, primarily that of the Church of Denmark. He is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher.
Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives as a "single individual", giving priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking, and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment.
His theological work focuses on Christian ethics, on the institution of the Church, and on the differences between purely objective proofs of Christianity. He wrote of the individual's subjective relationship to Jesus Christ, the God-Man, which came through faith. Much of his work deals with the art of Christian love.

wn.com/Søren_Kierkegaard
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, O.P. ( /əˈkwaɪnəs/ ə-KWY-nəs; 1225 – 7 March 1274), also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Roman Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus ([the] Angelic Doctor), Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis. "Aquinas" is not a surname, but is a Latin demonym for a resident of Aquino, his place of birth. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology, and the father of Thomism. His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy was conceived as a reaction against, or as an agreement with, his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law, metaphysics, and political theory.
Thomas is held in the Catholic Church to be the model teacher for those studying for the priesthood. The works for which he is best-known are the Summa Theologica and the Summa Contra Gentiles. As one of the 33 Doctors of the Church, he is considered the Church's greatest theologian and philosopher. Pope Benedict XV declared: "This (Dominican) Order ... acquired new luster when the Church declared the teaching of Thomas to be her own and that Doctor, honored with the special praises of the Pontiffs, the master and patron of Catholic schools."

wn.com/Thomas_Aquinas
Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel (born July 4, 1937) is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics. He is well known for his critique of reductionist accounts of the mind in his essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to deontological and liberal moral and political theory in The Possibility of Altruism (1970) and subsequent writings.
Nagel was born July 4, 1937, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) to a Jewish family. He received a BA from Cornell University in 1958, a BPhil from the University of Oxford in 1960, and a PhD from Harvard University in 1963 under the supervision of John Rawls. Before settling in New York, Nagel taught briefly at the University of California, Berkeley (from 1963 to 1966) and at Princeton University (from 1966 to 1980), where he trained many well-known philosophers including Susan Wolf, Shelly Kagan, and Samuel Scheffler, who is now his colleague at NYU. In 2006, he was made a member of the American Philosophical Society.

wn.com/Thomas_Nagel
Wang Yangming
Wang Yangming (王陽明, 1472–1529) was a Ming Chinese idealist Neo-Confucian philosopher, official, educationist, calligraphist and general. After Zhu Xi, he is commonly regarded as the most important Neo-Confucian thinker, with interpretations of Confucianism that denied the rationalist dualism of the orthodox philosophy of Zhu Xi. Wang was known as "Yangming Xiansheng" and/or "Yangming Zi" in literary circles: both mean "Brilliant Master Yangming".
In China, Japan, and Western countries, he is known by his honorific name rather than his private name.
Born Wang Shouren (王守仁) in Yuyao, Zhejiang Province, his courtesy name was Bo'an (伯安). His father was an earl and a minister responsible for supervising civil personnel. Wang earned the "recommended person" degree in 1492 and the "presented scholar" degree in 1499. He served as an executive assistant in various government departments until being banished for offending a eunuch in 1506. However, his professional career was later ensured when he became the Governor of Jiangxi.

wn.com/Wang_Yangming
Wikipedia Persondata
wn.com/Wikipedia_Persondata
Zhu Xi
Zhu Xi or Chu Hsi (Chinese: 朱熹, October 18, 1130, Youxi, Fujian Province, China – April 23, 1200, China) was a Song Dynasty Confucian scholar who became the leading figure of the School of Principle and the most influential rationalist Neo-Confucian in China. His contribution to Chinese philosophy included his assigning special significance to the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean (the Four Books), his emphasis on the investigation of things (gewu), and the synthesis of all fundamental Confucian concepts.

wn.com/Zhu_Xi
Zhuangzi
Zhuangzi (simplified Chinese: 庄子; traditional Chinese: 莊子; pinyin: Zhuāng Zǐ; Wade–Giles: Chuang Tzŭ) was an influential Chinese philosopher who lived around the 4th century BCE during the Warring States Period, a period corresponding to the philosophical summit of Chinese thought — the Hundred Schools of Thought, and is credited with writing—in part or in whole—a work known by his name, the Zhuangzi. His name Zhuangzi (English "Master Zhuang", with Zi being an honorific) is sometimes spelled Zhuang Tze, Zhuang Zhou, Chuang Tsu, Chuang Tzu, Chouang-Dsi, Chuang Tse, or Chuangtze.
The only account of the life of Zhuangzi is a brief sketch in chapter 63 of Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, where he is described as a minor official from the town of Meng (in modern Anhui) in the state of Song, living in the time of King Hui of Liang and King Xuan of Qi (late 4th century BCE). Sima Qian writes:
The validity of his existence has been questioned by some, including himself (See below) and Russell Kirkland, who writes:

wn.com/Zhuangzi
Zisi
Zisi (Chinese: 子思; pinyin: Zǐsī; Wade–Giles: Tzu-ssu; ca. 481–402 BCE), born Kong Ji (孔伋), was a Chinese philosopher. Zisi, who was the only grandson of Confucius, supposedly taught Mencius and wrote the Doctrine of the Mean. He is honorifically called Zisizi (子思子, "Master Zisi").
Where his grandfather began to distinguish between true and supposed knowledge, Zisi proceeded upon meditations on the relativity in human knowledge of the universe. He attempted to analyze as many types of action as possible, and believed that wise people who are conscious of their moral and intellectual duties can copy the reality of the universe into themselves.
On par with Mengzi, Zi Si is attacked by Xunzi in his famous "Against Twelve Masters" chapter. The target of Xunzi's attack is the Wuxing teaching. Extant version of the book of the same name is ascribed to Zi Si.

wn.com/Zisi

Mengzi shuo Mencius Book 1a

Mengzi shuo Mencius Book 1a...

published: 11 Mar 2010

author: harvardmr40

CHINESE CULTURE--- MENCIUS SPEAKS part 1(ENGLISH SUBS) .mp4

chinese culture...

published: 30 Dec 2010

author: 振邦曾

Mencius

...

published: 05 Nov 2010

author: TheLN

From the Sacred Works of Mencius: Gong Sun Chou I - P1/2

SupremeMasterTV.com -- From the Sacred Works of Mencius Gong Sun Chou I - P1/2. Episode: 1...

published: 14 Jun 2011

author: SMTV Uploads

Mengzi shuo Mencius Book 2a

Mengzi shuo Mencius Book 2a...

published: 11 Mar 2010

author: harvardmr40

Mengzi shuo Mencius Book 1c

Mengzi shuo Mencius Book 1c...

published: 11 Mar 2010

author: harvardmr40

Mencius

My first 2d animation commission I did the animation Carl Kein Valencia and marlo zanoria ...

published: 07 Aug 2011

author: carlkeinv

Temple of Mencius and Meng Family Mansion，Shandong, China

Mencius is one of the most important Confucianism. Mencius Temple is the place where peopl...

published: 06 Jul 2008

author: tianji4517

Mencius Moldbug: How to Reboot the US Government

See more talks like this one and get more information about BIL at BILconference.com Menci...

published: 20 Oct 2012

author: BILtalks

Mengzi shuo Mencius Book 1b

Mengzi shuo Mencius Book 1b...

published: 11 Mar 2010

author: harvardmr40

Mengzi shuo Mencius Book 5b

Mengzi shuo Mencius Book 5b...

published: 11 Mar 2010

author: harvardmr40

Mengzi shuo Mencius Book 3c

Mengzi shuo Mencius Book 3c...

published: 11 Mar 2010

author: harvardmr40

Mengzi shuo Mencius Book 6b

Mengzi shuo Mencius Book 6b...

published: 11 Mar 2010

author: harvardmr40

Mencius Quotes

What was your favorite Mencius quote? 'Like' and leave a comment below, then jump over to ...

published: 14 Mar 2012

author: quotetank

EastRiver on EbruTV

This is an excerpt of a "Roots & Rhythm" episode produced for Ebru TV (New Jersey) perform...

published: 22 Nov 2012

author: EastRiverEnsemble

God Ain't Dead

Right-wing postmodern transcendentalism, or something. AsymmetricalWarfare's video (10/11)...

published: 03 Oct 2012

author: graaaaaagh

Tea Nercita Savic

Miss Universe Canada 2009 - Video Interviews...

published: 10 May 2009

author: fbgenesismultimedia

Christmas & Genesis - this is Genesis Week, Ep 16, season 2 with Wazooloo/Ian Juby

genesisweek.com http In this episode: Why was Jesus born in a stable, What was the star of...

published: 28 Dec 2012

author: wazooloo

China and the Chinese (3 of 3)

Subtitles available. China and the Chinese by Herbert Allen Giles (1845-1935). Read by Dav...

published: 25 Nov 2012

author: The16thCavern

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photo: AP / Ugarit News via AP video

This image taken from video obtained from Ugarit News on Thursday, Feb. 7, 2013, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, purports to show Syrian soldiers dancing to Usher's hit song "Yeah!"

Amid a Bloody War, Syrian Videos Show a Glimpse of Fun

The New York Times

09 Feb 2013

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The video has gone viral in recent days. Syrian government soldiers, in camouflage gear, carrying rocket-propelled grenades and brandishing rifles, mugging for the camera while dancing in a circle to Usher’s hit song “Yeah!”. Enlarge This Image. Ugarit News, via Associated Press. In a video posted online, Syrian soldiers chant and dance to Usher’s hit song “Yeah!”. Related. U.N ... Twitter List ... Raw ... ....(size: 8.2Kb)

photo: WN / Ahmed Deeb

File - Palestinian Salafis "al-Qaeda" burning U.S. and Israeli flags as they burn an image of U.S. President Barack Obama during a protest against what they said was a film being produced in the U.S. that was insulting to the Prophet Mohammad in Rafah in southern Gaza Strip on September 14, 2012.

Tide of Salafism threatens the Arab spring

Mail Guardian South Africa

10 Feb 2013

A protester holds a banner reading "Be careful Mr President Hollande, Tunisia is not Mali" at a demonstration in Tunis on February 9. (AP). More Coverage. Late last year, largely unnoticed in the West, Tunisia's president, Moncef Marzouki, gave an interview to Chatham House's The World Today ... "We didn't realise how dangerous and violent these Salafists could be ... They are a tiny minority within a tiny minority ... Threats ... ....(size: 13.5Kb)

photo: AP / Elaine Thompson

A Boeing 777-367 (ER) Cathay Pacific jet is guided to a parking spot by a marshaller at Paine Field Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2013, in Everett, Wash.

Boeing 787 on test flight, 1st since grounding

Jakarta Post

10 Feb 2013

Boeing sent a 787 up on a test flight Saturday, the first since the new airliner was grounded three weeks ago because of a battery fire ... The plan was to spend two and a half hours in the air ... ....(size: 1.0Kb)

photo: WN / Imran Nissar

Activists of the Jammu and Kashmir Mass Movement (JKMM) shouting anti-India slogans during a protest in support of clemency for Mohammad Afzal Guru in Srinagar on December 13, 2012. Indian police detained some half a dozen activists during the protest. Fellow Kashmiri, Mohammad Afzal Guru was sentenced to death by an Indian court after being found guilty of being involved in the 13 September 2001 attack on India's Parliament House in New Delhi. The protestors appealed to the President to commute the death sentence of Guru and reinvestigate the case.

India hangs man for 2001 attack on Parliament

The Guardian

09 Feb 2013

NEW DELHI (AP) — Indian news channels are reporting that a Kashmiri man convicted in the 2001 attack on India's Parliament has been hanged ... World news. Last 24 hours....(size: 5.9Kb)

photo: WN / Janice Sabnal

US north-east battered by 'historic' snowstorm

BBC News

09 Feb 2013

Thick snow is blanketing the north-eastern US as a major storm cuts power to thousands of homes and plays havoc with transport schedules. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Connecticut and Maine are all on an emergency footing, with millions of residents being warned to stay indoors. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has temporarily banned all non-essential traffic on the state's roads ... Worse to come? ... Stay home." ... Light....(size: 5.7Kb)

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National Make a Friend Day: Best quotes and sayings about friendship

The Examiner

09 Feb 2013

When it comes to holidays, February 11 is a biggy when it comes to holidays. Not only is it the refreshing National Peppermint Patty Day and Don't Cry Over Spilled Milk Day, February 11 is also National Make a Friend Day!. Let's be honest. Many of us are overworked and just plain stressed out ... Friends are our confidants ... ~ Douglas Pagels It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m ... ~ Mencius We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone ... ....(size: 8.4Kb)

Game-maker hopes to be top dog on Facebook

Boston Herald

03 Feb 2013

“There are crazy cat people in the world. We are crazy dog people.”. So begins Elliot Pirate Epstein’s tale of how he and the mother who named him after The Pirates of Penzance founded SqueePlay, the startup behind the upcoming Facebook video game SqueeDogs. Four years ago, his mother, Cerise Jacobs, told him she wanted to play a game featuring her rat terrier, Mencius ... On Jan ... ....(size: 2.0Kb)

More people interested in Chinese

China Daily

25 Jan 2013

Guy S ... Even after two years of huffing and puffing up the steep slopes of classical texts such as the Analects of Confucius and Mencius, Alitto, then a graduate student majoring in Chinese history at the University of Chicago, couldn't use the language to order food at Chinese restaurants, and couldn't even say ni hao, or hello, accurately ... He is now professor of history at the University of Chicago ... The name was apt ... Related . ... ....(size: 5.6Kb)

More people interested in Chinese (Beijing Municipal Government)

noodls

25 Jan 2013

(Source. Beijing Municipal Government). Guy S ... Guy S ... Provided to China Daily. Even after two years of huffing and puffing up the steep slopes of classical texts such as the Analects of Confucius and Mencius, Alitto, then a graduate student majoring in Chinese history at the University of Chicago, couldn't use the language to order food at Chinese restaurants, and couldn't even say ni hao, or hello, accurately ... The name was apt....(size: 6.8Kb)

Fire damages Medical Center restaurant

my SA

14 Jan 2013

About 4.20 p.m., employees in the Mencius' Gourmet Hunan Chinese Restaurant in the 7900 block of Fredericksburg Road noticed a hot water ......(size: 0.7Kb)

Human rights: The good, the bad and the large grey area in between

Mail Guardian South Africa

11 Jan 2013

It appears that the robbers are not always the bad guys. (AFP). More Coverage. As a child, I used to play "cops and robbers" ... In my childhood game, it was easy to distinguish between the "good guys" and the "bad guys" ... The simple notions of good and bad we ascribe to particular behaviour have been considered by numerous writers and philosophers ranging from Mencius to Machiavelli ...   ... ....(size: 4.6Kb)

Confucius says ...

The Gleaner

06 Jan 2013

One of the great influences on China's life and thought is the teachings of Confucius ... Among these was Mencius, so that his teachings and his philosophy have become the orthodox doctrine of Chinese society and, even though challenged or revered at different periods by groups and individuals, he has remained a guiding source in Chinese life, and is now being studied and assessed by many modern scholars all over the world ... ....(size: 4.0Kb)

Taoism 301.3a: story of Cook Ting, the "dextrous butcher"

The Examiner

20 Dec 2012

Chapter Three of the Chuang Tze is entitled "The Secret of Nourishing Life". It begins with the story of a cook that followed the Tao. Life has a limit but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what is unlimited, you will be in trouble ... If you do evil, you will not necessarily receive punishment ... Location. ft lauderdale, fl ... According to Legge, Wen-Hui was a real King, also appearing in the writings of Mencius ... ....(size: 4.1Kb)

Taoism 301.0: Who was Chuang Tze?

The Examiner

17 Dec 2012

Chuang Tze (Chinese. “Master Chuang”) was born about one hundred years after Lao Tze’s passing. He was born in 369 B.C.E., in the State of Meng. Chuang Tze, like Lao Tze, was a government official. He was a contemporary of Mencius (Chinese “Meng Tze”), the successor of Confucius. He is remembered for writing the Taoist classic that bears his name. He is said to have been the next significant proponent of Taoism after Lao Tze ... ....(size: 5.5Kb)

Mencius
孟子
Mencius, from Myths and Legends of China, 1922 by E. T. C. Werner
Born	372 BC
Died	289 BC (aged 83)
Era	Ancient philosophy
Region	Chinese philosophy
School	Confucianism
Main interests	Ethics, Social philosophy, Political philosophy
Notable ideas	Confucianism
Influenced by Confucius
Influenced Nearly every Eastern philosopher

Life [link]

An image of Mencius in the sanctuary of the Mencius Temple, Zoucheng

Mencius, also known by his birth name Meng Ke or Ko, was born in the State of Zou, now forming the territory of the county-level city of Zoucheng (originally Zouxian), Shandong province, only thirty kilometres (eighteen miles) south of Qufu, Confucius' birthplace.

He was an itinerant Chinese philosopher and sage, and one of the principal interpreters of Confucianism. Supposedly, he was a pupil of Confucius' grandson, Zisi. Like Confucius, according to legend, he travelled China for forty years to offer advice to rulers for reform.^[5] During the Warring States Period (403–221 BCE), Mencius served as an official and scholar at the Jixia Academy in the State of Qi (1046 BCE to 221 BCE) from 319 to 312 BCE. He expressed his filial devotion when he took an absence of three years from his official duties for Qi to mourn his mother's death. Disappointed at his failure to effect changes in his contemporary world, he retired from public life.

Mencius is buried in the "Mencius Cemetery" (孟子林, Mengzi Lin, also known as 亚圣林, Yasheng Lin), which is located 12 km to the northeast of Zoucheng's central urban area. A stele carried by a giant stone tortoise and crowned with dragons stands in front of his grave.^[6]

Mencius' mother [link]

Mencius' mother is often held up as an exemplary female figure in Chinese culture. One of the most famous traditional Chinese four-character idioms is 孟母三遷 (mèng mǔ sān qiān; literal translation: "Mencius' mother, three moves").

This saying refers to the legend that Mencius' mother moved house three times before finding a location that she felt was suitable for the child's upbringing. As an expression, the idiom refers to the importance of finding the proper environment for raising children.

Mencius's father died when he was very young. His mother Zhang (仉) raised her son alone. They were very poor. At first they lived by a cemetery, where the mother found her son imitating the paid mourners in funeral processions. Therefore the mother decided to move. The next house was near a market in the town. There the boy began to imitate the cries of merchants (merchants were despised in early China). So the mother moved to a house next to a school. Inspired by the scholars and students, Mencius began to study. His mother decided to remain, and Mencius became a scholar.

Another story further illustrates the emphasis that Mencius' mother placed on her son's education. As the story goes, once when Mencius was young, he was truant from school. His mother responded to his apparent disregard for his education by taking up a pair of scissors and cutting the cloth she had been weaving in front of him. This was intended to illustrate that one cannot stop a task midway, and her example inspired Mencius to diligence in his studies.

She is one of 125 women of which biographies have been included in the Lienü zhuan, written by Liu Xiang.

Descendants [link]

One of Mencius's direct descendants was Dr. Meng Chih, former director of China House, and director of the China Institute in 1944. Time magazine reported Dr. Meng's age that year as 44. North Carolina's Davidson College and Columbia University were his alma mater. He was attending a speech along with Confucius descendant H. H. Kung.^[7]

Influence [link]

A Yuan Dynasty turtle with a stele honoring Mencius

Mencius' interpretation of Confucianism has generally been considered the orthodox version by subsequent Chinese philosophers, especially by the Neo-Confucians of the Song dynasty. Mencius' disciples included a large number of feudal lords, and he was actually more influential than Confucius had been.^[8] The Mencius (also spelled Mengzi or Meng-tzu), a book of his conversations with kings of the time, is one of the Four Books that Zhu Xi grouped as the core of orthodox Neo-Confucian thought. In contrast to the sayings of Confucius, which are short and self-contained, the Mencius consists of long dialogues, including arguments, with extensive prose.

View on human nature [link]

While Confucius himself did not explicitly focus on the subject of human nature, Mencius asserted the innate goodness of the individual, believing that it was society's influence – its lack of a positive cultivating influence – that caused bad moral character. "He who exerts his mind to the utmost knows his nature"^[9] and "the way of learning is none other than finding the lost mind".^[10]

His translator James Legge finds a close similarity between Mencius' views on human nature and those in Bishop Butler's Sermons on Human Nature.

The Four Beginnings (or Sprouts)[link]

To show innate goodness, Mencius used the example of a child falling down a well. Witnesses of this event immediately feel

“

alarm and distress, not to gain friendship with the child's parents, nor to seek the praise of their neighbors and friends, nor because they dislike the reputation [of lack of humanity if they did not rescue the child]...

The feeling of commiseration is the beginning of humanity; the feeling of shame and dislike is the beginning of righteousness; the feeling of deference and compliance is the beginning of propriety; and the feeling of right or wrong is the beginning of wisdom.

Men have these Four Beginnings just as they have their four limbs. Having these Four Beginnings, but saying that they cannot develop them is to destroy themselves.^[11]

”

Human nature has an innate tendency towards goodness, but moral rightness cannot be instructed down to the last detail. This is why merely external controls always fail in improving society. True improvement results from educational cultivation in favorable environments. Likewise, bad environments tend to corrupt the human will. This, however, is not proof of innate evil because a clear thinking person would avoid causing harm to others. This position of Mencius puts him between Confucians such as Xunzi who thought people were innately bad, and Taoists who believed humans did not need cultivation, they just needed to accept their innate, natural, and effortless goodness. The four beginnings/sprouts could grow and develop, or they could fail. In this way Mencius synthesized integral parts of Taoism into Confucianism. Individual effort was needed to cultivate oneself, but one's natural tendencies were good to begin with. The object of education is the cultivation of benevolence, otherwise known as Ren.

Education [link]

According to Mencius, education must awaken the innate abilities of the human mind. He denounced memorization and advocated active interrogation of the text, saying, "One who believes all of a book would be better off without books" (尽信书，则不如无书, from 孟子.尽心下). One should check for internal consistency by comparing sections and debate the probability of factual accounts by comparing them with experience.^{[citation needed]}

Destiny [link]

Mencius also believed in the power of Destiny in shaping the roles of human beings in society. What is destined cannot be contrived by the human intellect or foreseen. Destiny is shown when a path arises that is both unforeseen and constructive. Destiny should not be confused with Fate. Mencius denied that Heaven would protect a person regardless of his actions, saying, "One who understands Destiny will not stand beneath a tottering wall". The proper path is one which is natural and unforced. This path must also be maintained because, "Unused pathways are covered with weeds." One who follows Destiny will live a long and successful life. One who rebels against Destiny will die before his time.

View on politics [link]

Mencius emphasized the significance of the common citizens in the state. While Confucianism generally regards rulers highly, he argued that it is acceptable for the subjects to overthrow or even kill a ruler who ignores the people's needs and rules harshly. This is because a ruler who does not rule justly is no longer a true ruler. Speaking of the overthrow of the wicked King Zhou of Shang, Mencius said, "I have merely heard of killing a villain Zhou, but I have not heard of murdering [him as] the ruler."^[12]

This saying should not be taken as an instigation to violence against authorities but as an application of Confucian philosophy to society. Confucianism requires a clarification of what may be reasonably expected in any given relationship. All relationships should be beneficial, but each has its own principle or inner logic. A Ruler must justify his position by acting benevolently before he can expect reciprocation from the people. In this view, a King is like a steward. Although Confucius admired Kings of great accomplishment, Mencius is clarifying the proper hierarchy of human society. Although a King has presumably higher status than a commoner, he is actually subordinate to the masses of people and the resources of society. Otherwise, there would be an implied disregard of the potential of human society heading into the future. One is significant only for what one gives, not for what one takes.

Comparisons to contemporaries [link]

His alleged years make him contemporary with Xun Zi, Zhuangzi, Gaozi, and Plato.

Xun Zi [link]

Xun Zi was a Confucian who believed that human nature is originally bad, and the purpose of moral cultivation is to develop our nature into goodness. Obviously, Mencius was at odds with him. Zhu Xi declared his views to be unorthodox, supporting Mencius' stance that human nature is inherently good.

Plato [link]

Mencius' argument that unjust rulers may be overthrown is reminiscent of Socrates' argument in Book I of Plato's Republic.

Notes and references [link]

^ The original clan name was Mengsun (孟孫), and was shortened into Meng (孟). It is unknown whether this occurred before or after Mencius's death.
^ Traditionally, his courtesy name was assumed to be Ziche (子車), sometimes incorrectly written as Ziyu (子輿) or Ziju (子居), but recent scholarly works show that these courtesy names appeared in the 3rd century CE and apply to another historical figure named Meng Ke who also lived in Chinese antiquity and was mistaken for Mencius.
^ That is, the second sage after Confucius. Name given in 1530 by Emperor Jiajing. In the two centuries before 1530, the posthumous name was "The Second Sage Duke of Zou" (鄒國亞聖公) which is still the name that can be seen carved in the Mencius ancestral temple in Zoucheng.
^ Romanized as Mencius.
^ Chan 1963: 49.
^ 孟子林 (Mencius Cemetery)
^ "Education: China House". TIME. Monday, Sep. 04, 1944. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,885702,00.html. Retrieved May 22, 2011.
^ Charles O. Hucker, China to 1850: A Short History, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978, p. 45
^ The Mencius 7:A1 in Chan 1963: 78.
^ The Mencius 6:A11 in Chan 1963: 58.
^ The Mencius 2A:6 in Chan 1963: 65. Formatting has been applied to ease readability.
^ The Mencius 1B:8 in Chan 1963: 62.

Chan, Wing-tsit (translated and compiled). A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963.
Graham, A.C., Disputers of the TAO: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (Open Court 1993). ISBN 0-8126-9087-7

External links [link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Mencius

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
Mengzi Chinese text with English translation and links to Zhuxi's commentary
English translation by A. Charles Muller Annotated scholarly translation with Chinese text
Works by Mencius at Project Gutenberg
Article discussing the view of ethics of Mencius from The Philosopher
Family Background and Life of Mencius

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Ancestral name (姓):	Ji (Chinese: 姬; Pinyin: Jī)
Clan name (氏):	Meng (Ch: 孟; Py: Mèng)^[1]
Given name (名):	Ke (Ch: 軻; Py: Kē)
Courtesy name (字):	Unknown^[2]
Posthumous name (謚):	Master Meng the Second Sage^[3] (Ch: 亞聖孟子; Py: Yàshèng Mèngzǐ)
Styled:	Master Meng^[4] (Ch: 孟子; Py: Mèngzǐ)

Famous quotes by Mencius:

"Let men decide firmly what they will not do, and they will be free to do vigorously what they ought to do"

"He who attends to his greater self becomes a great man, and he who attends to his smaller self becomes a small man"

"It is not difficult to govern. All one has to do is not to offend the noble families."

"We live, not as we wish to, but as we can."

"Truth uttered before its time is always dangerous"

"If the king loves music, there is little wrong in the land"

"Kindly words do not enter so deeply into men as a reputation for kindness."

"Evil exists to glorify the good. Evil is negative good. It is a relative term. Evil can be transmuted into good. What is evil to one at one time, becomes good at another time to somebody else."

"Great is the man who has not lost his childlike heart."

"Friendship is one mind in two bodies."

Make changes yourself !

Make changes yourself !

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