CHIN215

How should one make moral choices? What is the best way to live a moral life? How should the state be organized to best encourage proper human behavior? And what happens if the state comes to be formed as an empire? What are the proper moral ways to respond? Questions such as these were at the heart of early Chinese philosophical debates (roughly fifth through first centuries BCE). This course will be study of how the early Chinese thinkers wrestled with these questions and what responses they gave. As we will quickly see, the views that arose in early China were among the most powerful and influential in human history. Regardless of whether one agrees with these views or not, they should be studied and taken seriously by anyone who cares about ethics and politics.