Review of Yu, Tao and Ivanhoe: Taking Confucian Ethics Seriously

The philosophical world is changing. By fits and starts, non-Western traditions are beginning to be taken seriously as philosophy. This is not just a feature of Anglophone philosophical discourse. As recently as 2008, John Makeham described Sinophone scholarship on Confucianism as lacking philosophical creativity.1 The Spring of 2011, in contrast, will see the first issue of a Chinese journal devoted exclusively to the contemporary philosophical development of Confucianism (Research on Contemporary Confucianism, edited by Huang Yushun), and there are other signs that Confucianism may once again become a vibrant tradition capable of self-criticism and growth. A critical aspect of this vibrancy is the openness of Confucian philosophers to stimuli of all kinds from outside the tradition. The book that is here under review represents an equally important flip-side to these Sinophone developments: Professors Yu, Tao, and Ivanhoe ask us, Anglophone philosophers, to see what good can come from taking Confucian ethics seriously. These goods are, for the most part, to be measured from within the discourses of contemporary Western thought: by taking Confucian ethics seriously, the book's readers will be learning new things on subjects they already care about, or perhaps experience a broadening of their sense of what matters in moral, political, or other areas of philosophy. At the same time, insofar as projects like the present book are successful, we may find the category of "Western philosophy" increasingly irrelevant. Philosophy will probably remain highly pluralist, but on both sides of the Pacific it promises to be less firmly unified by pre-existing linguistic-cultural traditions.