Embodied Moral Psychology and Confucian Philosophy

There is a movement underway in philosophy that takes advantage of both advanced research in cognitive neuroscience and the latest developments in pre-modern Chinese philosophy with the goal of producing better-founded theories in philosophy more generally. In this book, Bongrae Seok demonstrates why he is among the leaders of this movement. Drawing from a wide range of scientific, interpretive, and philosophical sources, Seok draws a detailed and persuasive argument for understanding Confucian moral philosophy as a middle ground between virtue ethics and situationist ethics, and as an important alternative to prevailing hyper-rationalist theories of moral agency. -- Brian Bruya, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy at Eastern Michigan University and editor of The Philosophical Challenge from China
The main strengths of this study lie in a substantive statement of an embodied cognition approach to Confucian moral psychology, particularly the Mencian wing of the tradition. Seok outlines an alternative to existing rationalist and sentimentalist accounts of Confucian moral psychology, drawing extensively from a wide range of research programs across the cognitive sciences in ways accessible to the non-specialist. Along the way, he applies this new framework to a number of important issues in the corpus, including the nature of moral judgment, virtue, and emotion. The book provides a new and fruitful vantage point from which to evaluate some of the core assumptions of the classical Confucian thinkers. -- Hagop Sarkissian, The City University of New York, Baruch College
A revival of Confucian ideas is taking place. . . .Seok’s book is a fine example from this trend. . . .Seok makes a convincing case for the importance of what he calls situated Confucian virtue. . . .[this book] is an outstanding example of how a philosopher well-versed in the literature of both the East and the West can bring them together in order to advance the field overall. * Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy *