Freshman Seminar 37k: China's Confucian Classics

Course first offered in Spring 2002.

The seminar intends to explore values such as humanity, rightness, civility, wisdom, and trust embedded in the Confucian classics, notably the Analects, Mencius, the Greating Learning and Doctrine of the Mean. Through close reading of the Four Books, issues such as the relationship between self and community, human beings and nature, and humanity and Heaven will be explored. The participants will be introduced to the art of ecountering the texts as embodying a philosophy of life. By using a dialogical interchange as well as the Socratic method, the participants should acquire an experiential understanding and a personal knowledge for the texts. Secondary readings will include Herbert Fingarette's Confucius: the Secular as Sacred, Benjamin Schwartz's The World of Ideas in Ancient China, David Hall and Roger Ames' Thinking through Confucius, and de Bary's Asian Values and Human Rights.