Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A central goal of my 2009 book Sagehood was to demonstrate the value of putting Neo-Confucian thinkers like Zhu Xi (1130-1200) and Wang Yangming (1472-1529) into dialogue with contemporary Western philosophers. I argued there that on a range of topics—from the scope and motivation for ethics, to understanding and responding to moral conflicts, to moral perception, to ethical education—Western philosophers could learn from Zhu and Wang, and the contemporary heirs of the Neo-Confucians could learn from their Western counterparts. In Sagehood I also dipped into some recent psychological literature on the lives and psychology of moral exemplars, which I used …