Bryan W. Van Norden

The author debates that academia focus only on Western philosophy, and refused to acknowledge that Eastern (and Middle Eastern for that matter) philosophy is militantly ignored. The reason for this is based on White Privilege, and in my honest opinion also influenced by Christianity. The other philosophy's are more interwove with the culture's religious beliefs such as Buddhism and Judaism. The other factor may be that Western thinking is based on deduction, and Eastern thinking on synthesis. The college curriculum may contain courses on Eastern literature or religion but you will find even fewer courses on Jewish literature or religion. This is an interesting fact since the deniers ignore that these cultures existed thousands of years before the Western culture. Aboriginal and African culture as a philosophical basis is largely ignored by academia as well.… (más)

This is a fantastic book - which I think deserves to be read much more widely than I fear it will be. It considers the basic moral and ethical character of Confucianism and of Mohism, a kind of anti-Confucianism, as paraphrases of 'virtue ethics' and of 'consequentialism'. Any of us who find ourselves battered between the conflicting rhetorics of moral thought in the contemporary West - I mean in the form of the 'Culture Wars' - will find this an enormously helpful book for clarifying the basic shape of moral thought and reflectiveness on both sides of the debate; it elucidates the plausibility as well as the weaknesses in both positions; and it does so in a non-polemical way facilitated by its having taken so very different a culture and set of moral sources from those which lie behind our own struggles. You don't need to have any interest in, or knowledge of, Sinology to find it interesting and valuable.… (más)