How Should One Live? (eBook)

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R.A.H. King, Glasgow University, UK; Dennis Schilling,Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, Germany.

Acknowledgements 6
Contents 8
Part I Methods 10
1 Rudimentary remarks on comparing ancient Chinese and Greco-Roman ethics 12
2 Comparative ethics: some methodological considerations 27
Part II Ethical theory 32
3 Two kinds of moral relativism 34
Part III China 44
4 Harmony as a contested metaphor and conceptions of rightness (yi) in early Confucian ethics 46
5 Why Mozi is included in the Daoist Canon – or, why there is more to Mohism than utilitarian ethics 72
6 Coming to terms with dé : the deconstruction of ‘virtue’ and an exercise in scientific morality 101
7 Virtue ethics in ancient China: light shed and shadows cast 135
Part IV Greece and Rome 162
8 Parrhesy and irony: Plato’s Socrates and the Epicurean tradition 164
9 The knowledge about human well-being in Plato’s Laches 179
10 Aristotle: ethics without morality? 200
11 Aristotle on friendship as the paradigmatic form of relationship 217
Part V Comparisons 248
12 The Greeks and Chinese on the emotions and the problem of cross-cultural universals and cultural relativism 250
13 Complexity and simplicity in Aristotle and early Daoist thought 268
14 The ethics of prediction 287
15 Being and unity in the metaphysics and ethics of Aristotle and Liezi 313
General index 332
Index of names 343
Index locorum - Chinese authors 345
Index locorum - Greek and Roman authors 348