Philosopher
Tu Weiming
born 1940
Also known as Du Weiming
Third-generation New Confucian, long at Harvard, who stressed the religious dimension of Confucianism and promoted dialogue between civilisations towards a global ethic.
Tu Weiming was born in Kunming, Yunnan Province, in 1940. Inspired by his teacher Mou Zongsan, and by decades of study and teaching at Princeton, the University of California and Harvard, he set out to renew Confucianism by bringing it into conversation with American social science and Christian theology.
His writings became key links between Western philosophy and religious studies on one side and modern Confucian thought on the other, and his influence on the Western reception of Confucianism has been very large, though his hybrid, spiritual Confucianism is criticised by more nationalist and secular Chinese Confucians.
Key ideas
- Confucianism as religious humanism
- Tu emphasised the religiosity within Confucianism, describing it as a religious humanism, and used the language of Western theology to explain it, which some Chinese Confucians criticised.
- Anthropocosmic unity
- Human beings, Heaven, earth and the myriad things form a unity. Tu thought this Confucian vision, together with humaneness (ren), could help with problems facing the modern world.
- Dialogue among civilisations
- Confucianism can learn from Western modernity without losing its heritage, and different religions and cultures can learn from one another to build a global ethic.
- Tradition
- Chinese
- Region
- Taiwan and the United States
- Schools
- Confucianism
- Themes
- The self
Influences
Where these links come from
- Tu Weiming studied with Mou Zongsan. Source: Hung Tsz Wan Andrew, Tu Weiming, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Terms on this page
- ren
- Humaneness or benevolence (仁), the cardinal Confucian virtue. Cheng Hao treated it as the whole of human nature, by which a person forms one body with all things and feels their pain as their own.
Sources
- Hung Tsz Wan Andrew, Tu Weiming, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy