Persons Emerging: Three Neo-Confucian Perspectives on Transcending Self-Boundaries

By Galia Patt-Shamir

Offers three neo-Confucian understandings of broadening the Way as broadening oneself, through an ongoing process of removing self-boundaries.

Persons Emerging explores the renewed idea of the Confucian person in the eleventh-century philosophies of Zhou Dunyi, Shao Yong, and Zhang Zai. Galia Patt-Shamir discusses their responses to the Confucian challenge that the Way, as perfection, can be broadened by the person who travels it. Suggesting that the three neo-Confucian philosophers undertake the classical Confucian task of "broadening the way," each proposes to deal with it from a different angle: Zhou Dunyi offers a metaphysical emerging out of the infinitude-finitude boundary, Shao Yong emerges out of the epistemological boundary between in and out, and Zhang Zai offers a pragmatic emerging out of the boundary between life and death.

Through the lens of these three Song-period China philosophers, the idea of "transcending self-boundaries" places neo-Confucian philosophies within the global philosophical context. Patt-Shamir questions the Confucian notions of person, Way, and how they relate to human flourishing to highlight how the emergence of personhood demands transcending metaphysical, epistemological, and moral self-boundaries.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1438485603
• ISBN13: 9781438485607
• Release Date: July 2022
• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Length: 276 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher