Download Confucian Worries about the Aristotelian Sophos

The Virtue Turn: Virtue Epistemology, Virtue Ethics and Chinese Philosophy
德性的轉向：德性知識論、德性倫理學與中國哲學
Confucian Worries about the Aristotelian Sophos
Matthew D. Walker
Yale-NUS College, Singapore
Abstract
Like the Confucian sage (shengren), the Aristotelian theoretically wise person (sophos) is
a purported model of ethical and intellectual self-cultivation. Yet within comparative ethics,
Confucian philosophers have tended either to reject Aristotle’s sophos as a viable exemplar
of human flourishing, or at least to view Aristotle’s sophos with suspicion. Confucians have
suggested in various ways that the Aristotelian sophos overvalues theoretically wise
understanding at the expense of other, less-narrowly intellectual goods; that the
theoretically wise understanding the sophos pursues is useless and of questionable value;
and that the 1sophos’s way of life requires an alienating rupture with ordinary living. In
light of contemporary philosophers’ renewed interest in the ancient conception of
philosophy as a way of life, and in light of recent virtue-ethical and virtue-epistemological
discussions of theoretical wisdom (sophia), its nature, and its value, such Confucian
worries about Aristotle’s 1sophos possess more than historical interest.
In this paper, then, I examine existing Confucian worries about the Aristotelian sophos as
a model of self-realization. How strong are these worries? Do Aristotelians have good
replies to them? And to what extent is the Aristotelian model of ethical and intellectual
self-cultivation, the sophos, compatible with Confucian ideal of the sage?