Mou Zongsan 1909 – 1995
Mou Zongsan was a Chinese philosopher and one of the principal representatives of the New Confucian movement of the twentieth century. After studies at Peking University and a long teaching career in Hong Kong and Taiwan, he produced a vast philosophical corpus that reread classical Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist sources in dialogue with Kant. His central claim is that human beings have an intellectual intuition of the moral law and that this intuition is the foundation of a Chinese philosophy that, properly developed, can answer the questions Kant raised but could not resolve.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Chinese
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Confucianism
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Mou Zongsan:
“Confucianism is, in its deepest sense, a moral religion.”
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Attributed to Mou Zongsan:
“The moral subject is the foundation of Chinese philosophy.”
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Attributed to Mou Zongsan:
“There is a two-level ontology: the phenomenal and the noumenal, both accessible to the moral subject.”
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Attributed to Mou Zongsan:
“Without intellectual intuition there can be no Chinese philosophy.”
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Attributed to Mou Zongsan:
“The sage is the one who has fully realized the moral subject.”