Timothy J. Madigan is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at St. John Fisher University in Rochester, New York and former President of the Bertrand Russell Society. We invited him to discuss comparative philosophy of religion as part of our “Philosophers of Religion on Philosophy of Religion” series.
Tu Wei-ming is the foremost authority writing today on the relevance of Confucian ethics to the Western World. He has helped to revitalize an interest in this ancient worldview, and has offered it as an antidote to many of the excesses of the Enlightenment Project which has dominated Western thinking for centuries. Interestingly, the Enlightenment itself was greatly influenced in its early stages by the knowledge of Confucianism which early Western explorers in China sent back to a fascinated European audie
Tu argues that the question of whether or not Confucianism is a religion remains a controversial topic among scholars. This problem of comparison was relevant to the earliest Western translators of Confucianist texts, the Catholic and Protestant missionaries in the 17th Century who first came into contact with this different approach. They were themselves uncertain as to how to categorize a belief system so different from their own. Yet they were also quick to make use of this newfound worldview in order to