The Virtue of Harmony

Harmony, the bringing together of dissimilar elements in a manner that coordinates these as parts of an organic whole, is central to different aspects of human existence. In many cultures, harmony is considered an important virtue. As a personal, social, or environmental accomplishment, harmony has a place in everyday conversation, political discourse, as well as academic scholarship. In most Western societies, however, it has no such presence. This volume introduces the virtue of harmony as a central aspect of the good life into global ethics discourse, and shapes the trajectory of ethics research in a manner that draws upon the resources of a broad variety of cultural traditions.

The volume comprises thirteen essays that examine harmony against different cultural and disciplinary backgrounds. A broad variety of cultural traditions are represented, including the Confucian, Daoist, Buddhist, Judaist, Greek, Christian, Islamic, African, and Native American traditions. The volume's essays also represent different disciplinary approaches, such as philosophy, religious studies, linguistics, psychology, and political theory. Each contribution focuses on some aspect of what harmony as a personal trait, social disposition, or environmental outlook entails and describes how the virtue may be cultivated-either by examining the way in which it has been discussed in specific traditions of ethical, religious, or political thought, or by developing a cross-cultural analysis of the theory and practice of the virtue of harmony.

Author: Chenyang Li
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 03/29/2022
Pages: 360
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.02lbs
Size: 8.27h x 5.56w x 0.91d
ISBN: 9780197598498

About the Author
Chenyang Li is Professor of Philosophy at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he founded the philosophy program. His primary areas of research are Chinese philosophy and comparative philosophy. He is author or editor of eighteen books, including The Confucian Philosophy of Harmony (Routledge, 2014), The Tao Encounters the West (SUNY Press, 1999), The Sage and the Second Sex (The Open Court, 2000), with Daniel Bell The East Asian Challenge for Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2013), with Peimin Ni Moral Cultivation and Confucian Character (SUNY Press, 2014), with Franklin Perkins Chinese Metaphysics and Its Problems (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and most recently (with Dascha Düring and Sai Hang Kwok) edited the volume Harmony in Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Introduction (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). He was a senior visiting fellow at the City University of Hong Kong, an American Council on Education ACE fellow, and an inaugural Berggruen Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford University.

Dascha Düring received her PhD in cross-cultural philosophy from Utrecht University (the Netherlands) in 2018, and worked as postdoctoral research fellow of the School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). She has published on harmony in Confucian philosophy and on its relation to feminist thought. Together with Chenyang Li, she was guest editor of a special issue on harmony of the Journal of East-West Thought and editor (with Chenyang Li and Sai Hang Kwok) of the volume Harmony in Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Introduction (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). She currently works as ethics and scientific integrity trainer at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.