Justice in East Asian Thought

PRIMARY SOURCES

Legge, James. The Chinese Classics. Oxford: Clarendon, 1893–1895. A standard rendering and authoritative interpretation of the Four Books and three ancient Confucian canonical scriptures by this famous Scottish missionary-scholar.

——. The Sacred Books of China. Oxford: Clarendon, 1879–1891. Six volumes in the Sacred Books of the East, edited by F. Max Müller. Vols. 3, 16, 27, 28, 39, 40. Revised and new translations of Confucian and Daoist canonical scriptures.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Bontekoe, Ron, and Marietta Stepaniants, eds. Justice and Democracy: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997. Includes helpful articles on Asian and comparative perspectives.

Cheng, Chung-ying, et al. Special Issue on Rawlsian and Confucian Justice. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 24, no. 4 (December 1997). Consists of six separate articles addressing different aspects of this comparison.

Feng, Youlan. A History of Chinese Philosophy by Fung Yu-lan. 2 vols. Translated by Derk Bodde. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952–1953.

Huang, Philip C. C. Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China: The Qing and the Republic Compared. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. Describes actual cases, including accounts about land ownership, handling of debts, old age provisions, and dynamic and oppressive elements in stipulations related to women in general society.

Lee, Lily Xiao Hong. The Virtue of Yin: Studies on Chinese Women. Broadway, Australia: Wild Peony, 1994. Poignant stories about Chinese women, including an essay on Ban Zhao.

Lee, Seung-Hwan. "Was There a Concept of Rights in Confucian Virtue-Based Morality?" Journal of Chinese Philosophy 19 (1992): 241–261. Seminal article claiming that rights-like concepts did exist in ancient Confucian texts and were norms for practice in ancient Chinese societies.

Liú Zéhuá, ed. Zhōngguó Zhèngzhì Sīxiang Shi. Hangzhou, China: Zhejiang People's Press, 1996. 3 vols. A thorough study covering twenty-five hundred years of Chinese political thought, including Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist contributions.

Peerenboom, Randall P. "Confucian Justice: Achieving a Humane Society." International Philosophical Quarterly 30 (1990): 17–32. A comparative philosophical analysis of a secularized version of justice from a Confucian-inspired vision of humane society.

Pfister, Lauren F. "A Study in Comparative Utopias—K'ang Yuwei and Plato." Journal of Chinese Philosophy 16, no.1 (1989): 59–117. Showing points of comparison between Plato and certain Confucian themes embodied in an unusual work by this nineteenth-century Chinese intellectual and reformer.

Sim, May. "Aristotle in the Reconstruction of Confucian Ethics." International Philosophical Quarterly 41, no. 4 (2001): 453–468. Showing points of comparison between Aristotle and early Confucian traditions.

Wood, Alan T. Limits to Autocracy: From Sung Neo-Confucianism to a Doctrine of Political Rights. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1995. Provides constructive comparisions between European medieval natural rights ideologies and Song dynasty (tenth to twelfth centuries) principle-centered Confucian political ideology.