Doctrine of Liang-chih and 'value ethics': An interpretation of Wang Yang-ming's philosophy.

摘要

This thesis is a new interpretation of the philosophy of the Chinese Neo-confucian philosopher, Wang Yang-ming. The research is profited by investigating the "non-formal value ethics" and the philosophical anthropology of the German phenomenologist, Max Scheler. And the theme of this thesis is: to explicate to what extent Scheler's ethical reflections are productive in interpretating Yang-ming's philosophy, to prove that Yang-ming's thought also can be classified as a kind of "value ethics", and from the result of these to do a new interpretation of Yang-ming's ethical thought.; The first chapter is an introduction. The second chapter considers how Scheler and Yang-ming understand the moral agent, called Person and Liang-chih respectively, and shows that both of them have very special understanding of the moral agent, different from most of the so-called "modern philosophies" and the philosophies of "rule ethics". The third chapter investigates the person-value and the Liang-chihTien-li intentionality found in both philosophers, which plays the important role of laying the foundation of morality. The fourth chapter is a comparison of both philosophers' philosophical anthropologies, how they understand the objective value structure and the meaning of life, and finally to delineate the basic meaning of Yang-ming's philosophy. The fifth chapter, based on all the above studies, investigates what is the essence of a "value-ethics", and proves that both Scheler's as well as Yang-ming's ethical thought can be classified as "value ethics", and shows the significance of these comparative studies. And the final chapter is a conclusion.