Department of Religious Studies

The Development of Law in Early Chinese Political Philosophy

Wednesday, November 8, 4:00 PM

Whitehurst Living Room, 108

Dr. Eirik Lang Harris, Department of Philosophy, Colorado State University

This talk examines the development of the role of law in the early Chinese philosophical corpus. It argues that Confucians were not as anti-law as often portrayed, many Legalists were not primarily concerned with the power of the ruler, and neither thought of the value of law as arising from its being a command of the ruler. For the vast majority of early Chinese philosophical texts, the benefits of the law were understood as arising, in part at least, from its naturalistic sources. To the extent that laws were seen as effective, they bore a necessary relationship to a range of underlying patterns in the natural world.

Eirik Harris is the author of The Shenzi Fragments: A Philosophical Analysis and Translation (Columbia University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Adventures in Chinese Realism: Classic Philosophy Applied to Contemporary Issues (SUNY Press 2022), as well as numerous articles and chapters on the Confucian and Legalist views on the relationship between morality and politics. www.eirikharris.net