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You're listening to the partially examined live a podcast by some guys who are at one point said I'm doing philosophy for living but then thought better of it

Our question for episode 314 is something like are people naturally good and we're looking at the Mengzi aka Menchis a Chinese warring states philosopher in the Confucian or Rue tradition from the late 4th century BCE

We focused on books 2 4 and 6 of the text from our information. Please see partially examined live comm

This is Mark Linsomire pull in my sprouts in Madison, Wisconsin. This is Seth Paskin practicing humaneness in Austin, Texas. This is Wes all one sparing the ox the axe in Cambridge, Massachusetts

This is Dylan Casey climbing a tree and search for a fish in Madison, Wisconsin. This is Krushnan Vanquatech suffering from allergies in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Welcome to the podcast. We know that men see us had a lot to say about. Yes, lots.

You started the eastern classics program at St. John's can you say a little more about what that's all about? I did not start the eastern classics program at St. John's but I have been involved in it at the beginning

When I first arrived in at St. John's in 1989 it turned out that a group of old tutors group of senior tutors kind of like venerable

Johnny's right the the first generation in Santa Fe were working on starting an eastern classics program and that surprised me a lot. I just happened to jump from the bandwagon at that time in 1989 and I think I'm probably the last survivor from that generation.

They were interested in it from various perspectives. I mean one one was that several of them were practitioners of various eastern things. There was a physicist who was also a tea master tea ceremony master.

There was a dean who was a coiness and Kant scholar who was also interested in Japanese martial arts and religion. There was a go master, you know different kinds of interest but also I think the dominant motivation at that time was a desire to see the other side of the same questions.

In particular the investigation of Indian philosophy dovetail very nicely with say,

with say, to our mystic philosophy or 19th century German philosophy about you know what was ultimately real about you know God you know different ways of thinking about those things.

So they were very interested in that the Chinese philosophy obviously you know from the St. John's interest in political philosophy you know that was of interest to them too.

They were very conscious and I think we all were at that time that when the college was started there was no thought of confining it to great books of the west not that the west is one thing but it was a great books program simply.

There's a conversation between Jacob Klein and Leo Strauss in which they they said they wanted a great books program simply but they couldn't do the Asian text just because of the language difficulties at that time there weren't enough there weren't enough translations and there weren't enough resources for studying the language and so I think that was the first thing.

So I think that was the first thing that we did was to study the language and so plus also the fact that those don't really belong in the same conversation and have you know different conversations different traditions that we need to respect to keep the integrity of the of the programs you know so the committee then decided not to pursue incorporating eastern text into the undergraduate curriculum but have a separate program where the integrity of these traditions could be respected to do it responsibly as it were.

The reasons we're feeling a little more comfortable introducing these things are of I don't know we've done about one eastern episode a year in our 13 years here so this is the first time actually that we've sort of bored down and we've done this is our fourth in a row now to on the Dau de Jing and one on Mozart really as preparation for this the way that seems to make most sense to us I'm not sure how this details with the respecting the tradition but like to try to make them speak to Aristotle to the western thinkers.

So that if we're doing ethics we're doing ethics like we understand there's things you have to work around in terms of the theological tradition that's going on in the area at the time.

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