Confucianism and Averroism: Notes for a Comparative Study

Abstract

This article explores some philosophical affinities between Confucianism and Averroism. It analyzes both intellectual traditions in their theoretical incompatibility with modern philosophical anthropology and, more specifically, with the Christian–Liberal notion of individual. Said incompatibility is examined on a historiographical level (referred to the problems for understanding the development of Averroism and Confucianism from the modern concept of author), a philosophical level (focused in Averroes’ noethics and Confucius’ moral philosophy), and a genealogical level (limited to the relation of both intellectual traditions with the genesis of Roman Catholic universalism). It concludes that both traditions offer conceptual and hermeneutical tools for thinking our present beyond modern philosophical categories.