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Mengzi claims that human beings have natural affective responses that lead them toward being good, but virtue requires extending and modifying these feeling so that they arise in all of the appropriate circumstances. In this talk, I argue that, for Mengzi, the cultivation of emotions is based not on judgment or analogy but on perception. The goal of cultivation is to shape oneself so that the world appears in a certain way.

Franklin Perkins is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and editor of the journal Philosophy East and West. His main research interests are in classical Chinese philosophy, early modern European philosophy, and in the challenges of doing philosophy in a comparative or intercultural context. He is the author of "Heaven and Earth are not Humane: The Problem of Evil in Classical Chinese Philosophy" (Indiana, 2014), "Leibniz: A Guide for the Perplexed" (Bloomsbury, 2007), and "Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light" (Cambridge, 2004), and was co-editor of "Chinese Metaphysics and Its Problems" (Cambridge, 2015), with Chenyang Li. His most recent book is "Doing What You Really Want: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mengzi" (Oxford University Press, 2021).

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