The Chinese philosopher Wang Chong was born in Shangyu (modern Zhejiang) in AD 27. According to his biographies, he came from a poor family and devoted most of his life to teaching, but also held minor posts in the state administration. Later he retired to compose the work by which we know him today, the Lunheng (Balanced Discussions). This extensive treatise in 85 chapters (one of which is lost) was completed in AD 82 or 83, about 15 years before the author's death.
Wang Chong lived about one century after Confucianism had emerged as imperial ideology. In this process, the “rationalist” and socially minded philosophy taught by Confucius had been integrated with cosmological doctrines extraneous to the letter of his teaching. The school of though: to which Wang Chong belonged propounded, on the contrary, a reading of the classic texts devoid of esoteric interpretations.
In his work, Wang Chong analyzes, with a strongly skeptical and even iconoclastic spirit, ideas expounded by earlier...
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Chan Wing‐tsit. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.
Forke, Alfred. Lun‐heng. Philosophical Essays of Wang Ch'ung. Vol. 1. London: Luzac and Co., 1907; Vol. 2. Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1911.
Fung Yu‐lan. A History of Chinese Philosophy, Vol. 2: The Period of Classical Learning. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953.
Hui, Huang, ed. Lunhengjiaoshi (A Critical and Annotated Edition of the Lunheng). Changsha: Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1938.
Needham, Joseph. Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 2: History of Scientific Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956.
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Pregadio, F. (2008). Wang Chong. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_9390
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