Acting Into Understanding: Confucian Ritual and Practical Knowledge

Date: Monday, 9 March
Time: 12:00pm–1:30pm
Place: Arts Building, Main Lecture Theatre 120

🍕🍇🍵 This lunchtime talk will have light food and refreshments available.

A lunchtime talk by Richard Kim

How do we come to understand what we are doing when we act?

A familiar picture of intentional action assumes that understanding comes first: we decide what to do, and then we do it. In this talk, Richard Kim challenges that assumption by drawing on both Elizabeth Anscombe’s philosophy of action and early Confucian thought.

Focusing on Confucian accounts of ritual formation in the Analects, the talk explores how practical understanding can emerge through action itself, rather than preceding it. Confucius distinguishes between performing rites correctly and performing them with ren (仁, humaneness), suggesting that one can follow a ritual before fully grasping its meaning. Over time, through sustained practice, understanding deepens.

Confucius’s own moral development, described as a gradual movement from rule-guided action to spontaneous, unforced conduct, offers a powerful model of how agents act into understanding. On this view, practical knowledge is not only a feature of intentional action, but also an achievement shaped by formation, habit, and moral cultivation.

💡The talk will be of interest to those working in philosophy, psychology and ethics, and Confucian philosophy. No prior knowledge of Confucian thought required!

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Host or Publisher University of Birmingham