Confucius (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry)

This is the Confucius entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, written by Mark Csikszentmihalyi, a scholar of early Chinese philosophy, published and maintained by the Metaphysics Research Lab at Stanford University. Its authority rests on the Encyclopedia's editorial model, a named specialist author writes a signed entry that is peer reviewed before publication and then kept current through dated substantive revisions, here first published in March 2020 and last substantively revised in May 2024, both dates confirmed directly against the live entry rather than a search summary. It discusses ren and li at length as Confucius's central ethical concepts. Its limit is that as a reference survey it summarizes the field's major readings of Confucius rather than arguing one original thesis, so a claim about one specific classical commentator's interpretation is better checked against that commentary directly.