Abstract

If we really want to build an intercultural humanistic perspective, we need to understand the ideas of humanity created by the Chinese traditions of thought, because they offer us different approaches to the problems of human nature ("xing"), human agency ("wei"), and relationships between human beings and the Way ("dao"), while at the same time they show us some interesting affinities with universal golden rules. These are the main topics of my contribution. I will try to highlight the crucial aspects of the ancient Chinese thought on these issues, with special reference to the complex notion of "ren", the "sense of humanity", whose fruitful implications for our current debate have been extensively explored by contemporary exegesis.