Quiz: Zhu Xi

When was Zhu Xi born?

• 1130, Youxi, Fujian, China.
• 1033, Aosta, in what is now Italy.
• 1225, Roccasecca, near Aquino, Italy.
• 1332, Tunis, Tunisia.

When did Zhu Xi die?

• 1200.
• 1109, Canterbury, England.
• 1347, Munich, Germany, probably of the plague.
• 1274, Fossanova, Italy, on the way to the Council of Lyon.

What is Zhu Xi known for?

• The Four Books with his commentaries, and the metaphysics of li, principle, and qi, material force.
• The Muqaddimah and its theory of asabiyyah, group feeling, which binds tribes into states and loosens as luxury corrupts them.
• The ontological argument: God, defined as that than which nothing greater can be thought, must exist even in reality. Also Cur Deus Homo, on why God became man.
• The Incoherence of the Philosophers, which denied that reason can prove metaphysical truths, and the Revival of the Religious Sciences.

Which school of thought was Zhu Xi part of?

• Neo Confucianism, the school of principle.
• Scholasticism; nominalism, the denial that universals exist outside the mind.
• Scholasticism; his own system is called Thomism.
• Jewish Aristotelianism.

True or false: Chinese thinker who completed the Neo Confucian synthesis, giving Confucianism a metaphysics of principle and material force.

• True
• False