What if the beliefs everyone repeats cannot stand up to what anyone can observe?

In Lunheng, Wang Chong weighs inherited wisdom against experience. This collection of essays takes on Heaven and nature, omens, fate, ghosts, the authority of sages, and the limits of knowledge. A scholar of the Eastern Han dynasty, he asks readers to examine claims rather than accept them because learned people repeat them.

Why do good people suffer while bad people thrive? Does a strange bird carry a warning from Heaven? Wang Chong brings such questions into sharp focus. He challenges the habit of praising the past at the present’s expense, questions Confucius and Mencius without rejecting them, and insists that sound claims must face the tests of experience, comparison, and reasoning.

この本で学べること

• Nature without a purpose Explore Wang Chong’s claim that Heaven and Earth act spontaneously, without an intended goal.
• Signs put to the test Examine why comets, eclipses, and strange birds need not carry warnings about a ruler.
• Virtue, fate, and luck Face the troubling question of why goodness offers no sure protection against suffering.
• Ghosts under close scrutiny Follow an argument that asks what a ghost would actually have to be.
• Sages open to question Discover a thinker who respects great teachers without placing their claims beyond examination.

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鋭い議論や古代中国の興味深い物語、あらゆることを問い直す書き手が好きな人に向いています。哲学、初期の科学、運や運命をめぐる議論にひかれる人に適しています。