Confucius’ Embodied Knowledge

The main purpose of the present article is to explicitly link the Analects to embodiment theory (ET). As indicated in the introduction, embodiment has been an important topic in recent Sinological research, but until now rather few explicit connections have been made with ET. In relation to embodied knowledge, the article discusses the following topics: embodiment, embeddedness, enactment, extendedness, emotivity, implicitness, emergence, joy and apprenticeship or self-cultivation. The same themes are found to be important in the Analects, with a plethora of examples. Arguably, ET could thus be a use­ful paradigm for discussing several important themes of the Analects. And with the An­alects being one of the founding texts of the Chinese philosophical tradition – although similar concerns are found in other texts – it could also be beneficial to further develop­ments in the ET itself, on the condition that its proponents familiarize themselves with the Chinese philosophical tradition where important issues of ET have been explicitly discussed for two and a half millennia.