Vytis Silius

• PhD
• Vice Dean Associated Professor at Vilnius University

Believing that your life is shaped by internal forces, such as your own free will, is usually thought to lead to positive outcomes, such as being prosocial and happy. Believing that it is shaped by external forces, such as deterministic laws of nature, is usually thought to lead to negative outcomes. However, whether that is the case might vary wit...

People across cultures consider everyday choices in the context of perceived various external life-determining forces: such as fate and gods (two teleological forces) and such notions as luck and chance (two non-teleological forces). There is little cross-cultural evidence (except for a belief in gods) showing how people relate these salient notion...

The article aims for a critical reflection on the practices and methodology of the so-called comparative philosophy. It starts from an observation that the recent successful developments in comparative philosophy nevertheless have a very limited impact outside the discipline. The article argues that a specific universality-particularity tension is...

Contemporary Western discourse on freedom and choice – some of the most championed modern values – is usually anchored in the concept cluster of free will and autonomous choice. In turn, academic research on free will in philosophy (including experimental philosophy) and psychology is largely based on a limited conceptual framework with roots in pa...

The article proposes to see Confucian role ethics as a philosophical project that puts forward metaethical and metaphilosophical arguments regarding the nature of ethics and the concept of human beings, instead of concentrating on its interpretational work in explicating the nature of early Confucian ethics. Thus, a more fitting context for evaluat...

In this paper we report a cross-cultural study on how different types of social transgressions are moralized by Chinese, Americans, and Lithuanians. We hypothesized that, given the continuing influences of Confucian worldview on contemporary Chinese societies, Chinese will not make a distinction between moral (daode 道德) and conventional cultural no...

It has been argued that belief in free will is socially consequential and psychologically universal. In this paper, we look at the folk concept of free will and its critical assessment in the context of recent psychological research. What kind of people has been studied so far? A review of papers indicates that, overall, 91% of participants in stud...

The article asks why, in Western universities, the success of the academic field of comparative philosophy has so far failed to significantly diversify the curricula of academic philosophy. It suggests that comparative philosophy has mainly relied on the same approaches that have made academic philosophy Eurocentric, namely, on the history of philo...

In this paper we report a study on how different types of normatively relevant transgressions are evaluated by Chinese participants. We hypothesized that, given the continuing influences of Confucian worldview on contemporary Chinese societies, the Chinese will not make a distinction between moral (daode) and conventional norms of cultured behavior...

In contemporary Western moral philosophy literature that discusses the Chinese ethical tradition, it is a commonplace practice to use the Chinese term daode 道德 as a technical translation of the English term moral. The present study provides some empirical evidence showing a discrepancy between the terms moral and daode. There is a much more pronoun...

It is a commonplace in contemporary English language literature of moral philosophy and moral psychology dealing with Chinese tradition or comparative issues, to use Chinese term daode 道德 as a technical translation for the English term moral. Such usage is supported by references to dictionaries, equivalent usage of both Chinese and English term by...

This dissertation deals with the controversy between two contemporary Western philosophical interpretations of early Confucian ethics: Confucian virtue ethics and Confucian role ethics. At the centre of this dissertation are the two different presentations of what constitutes the core characteristics of early Confucian ethics. At the same time, thi...

Since the 80’s of the last century a trend has emerged in the English language literature on Chinese thought that suggests reading early Confucian texts as a form of virtue ethics. However, Alasdair MacIntyre has presented early Confucian and Aristotle’s thoughts as incommensurable thought systems and doubted that notions and statements of one inco...

Vilnius UniversityThis article deals with the cosmology and ethics of Zhu Xi (朱熹) and reconstructs the relation between these two fields of inquiry in Zhu Xi’s philosophy. This article opposes the still common view in contemporary scholarship that portrays Zhu Xi as a metaphysical thinker who introduced metaphysical notions into the Confucian disco...

Vilnius UniversityDuring your stay in Vilnius, I have heard that you have so many invitations to give lectures and deliver speeches at conferences in the United States and abroad that you have to decline many of those. What made you to accept the invitation from the Centre of Oriental Studies at Vilnius University? And how do you feel about your ch...

The paper contains an analysis of the conception of personality concentrated in the ideal of exemplary person (jun zi) in classical Confucianism as it is shown in The Analects of Confucius. An attempt is made to discover what unique features, according to Confucius, are characteristic of such an exemplary person. So the meaning and significance of...