Head of the Jixia Academy
Served three times as the leading scholar at the Jixia Academy in Qi, the great intellectual center of the Warring States period. Hundreds of thinkers gathered there. Xunzi was the most respected of them all.
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Xunzi was the great realist of Confucian philosophy. He agreed with Confucius that virtue must be cultivated, but denied that human nature is naturally good. Desire, selfishness, and envy are our starting point. What saves us is deliberate effort: ritual, music, education, and the accumulated wisdom of sages who came before. He taught at the Jixia Academy in Qi, the greatest intellectual center of the Warring States. Two of his students, Han Feizi and Li Si, would go on to build the Legalist philosophy that unified China under Qin.
