Wang Chong
RationalistChinese
He demanded evidence for everything — including Confucius — and found that ancient China had very little of it.
Wang Chong was born poor in Guiji, educated in Luoyang, and spent his career as a minor official who disagreed, systematically, with almost every accepted belief of his time. His Lunheng — Balanced Inquiries — is one of antiquity's most relentlessly skeptical texts. He attacked belief in ghosts: the dead have no substance and cannot frighten. He attacked omens: the cosmos is not watching the emperor. He attacked the idealization of ancient sages: Confucius made errors, the historical texts are full of exaggerations. He insisted that all claims must be tested against observable reality, and that natural events have natural causes. Floods, famines, and eclipses happen by the logic of qi, not by divine response to human virtue. He did not reject Confucianism but wanted to salvage what could survive scrutiny. Most of his contemporaries ignored him. He is now read as the closest thing antiquity produced to a philosopher of empirical science.