Offers the first focused study of the shifei debates of the Warring States period in ancient China and challenges the imposition of Western conceptual categories onto these debates. In recent decades, a growing concern in studies in Chinese intellectual history is that Chinese classics have been forced into systems of classification prevalent in Western philosophy and thus imperceptibly transformed into examples that echo Western philosophy. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel offer a methodology to counter this approach, and illustrate their (...) method by carrying out a transcultural inquiry into the complexities involved in understanding shi and fei and their cognate phrases in the Warring States texts, the Zhuangzi in particular. The authors discuss important features of Zhuangzi’s stance with regard to language-meaning, knowledge-doubt, questioning, equalizing, and his well-known deconstruction of the discourse in ancient China on shifei. Ma and van Brakel suggest that shi and fei apply to both descriptive and prescriptive languages and do not presuppose any fact/value dichotomy, and thus cannot be translated as either true/false or right/wrong. Instead, shi and feican be grasped in terms of a pre-philosophical notion of fitting. Ma and van Brakel also highlight Zhuangzi’s idea of “walking-two-roads” as the most significant component of his stance. In addition, they argue that all of Zhuangzi’s positive recommendations are presented in a language whose meaning is not fixed and that every stance he is committed to remains subject to fundamental questioning as a way of life. (shrink)

This dissertation is based on Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative action. Habermas uses communicative action as his main notion for distinguishing among four types of social actions: teleological, normatively regulated, dramaturgical and communicative action. The main characteristics of communicative action are: the interaction of at least two subjects capable of speech and action, who try to reach an understanding about the interpretation of what constitutes the action situation, and who try to coordinate their actions by way of agreement, or "consensus." (...) ;Our main task is to apply the lessons learned about communicative action to two pre-Han Chinese traditions in the context of "words-deeds." I will emphasize the prominence of li, ritual action in the Confucian tradition, and te, potency, and tzu-jan, spontaneity in the Taoist tradition. ;I shall inter-relate the Confucian li, t'i, cheng-ming, and tao and similarly wu-wei, wu-chih, wu-yu, t'i$\sb4$ and tao for the Taoists and show how they form an "integrated" concept cluster. This will bring about a rapprochement between the Confucian and Taoist as a "fusion of horizons." We can take our stance between the two traditions to give us a better perspective to discover the shift in paradigm from a more yang to a more yin tradition. Correlatively, the main thrust of Taoism is a criticism of the Confucian ideology of the "tao of moral suasion." ;In general, the Confucian and Taoist sages are expert hermeneutic practitioners. They can explicate the relation between words and deeds, which abound in the Analects and in Mencius. They also can interpret the polarity between knowledge and action, which, in the Taoist case, becomes the "discarding of knowledge" , and wu-wei, of acting in a non-interfering way. ;We would also stress the side of "communicative receptivity," which builds upon the "passive" and "active" aspects of communicative action. In this regard, the Taoist concepts wu-wei, wu-chih, wu-yu, emphasize the non-contending, non-competitive aspects of our communicative receptivities. We will advance a concept of Chinese "sweet reasonableness" instead of the Western stress on "rationality." The clue to this reasonableness is the paradigm exemplified in Chuang-tzu's "goblet rationality," which is a metaphorical-evocative method of creating new and startling meanings, values, and significances. (shrink)