Three views of psychological emptiness, or xū, can be found in the Zhuāngzĭ. The instrumental view values xū primarily as a means of efficacious action. The moderate view assigns it intrinsic value as an element of one Zhuangist vision of the good life. The radical view also takes it to be an element of the ideal life, but in this case the form of life advocated is that of the Daoist sage, who transcends mundane human concerns to merge with nature (...) or the Dào. The instrumental and moderate views articulate a relatively commonsensical position, on which the agent continues to pursue at least some characteristically human projects. On the radical view, by contrast, the agent ceases to exercise agency and lives a life hardly recognizable as human. The three views thus signal a tension in Zhuangist ethics, and the unattractiveness of the radical view poses a potential obstacle to the application of Daoist ideas in contemporary ethical discourse. The paper argues that there are principled grounds within Zhuangist thought for detaching the instrumental and moderate views from the radical view and rejecting the latter. (shrink)

The author's primary aim is to help readers discover what is distinctive in Confucius & to learn what he can teach us.

This a general account of the school of Mo-tzu, its social basis as a movement of craftsmen, its isolated place in the Chinese tradition, and the nature of its later contributions to logic, ethics, and science. It assesses the relation of Mohist thinking to the structure of the Chinese language, and grapples with the textual dynamics of later Mohist writings, particularly in regard to grammar and style, technical terminology, the use and significance of stock examples, and overall organization. Includes edited (...) and annotated Chinese text with an English translation and commentary, a glossary, and a photographic reproduction of the unemended text from the Taoist Patrology. (shrink)

In this lecture, I present a sketch of how action and agency are conceived of in pre-Qín 先秦, or classical, Chinese thought, along the way drawing some contrasts with familiar Western conceptions of action. I will also comment briefly on how the ideas I present might affect our interpretation of early Chinese texts and how they might help us to relate early Chinese thought to contemporary action theory and ethics.

Introduction to reprint edition of A. C. Graham, Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science.

This book shows that classic Chinese philosophy is as rational as Western approaches dealing with the problems of logic, epistemology, language analysis, and linguistic topics from a philosophical point of view. It presents detailed analyses of rational and methodological features in Confucianism, Taoist philosophy, and the School of Names as well as Mohist approaches in classical Chinese philosophy, especially in regard to ideas of valid knowledge. The authors also provide new arguments against cultural relativism and antirational movements like religious fundamentalism (...) that do not pay due attention to what all human beings have in common-- to cultural universals. (shrink)

(Uncorrected OCR) Abstract of thesis entitled Similarity and Standards: Language, Cognition, and Action in Chinese and Western Thought Submitted by Christopher J. Fraser for the degree of Ph. D. (Philosophy) at the University of Hong Kong in March 1999 Early Chinese philosophical texts contain numerous passages that depict the perfected human life as a flow of immediate, automatic responses to the environment, occurring without thought, deliberation, or conscious intention. For readers versed in the Western philosophical tradition, this perfectionist vision is (...) puzzling, for it assigns no role to activities we usually think of as quintessentially human, such as theoretical contemplation, abstract reasoning, and know ledge of universal truths. The aim of this dissertation is to explain why early Chinese writers advocated the views expressed in these passages. Toward this end, I present a unified interpretation of the theoretical framework underlying classical Chinese philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and theory of action. I contend that the major philosophical concern in early Chinese thought is correct performance of dcw i!1[ (way, norms). Along with this focus on dcw performance, I argue, early Chinese philosophers hold non-mentalistic theories of meaning, knowledge, and cognition, in which the central explanatory notion is a type of pattern recognition: the behavioral ability to distinguish similar kinds of things by comparing them to public standards. In semantic theory, Chinese philosophers explain the communicative function of language by appeal to speakers' behavioral conformity in distinguishing the extension of terms. In epistemology, they explain knowledge as knowing how to distinguish and name things correctly, according to the norms of dcw. Copyright �1999 Abstract ii Reasoning is not explained in terms of drawing inferences between propositions, but as a process of examining things and distinguishing similarities and differences between them. Human action is guided by recognizing objects as certain kinds of things, thus invoking the normatively proper behavioral responses to them specified by diw. Practical reasoning occurs mainly when the agent encounters difficulty in executing dao and needs to deliberate over how to draw a distinction. A highly intelligent, knowledgeable agent rarely needs to engage in ratiocination or deliberation, but instead draws all distinctions directly as part of the process of perceptual recognition. In this theoretical context, the perfected human is one whose every activity smoothly and flawlessly conforms to dao. Following dao is similar to performing a skill. In the masterful performance of skills, conscious deliberation and ratiocination typically vanish. Similarly, for the ideal performer of dao conscious thought subsides, leaving only a stream of immediate, skilled behavioral responses to the environment. A more detailed overview of the dissertation is given in �1.1. 4 (p. 16). Copyright �1999. (shrink)

This article is a study of the Later Mohists' 'Lesser Selection (Xiaoqu)', which, more than any other early Chinese text, seems to engage in the study of logic. I focus on a procedure that the Mohists called mou . Arguments by mou are grounded in linguistic parallelism, implying perhaps that the Mohists were on the way to a formal analysis of argumentation. However, their main aim was to head off arguments by mou that targeted their own doctrines, and if their (...) argument succeeds then it entails that linguistic parallelism can never ground a cogent argument. In a way, this committed them to the view that formal logic cannot work, but the fact that they did not pursue this line of investigation was by no means inevitable. One consequence of this study is that the Later Mohists conducted their logical work by studying the behaviour of terms and verb phrases, and did not identify the sentence as a significant linguistic unit. This tends to confirm Chad Hansen's generalisation that early Chinese philosophers did not posit sentences or other sentence-like entities such as propositions, beliefs, or laws. Focusing on subsentential expressions did not stop the Mohists from addressing genuinely logical issues, but it may help explain the fact that they never developed a conception of logical structure. This study includes the complete Chinese text of the 'Lesser Selection' and a translation in English. (shrink)

The article assesses Chad Hansen's arguments that both early and later Moist texts apply only pragmatic, not semantic, terms of evaluation and treat “appropriate word or language usage,” not semantic truth. I argue that the early Moist “three standards” are indeed criteria of a general notion of correct dao 道 , not specifically of truth. However, as I explain, their application may include questions of truth. I show in detail how later Moist texts employ terms with the same expressive role (...) as “ is true.” Thus, contra Hansen, the Moists can justifiably be said to have a concept of semantic truth. (shrink)

A. C. Graham's Later Mohist Logic, Ethics, and Sciences is the only Western-language translation of the obscure and textually corrupt chapters of the Mozi that purportedly constitute the foundations of ancient Chinese logic. Graham's presentation and interpretation of this difficult material has been largely accepted by scholars. This article questions the soundness of Graham's reconstruction of these chapters . Upon close examination, problems are revealed in both the structure and the content of the framework Graham uses to interpret the Canons. (...) Without a more reliable framework for interpreting the text, it seems best to remain skeptical about claims that the Canons represent evidence for the study of logic in early China. (shrink)

The Mohist Canons are a set of brief statements on a variety of philosophical and other topics by anonymous members of the Mohist school , an influential philosophical, social, and religious movement of China's Warring States period (479-221 B.C.). [1] Written and compiled most likely between the late 4th and mid 3rd century B.C., the Canons are often referred to as the “later Mohist” or “Neo-Mohist” canons, since they seem chronologically later than the bulk of the Mohist writings, most of (...) which are probably from the mid-5th to the late 4th century. The.. (shrink)

This note responds to an interpretation of Mohist Canon and Explanation B 671 published by John Makeham some years ago. Makeham’s interpretation makes significant contributions to our understanding of this passage, especially in calling attention to problems with two influential previous interpretations, those of A. C. Graham and Chad Hansen.3 Yet his reading presents difficulties of its own, which I will attempt to rectify here.