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)

The writings of the later Mohists are generally taken to contain several updates to the consequentialist ethical view held by the Mohist school. In this paper, I defend one interpretation of those updates and how they may have served, within the Mohists’ argumentative context, to make their views more defensible. I argue that we should reject A.C. Graham’s prominent interpretation, on which the later Mohists’ argumentative strategy is to develop a conception of the a priori (...) and to ground their ethical view in a form of a priori rationalism. I contend, instead, that the strength of the later Mohists’ ethical view comes largely from their adoption of a subjective criterion for identifying what counts as a benefit within their consequentialist view. I show how the adoption of this subjective criterion fits within a larger trend in later Mohist thought of coming to terms with the diversity of people’s evaluative standpoints, and further show how it equips the later Mohists with worthwhile responses to their philosophical rivals. (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)

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

In this paper, I examine the concept of truth in classical Chinese philosophy, beginning with a critical examination of Chad Hansen’s claim that it has no such concept. By using certain passages that emphasize analogous concepts in the philosophy of language of the Later Mohist Canons, I argue that while there is no word in classical Chinese that functions as truth generally does in Western philosophy for grammatical reasons, the Later Mohists were certainly working with a notion (...) of semantic adequacy in which a language-to-world relationship is made an object of investigation, challenging Hansen’s position that classical Chinese functions within a primarily pragmatic linguistic framework in which a language-to-user relationship determines the meaning of words. (shrink)

The Mohists may have been the first consequentialists on earth. Their most important principles are that right action is what benefits the world and that the underlying outlook for benefiting the world is inclusive care, whereby each person receives equal consideration. The early Mohists are clearly objective-list consequentialists, whereby benefiting the world amounts to promoting the most basic goods. Stephens argues that the later Mohists shift to a preference-satisfaction consequentialism whereby benefiting the world amounts to promoting (...) what happens to please individual people. Stephens argues that while the direct texts are ambiguous between an objective-list interpretation and a preference-satisfaction interpretation, the latter better explains later Mohist engagement with opponents. I argue that the direct texts actually preclude Stephens’ preference-satisfaction interpretation, which moreover has the later Mohists concede an implausible amount to their opponents. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue in favor of a novel interpretation of the semantic theory that can be found in the Later Mohist writings. Recent interpretations by Chad Hansen and Chris Fraser cast the Later Mohist theory as a realist theory; this includes attributing to the Later Mohists what we can call “kind-realism,” the idea that there is some correct scheme of kind-terms that carves the world at its joints. While I agree with Hansen and Fraser (...) that the Later Mohist theory is realist in various ways, I offer challenges to their kind-realist interpretations, and argue instead for a kind-conventionalist interpretation on which there is no fixed, correct set of kinds, leaving schemes of kind terms to be determined by conventional decisions that occur during disputation. (shrink)

Any philosophical method that treats the analysis of the meaning of a sentence or expression in terms of a decomposition into a set of conceptually basic constituent parts must do some theoretical work to explain the puzzles of intensionality. This is because intensional phenomena appear to violate the principle of compositionality, and the assumption of compositionality is the principal justification for thinking that an analysis will reveal the real semantical import of a sentence or expression through a method of decomposition. (...) Accordingly, a natural strategy for dealing with intensionality is to argue that it is really just an isolable, aberrant class of linguistic phenomena that poses no general threat to the thesis that meaning is basically compositional. On the other hand, the later Mohists give us good reason to reject this view. What we learn from them is that there may be basic limitations in any analytical technique that presupposes that meaning is perspicuously represented only when it has been fully decomposed into its constituent parts. The purpose of this paper is to (a) explain why the Mohists found the issue of intensionality to be so important in their investigations of language, and (b) defend the view that Mohist insights reveal basic limitations in any technique of analysis that is uncritically applied with a decompositional approach in mind, as are those that are often pursued in the West in the context of more general epistemological and metaphysical programs. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Daniel Stephens argues against Chad Hansen’s and Chris Fraser’s interpretations of the later Mohists as realists about the ontology of kinds, contending that the Mohist stance is better explained as conventionalist. This essay defends a realist interpretation of later Mohism that I call “similarity realism,” the view that human-independent reality fixes the similarities that constitute kinds and thus determines what kinds exist and what their members are. I support this interpretation (...) with a new, detailed account of the Mohist conception of a kind on which kind relations lie in inherent similarities between the intrinsic features of objects. This account distinguishes kind relations from “uniting together” and part-whole relations, both of which, unlike kind relations, may be determined by convention. I argue that Stephens’s critique of realist interpretations fails because it confuses the ontological issue of what determines the existence of kinds with the semantic issue of what fixes the names for kinds. (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.

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)

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)

In the current version of Mozi, there are six special chapters on knowledge, language, logic, ethics, politics and science. They include “Canon I ” and “Canon Explanation I ”, “Canon II ” and “Canon Explanation II ”, and “Major Illustrations” and “Minor Illustrations”. Later scholars give the names “Mohist Canons ” for the first four chapters and “Mohist Dialectical Chapters” for all the six. The content of these six chapters indicates that the later Mohists follow Mozi’s cognitive (...) spirit in dealing with ethical and socio-political issues and,most importantly, apply an analytic approach to investigate philosophical problems, especially, in knowledge, language and logic. (shrink)

A. C. Graham's Later Mohist Logic, Ethics, and Sciences (1978) 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 (the so-called "Neo-Mohist Canons"). 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)

A cause has traditionally been thought of as that which produces an effect, and in terms of which this effect can be explained or accounted for. However spontaneously we turn to the idea of a cause in daily life, and however inevitable in jurisprudence, in modern science it is generally considered a relic of the past, and in philosophy it remains a topic of inexhaustible controversy. For almost twenty‐five centuries philosophers have been debating the nature of a cause, claiming that (...) it is an object producing an effect by virtue of its power, or arguing that it is an explanation accounting for some effect. Which of all the conditions contributing to an event is to be selected as its cause? Do causes exist in reality or are they read into our experience with the force of our expectations, or produced by the a priori categories of our minds as they structure reality in causal relations? To widen the horizon of this discussion and trace the concept of causation in non‐Western philosophical traditions – such as the ancient Chinese – might enrich this ongoing controversy and allow unfamiliar authors to contribute their views. (shrink)

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)

The anecdote of Zhuangzi and Hui Shi's brief discussion on a bridge above the Hao river gives us a nice piece of reasoning in ancient Chinese texts that may serve as a platform for a productive philosophical exchange between the East and the West. The present study examines Hansen's inferential analysis of Zhuangzi and Hui Shi's discussion in this spirit. It is argued that Hansen's analysis founders. To do justice to both Hui Shi and Zhuangzi, the present study proposes that (...) we apply the logic developed in the later Mohist text, the Lesser Pick, to an analysis of their discussion. The re-analysis shows that the intricate dialectic of the reasoning in which Zhuangzi and Hui Shi engage, neatly accords with the pattern of discourse expounded in the Lesser Pick, and gives us global insight into Zhuangzi's final statement in the anecdote, which is notoriously recondite, or confusing. (shrink)

Ancient Chinese logicians presupposed no fixed order in the world. Things are changing all the time. Time, then, plays a crucial role in the structure of Chinese logic. This article uses the concept of "subjective time" and the Leibnizian concept of "possible worlds" to analyze the structure of logic in the Later Mohist Canon and in the logical reasoning of other early Chinese philosophers. The author argues that Chinese logic is structured in the time of the now. This time (...) is subjective and "spreads out" to more than one possible world. Chinese logicians had to deal with relationships in not only a single world but also more than one "possible world." The aim of Chinese logical reasoning is not to represent any universal truth but to point out (zhi ) a particular-world-related truth, or, in other words, the harmony of relations among particulars in a particular field at a single moment. Therefore, a valid Chinese logical argument represents only the beauty of harmony among possible worlds at a given moment. The harmony represented by Chinese logic brings to light a high level of aesthetic order in a world that is always changing. (shrink)

Students of classical Chinese philosophy are quite justly puzzled by the debates and paradoxes in the "School of Names" and the extant logico-semantic texts of the Later Mohists. The latter has received an incisive and extensive treatment in A. C. Graham's Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science. Thus far, no larger systematic work on Chinese logic and philosophy of language is available in English. Hansen's book is a good attempt to deal in the large scale with classical (...) Chinese philosophy of language. This book consists of five carefully written chapters. The first expounds a methodology which starts from the premise that interpretation is a theory--"an attempt to explain a text--to render it understandable. As such it is inescapably relative to the intended audience, and appropriately wedded to the critical, rational, logical evaluation procedures appropriate to other theories. The main evaluative features on which we have concentrated is the coherence of the theory." The text at issue is that ascribed to Kung-sun Lung discussed in chapter 5. In terms of its announced aim, it succeeds well in rendering a plausible though by no means uncontroversial explication of the text. The attempted explication is, however, mediated by a number of chapters which raise interesting philosophical issues that repay closer examination by students and philosophical scholars of Chinese philosophy of language. Chapter 2, for example, proposes a bold hypothesis on Chinese philosophy in terms of the logic of mass nouns. It is claimed that a "stuff-like ontology and semantics were implicitly operating as a background assumption behind pre-Han philosophy," and a negative corrollary: "an hypothesis that an abstract or mentalistic ontology and semantics of the type common to Western thinkers were not implicit assumptions behind pre-Han philosophy." For the reviewer, the negative thesis is highly plausible independently of the adequacy of the first. (shrink)

In the past two decades, interest in the logical aspect of Chinese thought was largely confined to classical Chinese philosophy, particularly to the works of the later Mohists and Kung-sun Lung. Most of these discussions employed the techniques of formal analysis. Little attention was devoted to the possibility of exploring the nature of informal analysis and the standards of competence for evaluating particular pieces of discourse.

This book rewrites the story of classical Chinese philosophy, which has always been considered the single most creative and vibrant chapter in the history of Chinese philosophy. Works attributed to Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Han Feizi and many others represent the very origins of moral and political thinking in China. As testimony to their enduring stature, in recent decades many Chinese intellectuals, and even leading politicians, have turned to those classics, especially Confucian texts, for alternative or complementary sources (...) of moral authority and political legitimacy. Therefore, philosophical inquiries into core normative values embedded in those classical texts are crucial to the ongoing scholarly discussion about China as China turns more culturally inward. It can also contribute to the spirited contemporary debate about the nature of philosophical reasoning, especially in the non-Western traditions. -/- This book offers a new narrative and interpretative framework about the origins of moral-political philosophy that tracks how the three normative values, humaneness, justice, and personal freedom, were formulated, reformulated, and contested by early Chinese philosophers in their effort to negotiate the relationship among three distinct domains, the personal, the familial, and the political. Such efforts took place as those thinkers were reimagining a new moral-political order, debating its guiding norms, and exploring possible sources within the context of an evolving understanding of Heaven and its relationship with the humans. Tao Jiang argues that the competing visions in that debate can be characterized as a contestation between partialist humaneness and impartialist justice as the guiding norm for the newly imagined moral-political order, with the Confucians, the Mohists, the Laoists, and the so-called fajia thinkers being the major participants, constituting the mainstream philosophical project during this period. Thinkers lined up differently along the justice-humaneness spectrum with earlier ones maintaining some continuity between the two normative values (or at least trying to accommodate both to some extent) while later ones leaning more toward their exclusivity in the political/public domain. Zhuangzi and the Zhuangists were the outliers of the mainstream moral-political debate who rejected the very parameter of humaneness versus justice in that discourse. They were a lone voice advocating personal freedom, but the Zhuangist expressions of freedom were self-restricted to the margins of the political world and the interiority of one's heartmind. Such a take can shed new light on how the Zhuangist approach to personal freedom would profoundly impact the development of this idea in pre-modern Chinese political and intellectual history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Companion to Angus C. Graham's Chuang Tzu: The Inner ChaptersSteve CoutinhoA Companion to Angus C. Graham's Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters. By Harold D. Roth. Monographs of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy, 20. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003. Pp. 243. Paper $18.00.Scholars of Chuang Tzu—and "children of Angus"—will enthusiastically welcome Harold Roth's A Companion to Angus C Graham's Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters, a (...) collection of A. C. Graham's scholarly studies of the Chuang Tzu. Thanks to Roth's concerted efforts, Graham's scholarship on the Chuang Tzu has now been made readily available in a single volume. A. C. Graham was one of the most distinguished Western scholars of classical Chinese philosophy and one of the leading interpreters of the philosophy of Chuang Tzu. His pioneering research—textual, linguistic, and philosophical—on the Chuang Tzu and on its philosophical predecessor, the Later Mohist Canon, have laid the scholarly groundwork for further explorations of this philosophical and literary masterpiece.This collection includes: Graham's "Textual Notes to Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters," first published as a scholarly monograph in 1982 as a supplement to the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, under the title "Chuang-tzu: Textual Notes to a Partial Translation"; "How Much of Chuang Tzu Did Chuang Tzu Write?" which first appeared in 1976 in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion; [End Page 126] "Chuang Tzu's Essay on Seeing Things As Equal," written in 1968 for the Bellagio Conference on Taoist Studies and first published in a volume of History of Religions; "Two Notes on the Translation of Taoist Classics," which first appeared in 1991 in Interpreting Culture Through Translation: A Festschrift for D. C. Lau; and "Taoist Spontaneity and the Dichotomy of 'Is' and 'Ought,'" first published in 1983 in Victor Mair's Experimental Essays on the Chuang Tzu. The Companion ends with a Colophon by Harold Roth, "An Appraisal of Angus Graham's Textual scholarship on the Chuang Tzu."Chapter 1 reproduces Graham's textual notes on his translation of the Chuang tzu. Graham had written his "Textual Notes to Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters" while working on his translation of the Inner Chapters, and he had hoped to include them in the final version of Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters. Since this was not possible, Graham had them published instead by SOAS as a supplement to their Bulletin. Roth begins the Companion with a painstakingly reproduced computer-input version of Graham's original typewritten manuscript, which he also reorganized so that it corresponds to the (somewhat idiosyncratic) order and structure of Graham's translation. For ease of cross-reference, page numbers are provided to both Graham's translation and the Harvard Concordance (Chuang-tzu yin-te), the source text with which Graham worked.Chapter 2 is Graham's study, "How Much of Chuang Tzu Did Chuang Tzu Write?" This was written in large part as a response to Fu Ssu-nien's extraordinary and controversial claim that chapter 2, "Qi Wu Lun," is not the work of Chuang Tzu but of Shen Tao. In this paper Graham also attempts to identify how much of what he calls the "ragbag" chapters could have come from the same author as the Inner Chapters. The technique he uses is a straightforward tabulation of occurrences of characteristic usages and expressions in the various chapters, followed by a set of detailed comments. He compares carefully chosen idioms, grammatical particles and patterns, philosophical terms, and references to persons and themes. Comparisons are made specifically between the Inner Chapters, the "ragbag" chapters together with chapter 32, and the rest of the book.This is followed by a detailed justification of his "reconstruction" of what he believes to be the original introductory paragraph to chapter 3, "Yang Sheng Zhu." The next two sections put forward reasons for dividing the "Anarchist" chapters (8 to 11a, and 28 to 31) into two sections, the former group (8 to 11a) attributed to a person he calls the "Primitivist," the latter (28 to 31), following the argumentation of Kuan Feng, attributed to the... (shrink)

Summary. Analyses of the Mohist triads tend to rely mainly on observations about linguistic or rhetorical features. In this study, I aim to supplement such research by offering observations about the thematic content of the Shang- xian ©|½å and Shangtong ©|¦P triads (MZ 8-10 and 11-13). I argue that my observations are best explained by the hypothesis that the essays in both triads were compiled in the order shang-zhong-xia ¤W¤¤¤U . I also suggest that the writers of the later (...) texts probably had access to the earlier ones. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mencius and Xunzi between Humaneness and JusticeSungmoon Kim (bio)In his now classic Disputers of the Tao (1989), A. C. Graham aptly captured the central feature of the ancient Chinese world of thought in terms of the dispute about the Way between competing philosophical schools. But it has since long remained an intellectual challenge how to understand and evaluate the unfolding of the philosophical schools in ancient China [End Page (...) 439] coherently from a philosophical standpoint. Tao Jiang's Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China attempts to meet this long overdue challenge, and it does so admirably with philological rigor and philosophical insight.What is central to Jiang's framework is the conceptual tripod of humaneness, justice, and personal freedom, which he generally understands as "the moral norm that is agent/recipient relative" (especially, natural inclinations toward one's family/kin members), "impartial judgment on the merits of persons and states of affairs," and "the appreciation and cultivation of personal space where one can be left alone … without [being] entangled in the sociopolitical world," respectively.1 Jiang begins with Confucius by presenting him as the first major thinker in Chinese history who wrestled with the tension between humaneness and justice. According to Jiang, Confucius' seminal idea of impartial justice was critically re-appropriated by the Mohists, who advocated "impartial care" (jian ai 兼愛), while his idea of partial humaneness was later developed by Mencius, who upheld "familial virtues" as the pivot of Confucian morality and politics—although, as will be discussed shortly, this represents only one dimension of Mencius' philosophical system. Jiang understands the later development of the Laoist, the fajia ist (commonly known as "Legalist"), and the Zhuangist thoughts, largely as critical responses to the Confucian (especially the Mencian) argument for partial humaneness and the congruity between the familial and the political by naturalizing Heaven (thereby decoupling the political from the familial), developing an objective political system independent of the ruler's moral virtue, and insulating private persons from human relationality and the intervention of the state. Finally, Jiang argues that while Han Feizi's political thought presents the culmination of the early Chinese concern with impartial justice, Xunzi reformulated Confucianism by synthesizing humaneness and justice.I find Tao Jiang's overall argument, buttressed by extensive philological examinations, well-structured and penetrating, and I have no doubt that this book will make an important contribution to Chinese moral and political philosophy. Like many great books, however, Jiang's book makes numerous novel yet controversial claims, and this review aims to engage with several key questions Jiang raises with regard to Mencius and Xunzi, the two giants of classical Confucianism.The Two Strands of Mencius?In interpreting Mencius, Tao Jiang's core argument is that there is "a deep tension at the heart of the Mencian system."2 This tension, according to Jiang, rises from the two incompatible strands in Mencian thought, the "extensionist" strand and the "sacrificialist" strand: [End Page 440][W]hile the extensionist Mencius operates on the assumption, normative within Confucianism, of congruity between the personal, the familial, and the political domains, the sacrificialist Mencius recognizes a tension between the familial and the political that can be hard to reconcile or even irreconcilable under certain circumstances. Furthermore, the sacrificialist Mencius radically separates the familial from the political and ultimately prioritizes the former over the latter, by embracing the necessity for sacrifice as a way that, at times, is required to save the familial.3The extensionist Mencius presents the normative (i.e., partial humane) strand of Confucianism, which stipulates the seamless continuity between the personal, the familial, and the political, as best demonstrated in Mencius' statement that "the root of the world lies in the state; the root of the state lies in the family; the root of the family lies in oneself."4 That is, the extensionist strand of Mencius highlights the transformative force of moral self-cultivation that achieves the unity between the inner self and the outer world through the Heaven-decreed human nature, thus denying the categorial separations between ethics and politics, between moral virtue and political virtue, and between private and public. In Jiang's view, the extensionist strand captures... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Interpreting the MengziPhilip J. IvanhoeMencius: Contexts and Interpretations. Edited by Alan K. L. Chan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002. Pp. vii + 328. Hardcover $51.00.Mencius: Contexts and Interpretations, edited by Alan K. L. Chan, is an important collection of essays from a scholarly conference held at the National University of Singapore in 1999. It begins with a concise yet incisive introduction to Mengzi, his work, and the various (...) contributions to the volume. The essays engage the Mengzi from a wide range of perspectives and employ a variety of different approaches. One of its many virtues is the inclusion of articles that explore the relationship of the text to recently excavated Guodian material. The primary audience of these essays is other scholars. However, several contributions could be understood and appreciated by nonspecialists as well.In the lead essay, Ning Chen criticizes a wide range of current accounts concerning the background of Mengzi's theory of human nature and argues that because of these mistaken impressions about Mengzi's intellectual context contemporary scholars fail to appreciate important features of Mengzi's own theory. Chen argues that in order to understand Mengzi's theory it is necessary to appreciate that he was responding to a heretofore unnoticed Mohist theory of human nature and to views that we find in certain Guodian texts. Both of these sources describe "inegalitarian" theories of human nature, and such theories served as a central focus of not only Mengzi's but Xunzi's theory of human nature as well.Some may find Chen's claims about the Mohist theory of human nature in need of further support. His evidence is a single passage from the later, dialectical chapters and the reading of this passage remains highly controversial. Given the importance of this issue for Mengzi and the significant debates Mengzi has with Mohists in various places in the Mengzi, it is quite strange that we see no direct reference to this theory in the text, nor do we find evidence of it in the core chapters of the Mozi. Chen argues that his interpretation is superior to that of Wu Yujing, who argues that the Mohists advocated the view that human nature was ethically neutral. However, Chen does not mention that others have produced quite impressive arguments in support of this same conclusion, for example David S. Nivison.Chen presents interesting and impressive textual work on Guodian texts and no one can deny that this material adds to our understanding of early Chinese philosophy. However, it is not yet clear how, if at all, these texts change our interpretation of Mengzi's theory itself. Even on the issue of what motivated thinkers like Mengzi [End Page 249] and Xunzi to argue for more "egalitarian" theories, it is not clear that Chen has identified anything strikingly new. While the Guodian texts do describe new and interesting theories concerning the character of human nature, these are not the first "inegalitarian" theories. Perhaps more important, one need not see thinkers like Mengzi as responding only or even primarily to explicit theories about human nature; there was ample motivation to argue for a fundamental moral equality among human beings in order to resist the inertia of hereditary rule. As Donald Munro argued in his classic work, The Concept of Man in Early China, this is a distinctive feature of early Chinese thought. It seems reasonable to believe that on some not-too-deep level, all these theories about human nature were responding to the political and social realities of the times.I have some concern about Chen's tendency, which is common among those working on Guodian material, to infer direct causal influence between these texts and later philosophical writings. As all philosophers know, inference is a tricky affair. If we find an earlier culture A, whose members wore trousers with two legs, and a later culture B, whose members also wore trousers with two legs, we might be led to infer that B picked up this practice from A. This would be rash. Both may have adopted the practice from a third culture C or each may have come upon the idea independently—after all, they... (shrink)

The article mainly tries to discuss the dialogue between China and Western countries from the aspect of logic. There were three sources of logic, including formal logic in ancient Greek, logic in Early Qin of China as well as logic in ancient India. While, among all the schools in ancient China, Mohist and Virtuoso valued logic most. But as the rulers of Han Dynasty only paid their homage to Confucianism, the two schools gradually sank, logic in Early Qin of China (...) discontinued, without entering the main headstream of logic development worldwide. Later, logic in China had little influence on Chinese society although Indian logic was introduced in Tang Dynasty, a scholar-bureaucrat named Zhizao Li in Ming Dynasty, translated logic textbook Discussion of Name and Science, and German philosopher G.W. Leibniz explained Chinese changing theory with binary system. In the early 1900s, during the process of introducing western science, logic, regarded as the basis of science and a tool of scientific research, was highly valued by Chinese scholars, in fact, western logic entered China through two channels. After Chinese scholars learnt from western logic, they made their contribution to the development of logic. (shrink)

The book collects seventeen new research papers on themes in Indian philosophy, contributed by contemporary scholars from around the world. The principal themes are knowledge and logic, consciousness, existence, and the self. The editor explains that the studies discuss Indian sources in their own context, rather than trying to be comparative or make connections to other traditions. This unfortunate directive is fortunately ignored by the strongest papers. Claus Oetke shows that despite their investigations of inference and syntax, Indian analysts had (...) little interest in formal structure per se. They investigated ways to exploit the formal structure in ordinary cases for the establishment of metaphysical tenets. Metaphysical aspirations rather than sheer formal analysis were the overriding concern. Another contributor describes Indian thought as “relentlessly empiricist in orientation.” Scripture is acknowledged for transcendent things like Dharma and Brahman, “but it is the senses that hold sway over the natural world.” Logic is not enough for inference, which must be grounded in perception. The fourth-century Buddhist Vasubandhu defines inference in terms of perception. The basis of inference is the observation of an object not occurring without the inferred object for one who knows the connection. Eli Franco explains how skepticism invaded Indian thought with the Madhyamaka movement in latter Buddhism, beginning with the great founder Nagarjuna. He denies any means to knowledge, using arguments that often resemble those of Western skepticism. Skepticism about means to knowledge became associated with the later materialist Lokayata school, from ninth century. Indian materialism is an anomaly somewhat like the Chinese rationalism of the Mohists. Pradeep Gokhale provides an overview of the school, which he describes as “a rationalist philosophical movement which attempted to solve individual and social issues merely on empirical, rational, and practical grounds without taking recourse to religion.” Like Epicurus, this materialism is a physical theory demystifying traditional morality and religion, which are replaced by hedonism. Consciousness originates in body and does not exist independent of matter. It is not originally in the elements but arises from them, as intoxication, not originally in molasses, arises by fermentation. Religion is a human creation. Other worlds do not exist. Nothing that we do makes a difference to future lives, which do not exist. Fallacious ideas like life after death vitiate sacrifice and morality. The path to liberation is to follow natural pleasure. Joel Feldman discusses the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness. Things do not endure. The experience of enduring things is a delusive result of imagining things to have a universal character when actually they are merely grouped together according to our desires by means of their exclusion from things that do not fulfill our purposes. We impose this vast delusion on what are in truth momentary self-characterized particulars, each with its own self-nature, producing an effect and then annihilating in a moment by that very self-nature. Destruction is never the work of an external cause. If a thing can self-destruct, then it must be destroyed immediately by its own self-nature as soon as it begins to exist. Papers by Alex Watson and Roy Tzohar survey the spectrum of Indian views on the self. Consciousness as light is an ancient image in Indian thought described in a contribution by Matthew MacKenzie. Isabelle Ratié explains the metaphor of the mirror in Indian thought about consciousness. For Brahminical tradition mirror images are sheer illusion. For the later Buddhists the perceived universe is comparable to an optical refection. The characteristic of reflecting entities like a mirror is the capacity to manifest themselves as something else while remaining what they are, and this is exactly like consciousness, which manifests itself in all the images of phenomenal nature. In all of these papers Indian ideas are repeatedly compared with ideas in Sartre, McGinn, Dretske, Searle, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Sellars. (shrink)

This article describes the logic paradigm in the Mobian 墨辩 (the debate theory of the Mohist school) investigation from the point of view of hermeneutics, discloses the relationship between the overinterpretation tradition in China and the logic paradigm in the Mobian investigation, observes the overinterpretation of the Mobian by the creators and supporters of the logic paradigm from Liang Qichao and Hu Shi to the modernists, including mathematical logicians, and analyzes Shen Youding’s reflections on the logic paradigm in his (...) class='Hi'>later life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Meeting of Minds: Intellectual and Religious Interaction in East Asian Traditions of ThoughtDeborah SommerMeeting of Minds: Intellectual and Religious Interaction in East Asian Traditions of Thought. Edited by Irene Bloom and Joshua A. Fogel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Pp. 391.Meeting of Minds: Intellectual and Religious Interaction in East Asian Traditions of Thought, a volume of eleven essays written in honor of Wing-tsit Chan and William Theodore (...) de Bary, proposes to explore how Confucian and Neo-Confucian traditions have responded to and have influenced other traditions (Buddhist, Taoist, folk, Japanese nativist, and so on) in China and Japan. The essays are arranged first geographically (seven articles on China precede four on Japan) and then roughly chronologically. All essays, save one, describe Sung or post-Sung developments. A few sentences per essay must suffice in this review.Irene Bloom's "Three Visions of Jen" is the only essay on the classical period. Informed especially by Wing-tsit Chan's work on jen and shaped by Sung and later notions of the transmission of the way, the essay examines the notion of jen in the Analects, the Mencius, and Chu Hsi's "Jen shuo" (Discussion of jen), succinctly [End Page 318] emphasizing the significant differences of perspective therein. Nodding to the book's larger intent of examining intellectual interactions with other traditions, some attention is given in the conclusion to comparisons with the Mohist, Yangist, and Ch'an traditions. Rodney Taylor's "Chu Hsi on Meditation" is also deeply indebted to Wing-tsit Chan and starts by resurveying much terrain already explored in Chan's 1989 "Chu Hsi and Quiet-Sitting" (in Chu Hsi: New Studies, published by University of Hawai'i Press). Taylor enlarges upon Chan's work especially in his discussion of Chu Hsi's practices of breath-control techniques to improve health. In keeping with the larger direction of the book, Taylor contrasts Chu's emphasis on quiet sitting as a support for study with the different spiritual goals of Ch'an Buddhism.Patricia Ebrey's "Sung Neo-Confucian Views on Geomancy" examines a topic that is seldom encountered in American scholarship: the attitudes of such figures as Ssu-ma Kuang, Ch'eng I, Chu Hsi, and Ts'ai Yan-ting toward popular practices governing the placement of graves. Ebrey outlines the views of those who, as it were, are "for" or "against" geomancy (Chu and Ts'ai took geomancy seriously, although Ssu-ma and Ch'eng viewed it with apprehension) but also provides textual evidence that allows one to see the grayer areas between support for, and condemnation of, feng shui and other arts. Julia Ching's "Chu Hsi and Taoism" considers Chu's interpretations of such classical texts as the I ching, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and Ch'u tzu and also assays his commentaries on such later texts as the Ts'an-t'ung-ch'i (an alchemical text Chu commented on with the assistance of Ts'ai Yan-ting) and the Yin-fu-ching (a commentary that Ching concludes is most likely not Chu's work). She also explores in some detail the specifics of Chu's regimen of breathing practices.Moving from specific thinkers of the Sung to general developments in the Ming and Ch'ing dynasties, Chn-fang Y's "The Cult of Kuan-yin in Ming-Ch'ing China: A Case of Confucianization of Buddhism?" describes how the cult of Kuan-yin served the aims of Confucian family values and facilitated the realization of women's domestic expectations of filiality and fertility. Y explores the little-studied practice of ke-ku, or the cutting off of one's flesh to feed another, and relates Kuan-yin's role as a protector of those who engage in such filial excisions.Koichi Shinohara's "Ta-hui's Instructions to Tseng K'ai: Buddhist 'Freedom' in the Neo-Confucian Context" returns to the Sung but continues the focus on Buddhism, finding an example of Buddhist-Confucian interaction in the religious instruction given by the monk Ta-hui to a vice minister of rites. But what is particularly Confucian about minister Tseng K'ai's interest in Buddhism? The... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Interpreting the MengziPhilip J. IvanhoeMencius: Contexts and Interpretations. Edited by Alan K. L. Chan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002. Pp. vii + 328. Hardcover $51.00.Mencius: Contexts and Interpretations, edited by Alan K. L. Chan, is an important collection of essays from a scholarly conference held at the National University of Singapore in 1999. It begins with a concise yet incisive introduction to Mengzi, his work, and the various (...) contributions to the volume. The essays engage the Mengzi from a wide range of perspectives and employ a variety of different approaches. One of its many virtues is the inclusion of articles that explore the relationship of the text to recently excavated Guodian material. The primary audience of these essays is other scholars. However, several contributions could be understood and appreciated by nonspecialists as well.In the lead essay, Ning Chen criticizes a wide range of current accounts concerning the background of Mengzi's theory of human nature and argues that because of these mistaken impressions about Mengzi's intellectual context contemporary scholars fail to appreciate important features of Mengzi's own theory. Chen argues that in order to understand Mengzi's theory it is necessary to appreciate that he was responding to a heretofore unnoticed Mohist theory of human nature and to views that we find in certain Guodian texts. Both of these sources describe "inegalitarian" theories of human nature, and such theories served as a central focus of not only Mengzi's but Xunzi's theory of human nature as well.Some may find Chen's claims about the Mohist theory of human nature in need of further support. His evidence is a single passage from the later, dialectical chapters and the reading of this passage remains highly controversial. Given the importance of this issue for Mengzi and the significant debates Mengzi has with Mohists in various places in the Mengzi, it is quite strange that we see no direct reference to this theory in the text, nor do we find evidence of it in the core chapters of the Mozi. Chen argues that his interpretation is superior to that of Wu Yujing, who argues that the Mohists advocated the view that human nature was ethically neutral. However, Chen does not mention that others have produced quite impressive arguments in support of this same conclusion, for example David S. Nivison.Chen presents interesting and impressive textual work on Guodian texts and no one can deny that this material adds to our understanding of early Chinese philosophy. However, it is not yet clear how, if at all, these texts change our interpretation of Mengzi's theory itself. Even on the issue of what motivated thinkers like Mengzi [End Page 249] and Xunzi to argue for more "egalitarian" theories, it is not clear that Chen has identified anything strikingly new. While the Guodian texts do describe new and interesting theories concerning the character of human nature, these are not the first "inegalitarian" theories. Perhaps more important, one need not see thinkers like Mengzi as responding only or even primarily to explicit theories about human nature; there was ample motivation to argue for a fundamental moral equality among human beings in order to resist the inertia of hereditary rule. As Donald Munro argued in his classic work, The Concept of Man in Early China, this is a distinctive feature of early Chinese thought. It seems reasonable to believe that on some not-too-deep level, all these theories about human nature were responding to the political and social realities of the times.I have some concern about Chen's tendency, which is common among those working on Guodian material, to infer direct causal influence between these texts and later philosophical writings. As all philosophers know, inference is a tricky affair. If we find an earlier culture A, whose members wore trousers with two legs, and a later culture B, whose members also wore trousers with two legs, we might be led to infer that B picked up this practice from A. This would be rash. Both may have adopted the practice from a third culture C or each may have come upon the idea independently—after all, they... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Chinese Just War Ethics: Origin, Development, and Dissent ed. by Ping-Cheung Lo, Sumner B. TwissRosemary B. KellisonChinese Just War Ethics: Origin, Development, and Dissent Edited by Ping-Cheung Lo and Sumner B. Twiss London: Routledge, 2015. 320pp. $160.00As Ping-Cheung Lo notes, Western stereotypes of Chinese culture and particularly of Confucian ethics have led many to describe ancient China as a place of peace and cooperation—a picture that is contrary (...) to historical evidence (249). This new volume, edited by Lo and Sumner Twiss, offers an important corrective to that image. The contributing authors describe the moral attitudes toward war and peace taken by Chinese thinkers in several schools during the Warring States Period of 475–221 BCE (along with one later figure, the sixteenth-century neo-Confucian Wang Yangming). In particular, they focus on five traditions: military strategy, Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism, and legalism. The authors collectively demonstrate that ancient Chinese thought was marked by an intense interest in both peace and war, and that these topics were approached from moral as well as strategic and prudential perspectives. Moreover, in their historical contextualization of these materials, the authors emphasize the significance of the reality of war in shaping the arguments discussed. This attention to interpretation and real-life applications of these arguments, in both the ancient world and the contemporary activities of the People’s Liberation Army, is a particular strength of the book.This volume will be of special interest to comparative religious ethicists as well as to those interested in just war reasoning. As the inclusion of the phrase “just war” in the book’s title suggests, the identification of parallels to Western just war thinking in ancient Chinese thought is a major emphasis. Lo argues that although the Seven Military Classics are often read simply as strategy manuals, their discussions of strategy are complemented by concepts similar to the just war criteria of just cause, last resort, and discrimination. Twiss and Jonathan Chan suggest that the Confucian “true king” who is to oversee war [End Page 226] virtuously and with the goal of maintaining an ordered, humane society represents a requirement similar to the just war criterion of right authority; importantly, however, “right” in the Confucian tradition comes from the ruler’s virtue rather than his sovereignty. Hui-chieh Loy’s study of the Mohist tradition identifies concepts similar to six different jus ad bellum criteria while also revealing a lack of jus in bello criteria. Finally, Lo argues for the similarities between ancient legalism and contemporary Western realism as an alternative to just war thinking.Future scholarly development in this area should include a more robust articulation of the purpose of taking this comparative approach. Some reasons are implied in the book. For instance, Twiss and Chan argue for the overlap of Confucian punitive expeditions with the contemporary model of responsibility to protect, suggesting the possibility of international consensus on that norm. On the other hand, comparative work always runs the risk of distorting or overlooking material as a result of the desire to identify similarities or differences to a particular framework. Aaron Stalnaker, for example, points out that while Confucian thinker Xunzi may have embraced some concepts similar to those of jus ad bellum and jus in bello, he did not structure his own writing in those terms (135). Similarly, Ellen Zhang argues that the Daodejing differs from just war texts in that it approaches the question of war from the perspective of a particular conception of peace as an absence of coercion; the text thus takes the avoidance of war as its moral ideal. She also suggests that Confucian punitive expeditions may be better understood as domestic criminal discipline than as acts of war or humanitarian intervention (220). The chapters of this book thus provide a helpful and illustrative starting point for the kind of theoretical conversation about comparison mentioned here.Rosemary B. KellisonUniversity of West GeorgiaCopyright © 2016 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

As the Mohist doctrine of inclusive care (jian ai 兼愛) is usually understood, it is an affront to both human nature and commonsense morality.1 We are told that the Mohists rejected all particularist ties, especially to family, in the interests of a radically universalist ethic.2 But love for those close to us is deeply rooted in our natures, and few would deny that this love has moral significance. If the Mohists did deny this, it would be easy to (...) dismiss them, regardless of the abstract weight of their arguments. But the Mohists did not deny this. They consistently took it for granted that we have special attitudes and obligations toward those close to us. Filial piety was one of their core values, and .. (shrink)

A longstanding orthodoxy holds that the Mohists regard the promotion of li (benefit, 利) as their ultimate normative criterion, meaning that they measure what is yi (just, 義) or buyi (unjust, 不義) depending on whether it maximizes li or not. This orthodoxy dates back at least to Joseph Edkins (1859), who saw Mozi as a utilitarian and an ally of Bentham. In this paper, we will argue that this orthodoxy should be reconsidered because it does not square with several (...) passages from the Mozi. That the Mohists place a strong weight on the promotion of ‘li for the whole world (tianxia zhi li, 天下之利)’ is uncontroversial. We argue, however, that in certain cases the Mohist moral calculus diverges in its rationale or outcome from li-promotionalism. This position rejects the orthodoxy by showing that Mohism and li-promotionalism are not entirely coterminous. (shrink)

The Mencius contains several negative remarks about the Mohists and their doctrine of ‘universal love’ (jian’ai). However, little attention has been paid to whether Mencius’ descriptions of Mohism were accurate. Fortunately, there is a surviving record of the beliefs of Mozi in the text that bears his name. In this essay, I analyze this text and descriptions of Mohism from other early Chinese texts, and compare them to the criticisms of Mohism in the Mencius. Ultimately, I show that the (...) image of the Mohists as ones who promoted a doctrine that contradicted filial piety was inaccurate, and obscured the complexities of filial piety in the Warring States period. (shrink)

In this paper, I wish to examine the plausibility of two distinct but interrelated claims that might arise out of reading the Mozi . First, I want to examine the plausibility of understanding Mohist philosophy as quite naturalistic, notwithstanding the Mozi’s apparent discussion of a Heaven (tian 天) that has desires, likes, and dislikes and ghosts and spirits who do Heaven’s bidding. In this vein, I wonder if the Mohists think that it is simply a fact of the universe (...) that Heaven cares for all humans impartially, in much the same way that certain other thinkers in the Chinese tradition understand Heaven as having a set of regularities that can be understood and acted upon. Arising from this may be the idea that the right thing to do, in a hypothetical rather than categorical sense, is to accord with Heaven. -/- This then leads to the second part of this paper – questioning the substantive moral normativity often ascribed to the Mozi. Once we remove the supra-natural understanding of Heaven from Mohist thought, we may understand the normativity within as a non-moral normativity. Perhaps it is not that we morally ought to accord with Heaven’s will and act impartially or morally ought to accord with the natural world and follow the Dao. Rather, these can simply be seen as success criteria. Insofar as we wish to have a strong, flourishing, and prosperous state – or, in the Mozi’s terms a wealthy, populous and well-ordered state – it is necessary to accord with how the world is actually structured. (shrink)

In Mohist philosophy, the gnomon is a metaphor for the standard of valid arguments. This metaphor comes from the method of establishing due east and west by observing gnomon shadows at dusk and dawn. I argue that there is also an overlooked, implicit aspect of the gnomon metaphor that comes from its function of measuring the height of heaven indirectly through proportional calculation. The function of indirect measurement inspires a strategy of argumentation in Mohist ethics, which I call “analogical upscaling.” (...) Such an argument draws a parallel between small-scale and large-scale actions for the purpose of determining the Will of Heaven in a particular circumstance, just as the gnomon measures heaven’s physical height analogically. In the conclusion, I compare the epistemological status of light and shadow in the Mozi and Plato’s Republic. (shrink)

Fraser highlights an unattractive feature of Mohist ethics: the Mohists, while criticizing their Confucian contemporaries, restrict one’s pursuits to the most basic sorts of goods. Fraser suggests that the Mohists assume the perpetuity of scarce resources, which leads to a commitment to austerity, which in turn leads them to deny a plausible third way between austerity and excess. In their defence, I argue that the Mohists do not assume perpetuity of scarce resources but rather the hedonic treadmill. (...) And instead of begging the question by assuming austerity and then denying a moderate alternative to excess, the Mohists take the hedonic treadmill to preclude a principled stopgap between austerity and excess, leaving austerity as the only acceptable option. Finally, these dynamics illuminate a feature that should make us wary of parallels to Millian utilitarianism: the maximization principle of the latter is absent from Mohism, and this goes hand-in-hand with austerity. (shrink)