The Gongsun Longzi is often considered the only extant work of the Classical Chinese “School of Names”, an early intellectual tradition mainly concerned with logic and the philosophy of language. The Gongsun Longzi is a heterogeneous collection of five chapters that include short treatises and largely fictive dialogues between an anonymous persuader and his opponent, which typically revolve around a paradoxical claim. Its value as a testimony to Early Chinese philosophy, however, is somewhat controversial due to the intricate textual history (...) of the text and our limited knowledge about its intellectual backgrounds. This volume gathers contributions by leading specialists in the fields of Classical Chinese philosophy, philology, logic, and linguistics. Besides an overview of the scholarly literature on the topic and a detailed account of the reception of the text throughout time, it presents fresh insights into philological and philosophical problems raised by the Gongsun Longzi and other closely-related texts equally attributed to the “School of Names”. (shrink)

Mou Zongsan, one of the main representatives of New Confucianism in twentieth-century China, has presented, under the designation of a moral metaphysics, an ambitious philosophical reconstruction of Confucianism drawing both on Kantian critique and Buddhist scholasticism. I have argued elsewhere that this "philosophized" Confucianism can be understood as a reformulation of the daotong, the traditional view that the correct transmission of the Confucian Way proceeds from a master to his disciples. Unlike what Mou's prominent academic standing, at least in his (...) later years, might suggest, the core of Confucianism in his view is thus transmitted not in public discourse but in an intimate communication... (shrink)

A major figure in New Confucianism,1 Mou Zongsan 牟宗三 is often considered one of the most important thinkers of twentieth-century China. His philosophical work he labeled "moral metaphysics," a caption inspired by Kant's term "moral theology," marking, at one and the same time, both an homage to and a disapproval of the German philosopher's work. In Mou's view, Kant, unable to come up with a convincing solution to the problem of integrating practical and theoretical philosophy, fails to provide a viable (...) notion of the "Highest Good".2 Mou's own proposal to emend this alleged deficiency rests on two main pillars: the concept of intellectual intuition and the figure of a "perfect teaching"... (shrink)

Mit Blick auf Móu Zōngsāns erkenntnistheoretische Schriften untersucht Rafael Suters die Frage, ob es diesem gelungen ist, die kritische Philosophie Kants mit der konfuzianischen so zu vermitteln, dass sich von einer kritischen Transformation konfuzianischen Denkens sprechen läßt, oder ob er im Versuch, dies zu tun, nicht letztlich in einen kritikfernen Intuitionismus zurückgefallen ist, gegen den der Kritizismus Kants doch gerade gerichtet war. Aus der Konstellation, die diese Untersuchung mit den beiden vorhergehenden bildet, wird deutlich, dass dies eine Frage von beträchtlicher (...) moralphilosophischer und auch politischer Relevanz ist. (shrink)

The present chapter sketches the adoption of logic in late nineteenth and early twentieth century China. Addressing both conceptual and institutional aspects of this process, it contextualizes the raising interest in the discipline among Qing scholars and Republican intellectuals. Arranged largely chronologically, it delineates the successive periods in the reception of major works of and intellectual trends in the field. It introduces the most influential scholars promoting a public discourse on logic in the final years of the empire, but also (...) the ever more professional agents who participated in the ensuing establishment of a modern institutional framework for studies in logic like universities, departments of logic, academic societies, journals etc. While at the beginning, these people were mostly no trained logicians, progress in the establishment of academic logic in the 1930s provided the conditions for the formation of the first Chinese specialists in the field who were often internationally trained and soon to engage in cutting-edge research. In some contrast, academic discourse on logic well into the 1930s was dominated by exaggerated social and political expectations, not least due to the successive influence on intellectuals of inductionist scientism in the first decades of the twentieth century, of an inflated pragmatist notion of logic in the 1920s, and of an overly simplistic “antiformalist” notion of logic propagated by (vulgar-)Marxist historical dialecticians in the 1930s. The arrival of scientific logic also went in tandem with a renewed interest in studies in the traditional Buddhist “science of reasons” (yinming, hetuvidyā, “Buddhist logic”) and spurred the search for contributions to the field of logic in the record of inherited Chinese literature, a development which soon led to the common acceptance of the existence of genuinely Chinese traditions of logic. It is eventually a peculiarity of the Chinese reception of logic that since around 1920, less than two decades after the first modern translations of textbooks on traditional syllogistics, the visit of Bertrand Russell – one of the fathers of mathematical logic – fueled the spread of this new approach to logic which has eventually changed its face for good. Designed as a historical survey, this chapter is a general account on the major contributions to the field by Chinese scholars of the time and has to forego detailed discussions. (shrink)

In dieser Studie wird das Frühwerk des bedeutenden chinesischen Philosophen Mou Zongsan erstmals umfassend analysiert und aufgearbeitet: Nach einer Einführung in die Entstehungskontexte werden verschiedene Aspekte seiner Arbeiten zur Logik und ihrem Verhältnis zu Wahrnehmung und Erkenntnis vorgestellt. Der symptomatische Charakter von Mous Texten macht das Buch zu einer lohnenden Lektüre.