Later Mohism

This comprehensive introductory textbook to early Chinese philosophy covers a range of philosophical traditions which arose during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods in China, including Confucianism, Mohism, Daoism, and Legalism. It considers concepts, themes and argumentative methods of early Chinese philosophy and follows the development of some ideas in subsequent periods, including the introduction of Buddhism into China. The book examines key issues and debates in early Chinese philosophy, cross-influences between its traditions and interpretations by scholars up (...) to the present day. The discussion draws upon both primary texts and secondary sources, and there are suggestions for further reading. This will be an invaluable guide for all who are interested in the foundations of Chinese philosophy and its richness and continuing relevance. (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 thinks that the parallelism in the Neo‐Moist Canons is about the deduction of sentences. On the contrary, Chad Hansen thinks that they are not plausibly treated as inference of deductive forms since the later Moists are at pains to show that they can “go wrong.” In this article, I shall try to provide a logical analysis and a constructive rather than defeatist interpretation of parallelism in the text. I argue that the Moists tend to express their ideas (...) in the “material mode of speech” to build up their semantic and pragmatic sensibility in philosophical thinking. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to evaluate the Moist Canons from the point of view of logic, as a system of definitions. We concentrate more specifically on the formal organization of the upper part of the Moist Canons. This method leads us to a globally positive evaluation of the system of definitions but also to the less expected conclusion that a few very basic concepts are undefined and form the background of the Moist concrete, realist, and pragmatic philosophical system: (...) ran, to be so; de, to obtain; ming, illumination; zuo, to initiate; and wei, to act. (shrink)

The Later Moists grounded our linguistic abilities in our ability to distinguish between kinds on the basis of manifest similarities and differences among things. Proper names, however, require a different treatment. According to the Moists, when we use a proper name, we borrow a word for one kind of thing and use it to refer to something else, as when we name dogs “crane.” This view probably responds in part to arguments that the possibility of using any word to refer (...) to any thing threatens the stability of language. Proper names may borrow from terms with existing uses, but arguably they do not thereby undermine those uses. (shrink)

This article is an effort to improve understanding between Moist and Aristotelian logics on analogy. I argue that Chinese logic can neither fit in Aristotelian deductive framework, nor completely fit in Aristotelian inductive framework. One of the major reasoning skills that ancient Chinese logicians applied is analogical reasoning. Having examined thirteen Moist analogical propositions in a Moist text, the Da Qu 〈大取〉from the perspective of finding rationales (li 理) among things, I conclude that if the rationales can be found in (...) a changing world, then Chinese logicians seek for the “beauty of creative thinking” in the process of argumentation. (shrink)

In 1A:7 of the Mengzi, Mengzi tries to convince King Xuan of Qi that he is a “true” king. As a reading of Mengzi’s reasoning involved in his attempt at persuasion, David Nivison advances an inferential view, according to which Mengzi’s persuasion involves inferences. In this paper, I consider the assumptions underlying the objections raised against Nivison’s inferential view. I argue that these objections assume a contemporary Western view about the nature of logic and inferences. I propose an alternative characterisation (...) of the relevant sense of inference that, I believe, is more sensitive to the classical Chinese philosophical context and argue that certain insights can be derived from reading Mengzi in light of this alternative characterization of inferences. (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 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.

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)

The Mohist School's logical study focuses mainly on the following inference rule: suppose that N and M are coextensive terms, or N a subset of M; it follows that if a verb can appear in front of N, it can also appear in front of M. That is, if 'VM' then 'VN', where V is some extensional verb. Such an approach to logical inference necessitates the study of logical relations among nouns, verbs, and the relations between these two types of (...) words. Evidence is offered here that the Mohists clearly distinguished extensional verbs from intensional verbs, and that this insight enabled them to say, among other things, that VN does not follow from VM, even in cases where N is M or contained in M, as long as the V in question is an intensional verb. (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)

Despite the importance of the Moist-Confucian debate to students of both Chinese thought and comparative religious ethics, it remains in need of a careful analysis using contemporary ethical theory. In presenting such an analysis, this essay aims to accomplish three things: (1) to show how Confucius and Mo-tzu were divided over the priority-of-the-right issue, the latter being a utilitarian in his working ethics despite his oft-noted interest in divine command theory; (2) to describe how their followers worked out a meta-ethical (...) basis for their respective positions on this issue (Mencius, in particular, opposing the psychological and "definist" approach of the Moists with an "intuitionist" one that would have a deep influence upon later Confucian orthodoxy); (3) to demonstrate the tendency, perhaps grounded in the structure of human thought, toward conflict between two basic ways of doing normative ethics: the deontological and the teleological. (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)