Being a widely translated piece of work, the Daodejing becomes vulnerable to 'translation errors', which fail to bring across the nuances in certain parts of the text. This thus leads to the existing argument that the Daodejing seems to portray some form of linguistic skepticism, through the presence of differing interpretations of the Dao and the moral truth of wuwei (无为) (non-action). Furthermore, given that the text is widely used as a moral guide, there is a problem. It now seems (...) that the text perpetuates moral skepticism as well. In this paper, I analyse the question of whether linguistic skepticism in the Daodejing does bring about moral skepticism, and argue that it is the case; that moral skepticism does indeed follow from linguistic skepticism. The hope through this discussion is to call for a universal address of the presence of linguistic skepticism in the Daodejing and how it perpetuates moral skepticism, for this topic is still rather novel in the community, and open up further discussion. (shrink)

Regulative virtue epistemology argues that intellectual virtues can adjust and guide one’s epistemic actions as well as improve on the quality of the epistemic actions. For regulative virtue epistemologists, intellectual virtues can be cultivated to a higher degree; when the quality of intellectual virtue is better, the resulting quality of epistemic action is better. The intellectual virtues that regulative epistemologists talk about are character virtues (such as intellectual courage and open-mindedness) rather than faculty virtues (such as sight and hearing), since (...) they don’t think that faculty virtues could be cultivated. This article refers to Xunzi’s philosophy, explaining how a regulative faculty-based virtue epistemology is possible. If this explanation works, on the one hand, a new branch of contemporary virtue epistemology is shown, and, on the other hand, a clear theoretical framework of Xunzi’s epistemology is constructed. (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)