On The Epistemology Of The Senses In Early Chinese Thought

By departing from traditional sinological approaches, this method uncovers a detailed picture of certain shared underlying views of sense perception in the Lun Yu, the Mozi (including the Neo Mohist Canons), the Xunzi, the Mencius, the Laozi and the Zhuangzi."--BOOK JACKET.

Providing a bracing expansion of horizons, this book displays the unsuspected range of human thinking on the most basic categories of experience. The way in which early Chinese thinkers approached concepts such as one and many, sameness and difference, self and other, and internal and external stand in stark contrast to the way parallel concepts entrenched in much of modern thinking developed in Greek and European thought. Brook Ziporyn traces the distinctive and surprising philosophical journeys found in the works of the formative Confucian and Daoist thinkers back to a prevailing set of assumptions that tends to see questions of identity, value, and knowledge—the subject matter of ontology, ethics, and epistemology in other traditions—as all ultimately relating to questions about coherence in one form or another. Mere awareness of how many different ways human beings can think and have thought about these categories is itself a game changer for our own attitudes toward what is thinkable for us. The actual inhabitation and mastery of these alternative modes of thinking is an even greater adventure in intellectual and experiential expansion.

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.

Challenges the idea held by many prominent twentieth-century Sinologists that early China experienced a “language crisis.” Jane Geaney argues that early Chinese conceptions of speech and naming cannot be properly understood if viewed through the dominant Western philosophical tradition in which language is framed through dualisms that are based on hierarchies of speech and writing, such as reality/appearance and one/many. Instead, early Chinese texts repeatedly create pairings of sounds and various visible things. This aural/visual polarity suggests that texts from early China treat speech as a bodily practice that is not detachable from its use in everyday experience. Firmly grounded in ideas about bodies from the early texts themselves, Geaney’s interpretation offers new insights into three key themes in these texts: the notion of speakers’ intentions (yi), the physical process of emulating exemplary people, and Confucius’s proposal to rectify names (zhengming).

This book is a companion to logical thought and logical thinking in China with a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. It introduces the basic ideas and theories of Chinese thought in a comprehensive and analytical way. It covers thoughts in ancient, pre-modern and modern China from a historical point of view. It deals with topics in logical (including logico-philosophical) concepts and theories rooted in China, Indian and Western Logic transplanted to China, and the development of logical studies in contemporary China and other Chinese communities. The term “philosophy of logic” or “logico-philosophical thought” is used in this book to represent “logical thought” in a broad sense which includes thinking on logical concepts, modes of reasoning, and linguistic ideas related to logic and philosophical logic. Unique in its approach, the book uses Western logical theories and philosophy of language, Chinese philology, and history of ideas to deal with the basic ideas and major problems in logical thought and logical thinking in China. In doing so, it advances the understanding of the lost tradition in Chinese philosophical studies.

Chinese-Western Comparative Metaphysics and Epistemology: A Topical Approach features a comparative analysis of the fundamental metaphysical assumptions and their epistemological implications in Chinese and Western philosophy. Adopting the methodology of topical comparison that seeks to correlate two or multiple approaches to the same set of questions raised by a single topic or issue, Mingjun Lu argues for commensurability in Chinese and Western metaphysics of both Nature and the mind, and in the epistemology of knowledge dictated by these two fundamental hypotheses of the first principle or primary cause. Lu explores this philosophical commensurability through a comparative analysis of the canonical works written by Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz on the Western side, and by Confucius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Lu Jiuyuan, Zhu Xi, and Wang Yangming on the Chinese side. The parallels and analogues revealed by the comparative lens, Lu proposes, bring to light a coherent and well-developed Chinese metaphysical and epistemological system that corresponds closely to that in the West. By inventing such new categories as cosmo-substantial metaphysics, consonant epistemology, natural hermeneutics, and onto-mind reading to reconceptualize Chinese and Western philosophy, Lu suggests alternative and more commensurable grounds of comparison.

The study of perception and the role of the senses have recently risen to prominence in philosophy and are now a major area of study and research. However, the philosophical history of the senses remains a relatively neglected subject. Moving beyond the current philosophical canon, this outstanding collection offers a wide-ranging and diverse philosophical exploration of the senses, from the classical period to the present day. Written by a team of international contributors, it is divided into six parts: Perception from Non-Western Perspectives Perception in the Ancient Period Perception in the Medieval Latin/Arabic Period Perception in the Early Modern Period Perception in the Post-Kantian Period Perception in the Contemporary Period. The volume challenges conventional philosophical study of perception by covering a wide range of significant, as well as hitherto overlooked, topics, such as perceptual judgment, temporal and motion illusions, mirror and picture perception, animal senses and cross-modal integration. By investigating the history of the senses in thinkers such as Plotinus, Auriol, Berkeley and Cavendish; and considering the history of the senses in diverse philosophical traditions, including Chinese, Indian, Byzantine, Greek and Latin it brings a fresh approach to studying the history of philosophy itself. Including a thorough introduction as well as introductions to each section by the editors, The Senses and the History of Philosophy is essential reading for students and researchers in the history of philosophy, perception, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, aesthetics and eastern and non-western philosophy. It will also be extremely useful for those in related disciplines such as psychology, religion, sociology, intellectual history and cognitive sciences.

In China, the debate over the moral status of emotions began around the fourth century BCE, when early philosophers first began to invoke psychological categories such as the mind (xin), human nature (xing), and emotions (qing) to explain the sources of ethical authority and the foundations of knowledge about the world. Although some thinkers during this period proposed that human emotions and desires were temporary physiological disturbances in the mind caused by the impact of things in the world, this was not the account that would eventually gain currency. The consensus among those thinkers who would come to be recognized as the foundational figures of the Confucian and Daoist philosophical traditions was that the emotions represented the underlying, dispositional constitution of a person, and that they embodied the patterned workings of the cosmos itself. Curie Virág sets out to explain why the emotions were such a central preoccupation among early thinkers, situating the entire debate within developments in conceptions of the self, the cosmos, and the political order. She shows that the mainstream account of emotions as patterned reality emerged as part of a major conceptual shift towards the recognition of natural reality as intelligible, orderly, and coherent. The mainstream account of emotions helped to summon the very idea of the human being as a universal category and to establish the cognitive and practical agency of human beings. This book, the first intensive study of the subject, traces the genealogy of these early Chinese philosophical conceptions and examines their crucial role in the formation of ethical, political and cultural values in China.