Category Archives: Chinese philosophy – 中國哲學 – 中国哲学

Is There Something More Than Knowing-how and Knowing-that?

As this is my first blog, please forgive me if it is not consistent with the standard style of common blogs. What is posted below is potentially the first of two installments (i.e., if the second one will ever come through).

Gilbert Ryle has made the famous distinction between knowing-that and knowing-how. Knowing that is the knowledge that something is the case, and knowing how is the knowledge about how to do something. With this distinction in mind, it has been common among students of Chinese philosophy in general and Confucianism in particular to think that Confucians advocate knowing-how in contrast to knowing-that.

Given the fact that Confucians are primarily concerned with moral knowledge and they have undoubtedly put great emphasis on moral self-cultivation, it is clear that knowledge in Confucianism is not merely propositional and theoretical knowing-that. Indeed, if knowing-that and knowing-how have exhausted all possible types of knowledge, then I would certainly also agree that moral knowledge in Confucianism is knowing-how rather than knowing-that or at least is more knowing-how than knowing-that. However, what I would like to challenge is precisely the assumption that knowing-how and knowing-that have exhausted all types of knowledge, and consequently I would also like to challenge the characterization of Confucian moral knowledge as knowing-how. In contrast, I would like to claim that it is other (or more) than knowing-how and knowing-that. I shall use Wang Yangming as an example.  Continue reading →

Xunzi and the Mohists on Natural Disasters

In a famous passage, Xúnzǐ argues that natural disasters lead to catastrophe only because of human failings: with the proper preparation, floods and droughts still occur, but do not devastate. I’m probably not the only friend of this blog who found special poignancy in this argument while lecturing on it in the aftermath of Katrina.

The news today has been good. Irene seems to have weakened unexpectedly. (I hope this hasn’t changed since last I saw good information.) Here in Philadelphia, it looks like we’ll get a category one hurricane, the equivalent (in Hong Kong terms) of a typhoon signal ten. I think there was just one of those in the ten years I lived in Hong Kong; we didn’t even lose internet. I’m preparing mostly by baking lots of bread and making lots of hummus. I’m still a bit nervous, because I don’t know what I can expect from local construction, and the American infrastructure is (understandably, to an extent) less robust than Hong Kong’s. And there are lots of people more vulnerable than I am, and lots of people who have been and are going to be hit harder. I’m glad that friends have evacuated the Jersey shore, and am proud of friends who are part of the preparations and will be part of the response.

In any case, it’s got me thinking about Xúnzǐ, and also about the Mohists, who would have interpreted a storm like Irene as a punishment from heaven. Continue reading →

Ruism and free speech

I’ve been giving some thought to this topic quite a bit, most recently spurred on by a response to an article by Daniel Bell that I’m writing for a Chinese journal. I won’t go into Bell’s argument in any detail, but I find significantly greater restrictions on speech accepted and even advocated by classical Ruists than in liberalism. On certain topics (criticizing the ruler/government) certain people (Ruists, or maybe the elite more generally) should speak out, though even here historically Ruists have generally accepted that they might be punished for doing so. On other topics, particularly those that might threaten social harmony and stability, they seem quite willing to ban certain kinds of expression. Continue reading →

Review of Denecke

Here are a few excerpts from a short book review (about 2000 words) I just wrote for China Review International, of Wiebke Denecke‘s The Dynamics of Masters Literature: Early Chinese Thought from Confucius to Han Feizi. My review mostly touches on method, not so much on substance, of her analysis. However, if you thought you might be interested in reading the book, here is some indication of its contents.

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Wiebke Denecke. The Dynamics of Masters Literature: Early Chinese Thought from Confucius to Han Feizi. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. xii, 370 pp. Hardcover $39.95, ISBN 978-0-674-05609-1.

Some academic philosophers and historians claim to study or “do” Chinese philosophy. Denecke takes aim in this book at understanding “first what modern proponents of a ‘Chinese philosophy’ have gained from creating a Chinese equivalent of philosophy for their time and concerns, and second what we may gain from framing our inquiry into this text corpus through the lens of other disciplines, questions, and concerns for our time” (3). So, the project is constructive and invites readers to seek gains from the inquiry. Ultimately, Denecke conceives of her project as friendly to the task of including Chinese thought in contemporary philosophical conversation, so long as the project of understanding those texts is itself seen as an important part of the learning process: “’Chinese philosophy’ should not be a toolbox of concepts and values that could give Western philosophy a fix. Instead, it is the translation process … both on the level of words and on the level of disciplines, that has the greatest potential to become productive in the future” (344-5). Continue reading →

International Research Candidate Scholarships at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

UNSW offers scholarships to international research candidates (Masters, PhD) of exceptional research potential to undertake a higher degree by research. Tuition Fee Scholarships are available for PhD, Masters by Research and Master of Philosophy (in selected disciplines depending on Faculty research areas). Some scholarship schemes also provide a living allowance.

If you are interested in applying for a scholarship to conduct MA or PhD research in Chinese philosophy, please contact Dr Karyn Lai (k.lai@unsw.edu.au) for more information. The closing date for applications is 31st August, 2011, so please act quickly!

More information on the scholarship is available at: http://research.unsw.edu.au/international-research-candidate-scholarships.

Call for Papers for ISCWP Panels at the Pacific Division Meeting of APA, Seattle, April 4-7, 2012.

Dear ISCWP members:

The International Society for Comparative Studies of Chinese and
Western Philosophy (ISCWP) plans to sponsor one or two panels at next
year’s Pacific Division Meeting of APA, which will be held in Seattle,
April 4-7, 2012. We hereby invite submissions.

Our Goal: We would like to encourage submissions of individual papers
that are comparative, as well as panels which combine philosophers
working primarily in Chinese traditions with those working primarily
in Western traditions, aimed at promoting more in-depth engagement
between the two groups. We have not stipulated any specific themes for
the panels, but would welcome suggestions. Continue reading →

Individualism Piece on IEP

Erica Brindley, author of Individualism in Early China: Human Agency and the Self in Thought and Politics, just published a piece on “Individualism in Classical Chinese Thought” for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Brindley’s whole article is worth a careful read, not to mention the aforementioned book; I assume the article is in part a distillation of the book. Here are a couple of excerpts:

To the extent that the self is conceived as physical, embodied, and dynamic, the early Chinese “self” necessarily entails a different definition of  “individual.” While there is no clear term in Classical Chinese that might translate consistently into “individual,” this latter term facilitates discussion of those aspects of the self that emphasize its particularity within a whole. We use the term “individual” here to refer to early Chinese notions of self that concern not so much the subjective, psychological sense of “self,” but the qualities of a person that mark him or her as a single, particular entity capable of exerting agency from within a web of relationships. In other words, we refer to the individual not as an atomistic, isolated, and undifferentiated part of a whole, but as a distinct organism that must serve particular functions and fulfill a unique set of relationships in the worlds of which he or she is a part. The individual is thus a unique participant in a larger whole—integral to both, the processes that define the whole, as well as to the change and transformation that stems from itself.

Continue reading →