Joel J. Kupperman, 1936–2020

Journal of Chinese PhilosophyVolume 39, Issue S1 p. 5-9 Special Theme Introduction: Intersections between Chinese and Western Philosophies Eric s. Nelson, Corresponding Author Eric s. Nelson UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS LOWELL, Lowell, MassachusettsERIC S. NELSON, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Lowell. Specialties: Chinese philosophy, comparative philosophy, European philosophy. E-mail: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Eric s. Nelson, Corresponding Author Eric s. Nelson UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS LOWELL, Lowell, MassachusettsERIC S. NELSON, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Lowell. Specialties: Chinese philosophy, comparative philosophy, European philosophy. E-mail: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 11 June 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-6253.12001Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume39, IssueS1Special Issue: European and Chinese Philosophy: Origins and IntersectionsDecember 2012Pages 5-9 RelatedInformation

Reviewed by: The Bloomsbury Handbook of Chinese Philosophy Methodologies ed. by Sorhoon Tan Jeremy Huang Zujie (bio) The Bloomsbury Handbook of Chinese Philosophy Methodologies. Edited by Sorhoon Tan. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Pp. ix + 375. isbn 978-1-472-58031-3. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Chinese Philosophy Methodologies is the third entry of the Bloomsbury Research Handbook in Asian Philosophy series. Editor Sor-hoon Tan begins the Handbook with a historical journey starting from Hegel's insistence that "Chinese philosophy" is not really philosophy; through Hu Shih's and Fung Yulan's groundbreaking attempts in the early twentieth century to revise traditional Chinese thought using Western methods; and up to more current discussions on the question of whether there is such a thing as "Chinese philosophy." Methodology, Tan insists, lies at the center of this debate, and being committed to the employment of sound methods can be of existential importance for the field of Anglophone Chinese [End Page 656] philosophy. This may involve reflecting, from a meta-perspective, the methodology one uses to engage with Chinese philosophy. The present collection of eighteen essays is a cooperative effort by leading researchers working in the field to do just that. In light of recent events, it seems that a project like this is sorely needed. I refer to a series of online articles that emerged in 2016, just about when this Handbook was published, debating the status of non-Western philosophy. It began with an opinion piece where Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden argue, tongue-in-cheek, that if philosophy departments in the United States are unwilling to consider non-European philosophy in their curriculum, they should be renamed as departments of Anglo-European philosophical studies.1 Predictably, it incited multiple responses defending the exclusion of non-European philosophy. Brian Leiter of "The Philosophical Gourmet Report" fame, for instance, gave a short response on his blog claiming that "What unites the curricula at these programs is not a commitment to 'European and American philosophy' but a commitment to a style of doing philosophy."2 In other words, there is something different about the methodology of "non-European philosophy" that makes it qualitatively different from mainstream philosophy. As mentioned, Tan sees methodology as an existential issue for Chinese philosophy, especially if it wants to be taken seriously as philosophy. The discussions in this Handbook, though not explicitly aimed at providing an apologia for Anglophone Chinese philosophy,3 gives readers the conceptual resources to push back against claims such as those made by Leiter. The Handbook is divided into four parts. Part 1 deals with the unique difficulties of philosophizing in a textual tradition. Roger Ames and Kwong-loi Shun both contribute essays about the methodology they personally employ to approach Chinese texts and thoughts. Ronnie Littlejohn, Michael Nylan, and Ming-Huei Lee start off the discussion with three consecutive essays that go back-and-forth on the importance of historical accuracy in representing the content of the texts vis-à-vis philosophical liberties taken with interpreting them. Littlejohn and Lee argue for more balanced approaches between the two while Nylan, speaking as a historian, issues a stern warning against ignoring certain historical contexts. Part 2 features essays by Peimin Ni, Sarah Mattice, and Sor-hoon Tan, stressing the centrality of practice in Chinese philosophy and drawing methodological insights from that angle. Ni's and Tan's essays consider two approaches to the practice-oriented study of Chinese philosophy: the Gongfu method and the Pragmatist method, respectively. Mattice, on the other hand, extracts methodological insights from the practice of teaching Chinese philosophy, prescribing an aesthetics-centered approach to the subject (p. 146). Part 3 features essays that look at how Chinese philosophy can borrow methodologies from Western philosophy. Franklin Perkins argues that conceptually loaded terms like "metaphysics" can be borrowed for discussions in Chinese philosophy but only if discussants are willing to use the term in a more inclusive manner that encourages cross-cultural dialogue (p. 186). Bo Mou presents a comprehensive approach to studying Chinese philosophy that aims to have distinct approaches from different [End Page 657] philosophical traditions cross-pollinate ideas and contribute to contemporary philosophical issues (pp. 199–200). Yiuming Fung...

Notes on Contributors

Brian GrantAssociate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. His main areas of interest are epistemology and the philosophy of mind. He has a recent book in the latter area, The Condition of Madness.Rom HarréEmeritus Fellow of Linacre College Oxford and Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, Washington DC. His published work includes studies in the philosophy of the physical sciences, such as Varieties of Realism (1986) and in the philosophy of psychology, such as The Singular Self (1988). His One Thousand Years of Philosophy was published last year.Joel J. KuppermanProfessor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. His most recent books are Learning from Asian Philosophy, Value É And What Follows, and Classic Asian Philosophy: A Guide to the Essential Texts.Tony LynchLectures in Philosophy and Politics at the University of New England, Armidale. His research interests are in the areas of moral psychology and liberal politics.Gordon GrahamRegius Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. He has contributed to Philosophy on several occasions. His most recent books include the Internet: a philosophical inquiry (Routledge, 1999) and Evil and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2000).Mark T. Nelson Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds. He is the co-editor of Christian Theism and Moral Philosophy and the author of articles on ethics, philosophy of religion, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind.Nicholas Maxwell Emeritus Reader in Philosophy of Science at the University of London. Among his publications are From Knowledge to Wisdom (Blackwell, 1984), The Comprehensibility of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 1998), and The Human World in the Physical Universe (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming).Sophie BotrosFellow in the Department of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her previous publications include ‘Precarious Virtue’ (Phronesis) and, for this journal, ‘Acceptance and Morality’ and ‘Acts, Omissions and Keeping Patients Alive in a Persistent Vegetative State’. She is presently working on Hume's practicality argument.

Notes on Contributors

Reviewed by: The Vulnerability of Integrity in Early Confucian Thought by Michael D. K. Ing Thomas Michael (bio) Michael D. K. Ing. The Vulnerability of Integrity in Early Confucian Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.x, 293 pp. Hardcover $99.00, isbn 978-0-19-067911-8. Chinese philosophy is currently a type of limbo discipline: peripheralized at best in philosophy departments, it also hardly meshes with the modern language and other contemporary concerns of Asian studies. Its relationship with sinology is strained, which can be surprising because their ends only appear to be shared. In the end, Chinese philosophy is typically relegated to religion studies departments, where it often leads an alienated existence. The main reason for this limbo status of Chinese philosophy is not due to some inherent weakness at its core; rather, it is because it stands as one of the newest of all modern fields of academic research and study. Often recognized as having been born in 1930s with the work of Feng Youlan, it is gradually being lifted to the status of an established discipline, but still has a long way to go. Michael Ing's The Vulnerability of Integrity is a shining example of how far Chinese philosophy has come over the past many decades. His work opens with a meditation on how the subject matter of Chinese philosophy can find a justifiable position within contemporary philosophical study and concludes, "The discourses of religious ethics and early Confucianism are capable of conversation" (p. 15). The specific area of concern through which he brings early Confucian writings into dialogue with a range of contemporary philosophers (including Michael Walzer, Erinn Gilson, and C.A.J. Coady) is vulnerability together with a series of related values that include "moral development, social formation (and the realization of relationships), trust, and maturity" (p. 247). The dominant readings of early Confucian literature, from both traditional and modern scholars, is grounded in what is known as "the harmony thesis," which holds that "value conflicts are only apparent or epistemic. Ultimately speaking, values do not conflict. Yet only sages can reason through difficult situations … The [Confucian] sage harmonizes a plurality of relatable, but [End Page 268] not reducible, values in doing the right thing" (p. 55). In this way, the integrity of the best of moral agents including sages are invulnerable to feelings of guilt, remorse, regret, and tragedy caused by value conflicts. Based on his deep familiarity with early Confucian writings, Ing's work offers an alternative reading in which he analyzes numerous instances of value conflicts, some of which are irreducible, that render moral agents, including sages, vulnerable to regret. Chapters 1 and 2 present the harmony thesis directly. Chapter 1 analyzes narratives and other discussions from the early Confucian writings that give corroboration to the harmony thesis by showing the ways in which the Confucian sage, primarily but not exclusively Confucius himself, navigates seeming value conflicts through the sagely exercise of 權 quan ("moral deliberation"). Chapter 2 analyzes an array of modern philosophical studies that argue for the possibility and value of moral invulnerability, and it concludes with a critique of invulnerability. The remaining chapters are devoted to the exploration of the vulnerability of the moral agent's integrity, and they demonstrate the best of what contemporary Chinese philosophy is capable of. Ing argues that the harmony thesis applies to many early Confucian writings but not to all, and in many of them sages and other moral agents are shown not only to experience vulnerability in their confrontations with value conflicts, but also to conscientiously cultivate it together with all the risks that entails. Among Ing's many claims about an early Confucian understanding of vulnerability, the following is both representative and cogent: it "is a basic attitude of interest where one cares about things … a particularly Confucian account of vulnerability sees self-cultivation as a process of learning to transform this state of caring about things to actions and attitudes of properly caring for things … This Confucian account of vulnerability advocates developing optimal degrees of vulnerability by means of ritual practice. As such, instead of seeking to eliminate vulnerability or treat it as a threat to human flourishing, we...

Reviewed by: Feng Youlan and Twentieth Century China. An Intellectual Biography by Xiaoqing Diana Lin Carine Defoort (bio) Xiaoqing Diana Lin. Feng Youlan and Twentieth Century China. An Intellectual Biography. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016. xii, 244 pp. Hardcover $135.00, isbn 978-90-04-30129-0. This monograph is a detailed intellectual biography of Feng Youlan (Fung Yu-lan) 冯友兰 (1895-1990), whom Diana Lin rightly identifies as "one of the preeminent Chinese philosophers of the 20th century" (p. 1). As Lin points out, his academic influence was not limited to China: his "early two-volume History of Chinese Philosophy was translated into English in 1948 by the eminent Sinologist Derk Bodde; its influence on the study of Chinese thought in the West was unmatched for decades" (p. 1).1 Indeed, when I started studying Chinese philosophy in the 1980s this was one of the few and almost omnipresent books on Chinese philosophy, not only in Sinology, but also at [End Page 72] Philosophy departments. Despite its enormous contribution in making Chinese thought known in the West, its success also had a serious drawback: it was soon taken as the uninspiring, established account of Chinese philosophy, one that was moreover strikingly un-Chinese. During the second part of the twentieth century, scholars were often disappointed in their search for an "authentic" understanding of Chinese philosophy in Feng's work. As Bryan Van Norden points out, "[I]n reality, Fung is one of the most Western-centric readers of Chinese thought."2 I also belonged to the generation of scholars who either neglected Feng Youlan's interpretations or chided him for presenting an uninspiring variant of unquestioned Western philosophy. In a switch from philosophy to intellectual history, this monograph shows how scholars have outgrown this critical stage and have cultivated a mature interest in the complexities of Feng's views. Due to the political turbulences since the Republican era, the psychological traumas of its intellectuals, and Feng's own choices during a near century-long life, this biography captures well the vicissitudes of twentieth-century Chinese politics. Many academic studies have been dedicated to both Feng Youlan and China's recent intellectual history,3 but this monograph is particular in its combined analysis of changing philosophical stances, political waves, and concrete events in Feng's life. Lin concludes by distinguishing two major philosophical frameworks in Feng's reflections on Chinese philosophy: in the 1930s he created a "philosophy in China," using Western notions such as intuition and logic to construe a cosmology-ontology for a world in flux; in the 1980s he attempted a restoration of "Chinese philosophy" in terms of correlative thinking to explain the interactions among humans and with nature (pp. 183-184). Her monograph, however, distinguishes between five periods corresponding with the five chapters that constitute its backbone. The first chapter shows how the young Feng (roughly from 1920s till 1934) is initially inspired by philosophers such as William James (1842-1910) and Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941) to make Chinese thought well structured and compatible with Western metaphysics. The second chapter mostly treats the six major works (written from 1938 to 1946) in which Feng builds his own metaphysical system influenced by New Realism and mathematical logic. In chapter 3, Feng turns toward Dialectical and Historical Materialism (roughly between the 1930s and the 1950s) and strengthens his focus on experience, social formation, and universal truth rooted in reality while sustaining mental space to reflect on China's "abstract inheritance." This intellectual luxury is threatened in the fourth period when social contextualization and class provenance dominates all philosophical analyses (roughly in the 1960s and 1970s). The fifth and final chapter introduces Feng's second major philosophical framework, namely that of "Chinese philosophy," when he rewrites his overview into a seven-volume New [End Page 73] History (1980-1990) combining materialism with humanism, historicism, and a stress on the Confucian notion of sincerity. The materialist inspiration lingers in Feng's attention for the political context of Chinese masters. A similar attention inspired Lin's own understanding of Feng Youlan explaining his meandering thoughts throughout the turbulent twentieth century. What makes this biography fascinating is that it describes many more...

The five papers translated here were first presented at a conference titled Metaphysics and Epistemology in Chinese Philosophy: A Systematic and Comparative Approach, which met on July 10-11, 2010, under the co-sponsorship of the School of Philosophy (which hosted the event) and the International Center for Chinese and Comparative Philosophy (ICCCP), both at the Renmin University of China (RUC), and the Association of Chinese Philosophers in America (ACPA). The selected papers represent three main approaches to Chinese metaphysics: a traditional textual approach (Wang, Xiang); an approach drawing on both Western and Eastern philosophy (Yang); and a Western-style analytic approach (Liu, Wen).

Notes on Contributors

Is There Such a Thing as Chinese Philosophy?Arguments of an Implicit Debate Carine Defoort "Philosophy" is the showpiece of our university: every freshman student is required to follow a general course on philosophy. But regardless of the ways in which this course may be considered general, the fact is that attention to non-Western cultures is absent throughout. The course is not titled "General Western Philosophy," and yet philosophy is, quite simply, a Western matter. This demands no further explanation; it is taken for granted. It should come as no surprise that China starts from an entirely different presupposition. Several philosophy departments have a branch dealing with Chinese philosophy, analogous to those offering Western and often even Indian philosophy. But not one Chinese university teaches exclusively Chinese philosophy, let alone under the title "General Philosophy."1 In the light of such an imposing state of affairs, the question inevitably comes to the fore: is there indeed such a thing as "Chinese philosophy"? However, the degree of certainty with which the conflicting positions are held is not the result of thorough research, painstaking debate, or well-founded reasoning. For these have hardly even begun. In both the West and China, the answer to this question consists mostly of implicit presuppositions. It belongs less to the domain of explicit opinion than to the implicit frame within which we function: the organization of universities, book-shops, journals, and conferences all confirm a vision that, in fact, they have seldom explicitly discussed. The topic is therefore rather sensitive: any explicit rejection of the existence of Chinese philosophy implies not only a painful break with the raison d'être of more than a thousand Chinese academics but also a blow to China's national pride. On the other hand, the insistence that general introductory courses to philosophy ought to include philosophical traditions laid claim to by other cultures would certainly disturb Western colleagues in the field. From this one might be inclined to conclude that such strong emotions and exaggerated sensitivities—a Western chauvinism on the one hand and an overly sensitive Chinese self-insistence on the other—are obstacles to a mature discussion of this nevertheless fundamental question. The arguments presented here, on the contrary, shall endeavor to show that this conclusion is not entirely correct. Several concrete arguments have been forwarded in this debate, and insofar as this conclusion is correct, I will argue that this very sensitivity is an interesting phenomenon, one that is unjustly being neglected. The following analysis of the implicit debate has a relevance beyond the field of "Chinese philosophy" since a similar problematic forwards itself not only in [End Page 393] analogous controversies around entities such as "Chinese science" or "Chinese religion"2 but also in the case of other non-Western cultures reinterpreting their tradition in terms of modern Western concepts. The existence of Chinese philosophy thus acts as a case study for a wider problematic. It is certainly not my intention to solve the crucial question concerning the legitimacy of Chinese philosophy once and for all—this would be an impossible task given the indecision governing the definition of the concept of philosophy even in the West. Nor do I wish to call into question the legitimacy or value of two domains that are closely adjacent to the theme of this essay, namely "philosophy in China"— the philosophical activities of contemporary Chinese academics—and current "Chinese philosophy," insofar as this refers to a purely geographical variant of something like contemporary "Continental philosophy."3 The arguments presented here concern only the traditional Chinese body of thought, which is generally labeled as "Chinese philosophy." A clear definition of our domain is thus our first task. The Expression "Chinese Philosophy" Doubt over the legitimacy of Chinese philosophy is not exclusively the result of Western chauvinism. Indeed, the expression "Chinese philosophy" encompasses a strange paradox, which threatens to call its very identity into question. Just like other concepts such as "science" or "human rights," philosophy, by definition, makes a certain claim to universality, without thereby denying its particular, Western origin. "Spanish science" or "Swiss human rights" sounds strange to our ears because the adjectives in these expressions pose a...

Journal of Chinese PhilosophyVolume 34, Issue 4 p. 473-491 PROLEGOMENA TO FUTURE SOLUTIONS TO “WHITE-HORSE NOT HORSE” CHAD HANSEN, Corresponding Author CHAD HANSEN UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONGHong Kong SAR, ChinaCHAD HANSEN, chair professor of Chinese Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Hong Kong. Specialties: Chinese philosophy, comparative philosophy, Chinese theory of language and mind. E-mail: chansen@hku.hkSearch for more papers by this author CHAD HANSEN, Corresponding Author CHAD HANSEN UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONGHong Kong SAR, ChinaCHAD HANSEN, chair professor of Chinese Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Hong Kong. Specialties: Chinese philosophy, comparative philosophy, Chinese theory of language and mind. E-mail: chansen@hku.hkSearch for more papers by this author First published: 26 November 2007 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6253.2007.00435.xCitations: 5Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume34, Issue4December 2007Pages 473-491 RelatedInformation

Is Confucian Discourse Philosophy? Eske J. Møllgaard (bio) Recently some philosophers have claimed that it is a scandal that non-Western traditions are excluded from the curriculum in Western philosophy departments. I consider the case of Confucianism and argue (1) that the central features of Confucian discourse are different from those of philosophical discourse, (2) that the historical conditions that gave rise to Confucian discourse sets it apart from the formation of Western philosophy, and (3) that Western philosophers often misread Confucian discourse because they assimilate it to philosophical discourse. I conclude that in order to do justice to the Confucian masters we must read their discourse in accord with its own nature and aims. The question whether there was philosophy in traditional China has been discussed for a century. In the beginning of the twentieth century Chinese scholars argued that ancient Chinese thought had to be systematized using Western categories in order to become philosophy. In this way "Chinese philosophy" (Zhongguo zhexue 中國哲學) was created.1 After the rise of China as a global power some Chinese scholars opposed this assimilation of traditional Chinese thought to Western philosophy.2 The question whether traditional Chinese thought is philosophy has been debated in the West as well. Many articles and whole issues of journals of Chinese and comparative philosophy have been devoted to this question.3 The following is a contribution to this ongoing debate but is limited to considering Confucian discourse. I dispute the claim that Confucian discourse is philosophy and best understood when discussed by philosophers. I agree that Western philosophy should open up to non-Western philosophy, but accepting non-Western discourses as philosophy should be based on rational debate and not on moral outrage at being excluded. To be sure, there is a certain violence in exclusion, but there is also violence in inclusion,4 and perhaps philosophy must be violent in order to maintain itself and not sink into syncretism. And many Confucians would be sad to see Confucian thought being assimilated to analytic philosophy with its set of problems and record of solutions taught in universities in the kind of English that is now used for global communication. [End Page 1029] In a recent book Brian Van Norden argues for the inclusion of non-Western philosophy in the curriculum of Western philosophy departments. Van Norden is a specialist in Confucianism, and in order to show Western philosophers that Confucian discourse is philosophy, he highlights an argument by the important early Confucian Mencius 孟子 (born around 380 b.c.e.), namely Mencius' "reduction ad absurdum against the claim that human nature is reducible to desires for food and sex."5 There is much to admire in Mencius, but skillful argumentation is not what first comes to mind. Mencius himself says that he does not like to engage in argument, and nobody in the Confucian tradition admired Mencius because he was skillful in his argumentation. Confucians read Mencius because they believed that he was able to speak the words of the sages. According to Mencius, there is a certain rhythm in history: now order, now disorder (yizhi yiluan 一治一亂). In times of disorder, the difference between humans and animals disappears and wild animals take over the world of human beings. Order comes about when a sage again separates beasts from humans. In Mencius' own day humans were again sinking to the level of animals, and it was Mencius' ambition to follow in the way of the former sages and, by opposing the teachings of Yang Zhu 楊朱 and Mo Zi 墨子, separate humans from animals. Mencius says: I too want to correct the hearts of men, put an end to depraved doctrines, oppose one-sided actions, and banish excessive words and phrases, and thus continue the [work of] the three sages [Yu 禹, the Duke of Zhou 周公, and Confucius 孔子]. How could I be fond of argumentation!? The case is that I have no other recourse. He who can oppose Yang and Mo with words is a follower of the sages.6 Mencius does not like to argue (bian 辯), but he wants to speak the words (yan 言) of the sages, or, as Mencius calls it, the "one good word" (yi shanyan 一善言). This word...

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreBrooke Abounader is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. She studies the role of representational inaccuracy in scientific modeling.Anna Akasoy, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Oriental Institute at Oxford, specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of the medieval Muslim West, contacts between the Islamic world and other cultures, and the role of Islamic history and culture in modern political debates in Western Europe.Garland E. Allen is Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis. He has a special interest in the history of genetics (and eugenics), evolution, and embryology and their interactions in the first half of the twentieth century.Casper Andersen is an assistant professor at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. His main area of research is history of science, technology, and empires. His publications include the monograph British Engineers and Africa, 1875–1914 (2011), and he is coediting the forthcoming five-volume collection British Governance and Administration in Africa, 1880–1940 (2013).Warwick Anderson is Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Department of History and the Centre for Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Johns Hopkins, 2008) and coeditor of Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Postcolonial Sovereignties (Duke, 2011). His current research explores the global history of scientific investigations of race mixing in the twentieth century.Peder Anker is an associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and in the Environmental Studies Program at New York University. His works include Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Harvard University Press, 2001), and From Bauhaus to Eco-House: A History of Ecological Design (Louisiana State University Press, 2010). See www.pederanker.com.Ross Bassett is Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University. He is working on a history of Indians who studied at MIT.Jakob Bek-Thomsen has a postdoctoral position at the Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University. He has recently finished his Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Nicolaus Steno and the Making of an Early Modern Career: Nature, Knowledge, and Networks at the Court of the Medici, 1657–1672.” He is currently working on the emergence of finance and its connections with natural philosophy and religion in the early modern period.Jim Bennett is Director of the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. His research interests lie in the history of instruments, of practical mathematics, and of astronomy.Marvin Bolt, Director of the Webster Institute at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, is authoring the Adler's Optical Instruments catalogue. He served on the editorial team of the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, studies the Herschel family, and researches the history of the telescope, early seventeenth-century examples in particular.Christian Bonah is Professor for the History of Medical and Health Sciences at the University of Strasbourg and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He has worked on comparative history of medical education, the history of medicaments, and the history of human experimentation. Recent work includes research on risk perception and management in drug scandals as well as studies on medical films.Sonja Brentjes is currently a researcher in a “project of excellence” sponsored by the Junta of Andalusia at the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and History of Science of the University of Seville. She publishes on three major topics: Arabic and Persian versions of Euclid's Elements, the mathematical sciences at madrasas in Islamic societies before 1700, and cross-cultural exchange of knowledge in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean.Thomas Broman is Professor and Chair of the Department of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research interests include eighteenth-century science and medicine, and he is currently writing a survey of science in the Enlightenment.Massimo Bucciantini is Professor of History of Science at the University of Siena. He is coeditor, with Michele Camerota, of Galilaeana: Journal of Galileo Studies. His publications include Galileo e Keplero (Einaudi, 2003; Les Belles Lettres, 2008), Italo Calvino e la scienza (Donzelli, 2007), and Auschwitz Experiment (Einaudi, 2011).Andrew J. Butrica, a former Chercheur Associé at the Centre de Recherches en Histoire des Sciences et Techniques in Paris, has published extensively on space history and has earned the Leopold Prize of the Organization of American Historians and the Robinson Prize of the National Council on Public History.Stefano Caroti is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Parma. His research interests include late medieval philosophy, particularly late scholastic debates on natural philosophy at the University of Paris.Chu Pingyi is a Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He has published widely on appropriations of Jesuit science and natural philosophy by their Chinese readers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China.J. T. H. Connor is John Clinch Professor of Medical Humanities and History of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada. He is currently coeditor of the McGill-Queen's University Press History of Health, Medicine, and Society series. His latest book, a collection of essays coedited with Stephan Curtis entitled Medicine in the Remote and Rural North, 1800–2000, was published in 2011 by Pickering & Chatto in the Studies for the Society for the Social History of Medicine series.Scott DeGregorio is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan–Dearborn. He specializes in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Latin literature, with a special focus on the Bible and its interpretation. He has published widely on the writings of Bede, most recently editing The Cambridge Companion to Bede.Michael Dettelbach has published widely on Alexander von Humboldt and is generally interested in science and culture in the revolutionary and Romantic eras. He directs Corporate and Foundation Relations at Boston University.Nadja Durbach is Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah. She is the author of Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England and Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture. She is now working on a book about beef, citizenship, and identity in modern Britain.David Edgerton is the Hans Rausing Professor, Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Imperial College London. His most recent book is Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2011; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).Paula Findlen is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University. Her publications include Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (California, 1994), and she has a long-standing interest in the relations between knowledge and faith in the age of Galileo.Maurice A. Finocchiaro is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His latest books are The Essential Galileo (Hackett, 2008) and Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 280) (Springer, 2010). He is now working on the Routledge Guidebook to Galileo's Dialogue.Mike Fortun is an associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the author of Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation (University of California Press, 2008).Stephen Gaukroger is Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sydney and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. Among his recent publications are The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210 to 1685 (Oxford University Press, 2005), and The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680 to 1760 (Oxford University Press, 2010). He is now at work on the third volume in this series: The Naturalization of the Human and the Humanization of Nature: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1750 to 1825.Thomas F. Glick is Professor of History at Boston University. His two research fields are medieval technology (irrigation systems, water mills) and modern science (Darwin, Freud, and Einstein).Susana Gómez is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She is a specialist in seventeenth-century Italian science, with particular interests in atomism and experimental science. Much of her current work concerns issues about the representation of nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Frederick Gregory is Emeritus Professor of History of Science at the University of Florida. His research has dealt with the history of science and religion and with German science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is currently engaged in writing a biography of the nineteenth-century Moravian physicist-philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries.David E. Hahm is Professor Emeritus of Greek and Latin at the Ohio State University. He is the author of The Origins of Stoic Cosmology and articles on Greek and Roman intellectual and cultural history, especially Hellenistic philosophy and historiography.Minghui Hu served as an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago from 2003 to 2005. He joined the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2005 and is now completing his book manuscript Cosmopolitan Confucians: The Passage to Modern Chinese Thought.Jeffrey Allan Johnson, Professor of History at Villanova University, has published mainly on the social and institutional history of chemical science and technology in modern Germany. Recently he was guest editor for Ambix, 2011, 58(2), a special issue on “Chemistry in the Aftermath of World Wars.”Jessica Keating is a Solmsen Fellow in the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is writing a book entitled The Machinations of German Court Culture: Early Modern Automata.Peter C. Kjærgaard is Professor of Evolutionary Studies at Aarhus University. He has published widely in the history of modern science, including books on Wittgenstein and the sciences, the history of universities, and the history of science in Denmark. His current research focuses on the history and popular understanding of human evolution.David Knight has taught history of science at Durham University in England since 1964 and is a past President of the British Society for the History of Science. He published The Making of Modern Science in 2009 (Polity) and is writing a book on the Scientific Revolution.Bernard Lightman is Professor of Humanities at York University, where he is Director of the Institute for Science and Technology Studies. He is also the Editor of the History of Science Society's flagship journal, Isis. His most recent publications include Victorian Popularizers of Science, Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain, and Science in the Marketplace (coedited with Aileen Fyfe). He is also general editor of a monograph series titled “Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century” published by Pickering & Chatto. He is currently working on a biography of John Tyndall and is one of the editors of the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, an international collaborative effort to obtain, digitalize, transcribe, and publish all surviving letters to and from Tyndall.Pamela O. Long is a historian of late medieval/early modern history of science and technology. She is the coeditor and coauthor of The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript (MIT Press, 2009). Her books include Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600 (Oregon State University Press, 2011). She is at work on a history of engineering and knowledge in late sixteenth-century Rome.Morris Low is an associate professor of Japanese history at the University of Queensland, where he is Acting Head of the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies. He coedited a special issue of Historia Scientiarum (2011, 21[1]), and his recent books include Japan on Display (2006).Christine MacLeod is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism, and British Identity, 1750–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1988).Paolo Mancosu is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main areas of interest are mathematical logic and history and philosophy of mathematics and logic. His current work is focused on the philosophy of mathematical practice. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow (2008) and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (2009).Hannah Marcus is a doctoral student studying history and the history of science at Stanford University. She is interested in the relationship between intellectual and religious culture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy.David Meskill is an assistant professor of history at Dowling College on Long Island. His book Optimizing the German Workforce: Labor Administration from Bismarck to the Economic Miracle was published by Berghahn Books in 2010.John Pickstone is Wellcome Research Professor in the University of Manchester Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. His publications include Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Manchester University Press, 2000) and The Modern Biological and Earth Sciences, Volume 6 of the Cambridge History of Science (edited with Peter Bowler) (Cambridge University Press, 2009).Matthias Rieger is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Sociology, Leibniz University, Hannover, and the author of Helmholtz Musicus: Die Objektivierung der Musik im 19. Jahrhundert durch Helmholtz' Lehre von den Tonempfindungen (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006).Joy Rohde is Assistant Professor of History at Trinity University in San Antonio. Her research focuses on Cold War social science and politics. She is completing a book, under contract with Cornell University Press, titled The Social Scientists' War: Knowledge, Statecraft, and Democracy in the Era of Containment.William G. Rothstein is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of several books on American medical history, most recently Public Health and the Risk Factor (2003).Lisa T. Sarasohn is Professor of History at Oregon State University. Her latest publication is The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution (Johns Hopkins, 2010). She is working on a cultural history of insects in early modern England.Arne Schirrmacher teaches history of science at the Humboldt University in Berlin and is currently on leave at the University of California, Berkeley. His research concerns the history of the modern mathematical sciences, in particular quantum theory, the history of scientific socialization within student groups in Germany since 1850, and science communication in twentieth-century Europe.Petra G. Schmidl specialized in premodern astronomy in Islamic societies. Since 2009, she has worked as a research assistant at the University of Bonn. With Eva Orthmann and Mo˙hammad Karīmī Zanjānī A˙sl, she is investigating the Dustūr al-Munajjimīn as a source for the history of the Ismāʿīliyya and their astronomical and astrological concepts.Charlotte Schubert is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Leipzig. Her publications include Anacharsis der Weise: Nomade, Skythe, Grieche (2010), Der hippokratische Eid (2005), Hippokrates (coedited, 2006), and Frauenmedizin in der Antike (coedited, 1999).Vera Schwach is a historian and senior researcher at the Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research, and Higher Education (NIFU). She has published analyses in science policy and has written extensively on the history of marine science, especially on fisheries biology and the management of sea fisheries in the Nordic countries and in Europe.Jonathan Seitz is an assistant teaching professor of history at Drexel University. He is particularly interested in vernacular ideas about nature and the supernatural in early modern Europe. His book, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice, was published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press.Helaine Selin is Science Librarian and Faculty Associate in the School of Natural Sciences at Hampshire College. Her work includes editing The Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures (Springer, 2008) and the series Science Across Cultures. Happiness Across Cultures is due out in Spring 2012.Efram Sera-Shriar received his Ph.D. in history and philosophy of science from the University of Leeds. He is now working as a research associate on the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, organized by Montana State University and York University in Toronto.Asif A. Siddiqi is an associate professor of history at Fordham University. His most recent book is The Red Rockets' Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857–1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He is now writing a book on the effects of the Stalinist purges on Soviet science and technology.Mark G. Spencer is Associate Professor of History at Brock University. His book, David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (University of Rochester Press, 2005), was issued in a paperback edition in 2010. He is also current President of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society.Matthew Stanley is an associate professor at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where he teaches and researches the history and philosophy of science. He is the author of Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington (Chicago, 2007), and he is now completing a manuscript on the history of science and religion in the Victorian period.John Steele is Associate Professor of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies at Brown University. His recent publications include A Brief Introduction to Astronomy in the Middle East (Saqi Books, 2008) and Ancient Astronomical Observations and the Study of the Moon's Motion (1691–1757) (Springer, 2012). He is currently working on an edition and commentary of a newly discovered astrological compendium from Babylon.Larry Stewart is Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan. He is editing a book on the uses of humans in experiment and writing a study of experiment in the Enlightenment and the first industrial revolution.Bert Theunissen is Professor of the History of Science at the Institute for History and Foundations of Science, affiliated with the Descartes Centre for the History of the Sciences and the Humanities at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His current work focuses on the history of animal breeding, particularly on the interactions between scientific and practical workers in livestock breeding in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For his publications see http://www.descartescentre.com.Carsten Timmermann is a lecturer at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Manchester. His research and teaching focus on issues in the history of modern medicine and biology, including chronic disease, cancer research, and pharmaceuticals.The Rev. Jeffrey P. von Arx, S.J., became the eighth President of Fairfield University in 2004. A historian by discipline, he is the author of numerous articles as well as the books Progress and Pessimism: Religion, Politics, and History in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harvard University Press, 1985) and Varieties of Ultramontanism (Catholic University Press, 1998). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.Michael Worboys is Director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine and the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Manchester. He specializes in the history of infectious diseases as well as the application of research in clinical practices. He has recently started new work on dog breeding, feeding, training, and welfare from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. His publications include Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830–2000 (with Neil Pemberton), and Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–1900. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 103, Number 2June 2012 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/666369 © 2012 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Reviewed by: Vanishing into Things: Knowledge in Chinese Tradition by Barry Allen Shane Ryan (bio) and Chienkuo Mi (bio) Vanishing into Things: Knowledge in Chinese Tradition. By Barry Allen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. 289. Hardcover $45.00, isbn 978-0-674-33591-2. Introduction Barry Allen's Vanishing into Things discusses intellectual traditions of Chinese philosophy through the thematic thread of knowledge. The thread takes us chapter by chapter from Confucianism, Daoism, and The Art of War to Chan Buddhism and The Investigation of Things. The final chapter discusses "resonance" and the part it has played in Chinese intellectual history. It wouldn't be surprising if such an ambitious work, covering the range of intellectual traditions that Allen covers, became fragmentary and disparate. After all, such [End Page 1299] traditions vary in significant ways and in certain respects are unrelated intellectually. What arrests this tendency is the commonality that Allen identifies in the treatment of knowledge. In particular, Allen advances the view that Chinese philosophy is concerned with "wise knowledge." This is the sort of knowledge that, among other things, allows us to live well (pp. 20–21, 80). The result is a quite comprehensive work on Chinese philosophy and the topic of knowledge, or at least one aspect of knowledge, and as such is a valuable resource for the increasing number of scholars interested in both Chinese philosophy and knowledge. Indeed, the book's strength is testified to by the fact that what Allen writes in his book can provide scholars with a basis for disagreeing with views that Allen advances. Allen deserves credit for this. The view that Chinese philosophy is concerned with wise knowledge is contrasted with the concern, as Allen sees it, of epistemology from the Western tradition. This contrast, presented as favorable to Chinese philosophy, is another of the central views advanced in Allen's book and, unfortunately, is perhaps the weakest aspect of the book. The case that Allen makes vis-à-vis Chinese philosophy and epistemology is, as we shall see, problematic. In the second part of our review we discuss in detail the account Allen provides of knowledge across Chinese intellectual traditions. The principal idea conveyed by Allen is that Chinese philosophy is concerned with wise knowledge and not everyday knowledge. Rather than there being a break between the concern for wise knowledge and everyday knowledge, however, we find merely a difference in emphasis. In contrast to what Allen writes, we believe there is a concern for everyday knowledge in Chinese philosophy. The Contrasting of Chinese Philosophy and Western Philosophy Allen introduces his book by telling the story of a servant dashing a duke's plans for war. The servant attends to small details to draw the correct conclusion that the duke is planning for war against a neighboring state. The airing by the servant of the duke's secret plan for war forces the duke to give up the plan. We are told that the servant is called a sage by Guan Zhong, who himself is a "sage statesman" (pp. 1–2). His is a case that exemplifies what Allen calls "wise knowledge." It tells us what Chinese philosophy expects and values in such knowledge. A Chinese proverb says of the sage that "from the inconspicuous he hits upon brightness" (p. 2). Another proverb in the Daodejing makes the same basic point: "To really see the little things is called enlightenment" (ibid.). Finally, in the Huainanzi, we have a further and more explicit variation on this: "Since the beginnings of good and bad fortune are tiny as a sprout, people overlook them. Only sages see their beginnings and know their ends. … The sage's perception of outcomes at their origin is subtle" (quoted on p. 2). Allen notes the importance given to "[p]enetrating the subtle—seeing a lot in little things. Discerning the concordant and contrary—knowing the resonance among things, and how to amplify or dampen emerging tendencies" is the "leading idea" with regard to wise knowledge in the Chinese tradition (p. 3; Allen's own emphasis).1 He describes [End Page 1300] this capacity to see what the little things portend as the "cognitive accomplishment" of...

Journal of Chinese PhilosophyVolume 36, Issue 2 p. 210-227 RECONSTRUCTING MODERN ETHICS: CONFUCIAN CARE ETHICS ANN A. PANG-WHITE, Corresponding Author ANN A. PANG-WHITE UNIVERSITY OF SCRANTONScranton, PennsylvaniaANN A. PANG-WHITE, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Scranton. Specialties: Augustine, Aquinas, Chinese and comparative philosophy. E-mail: pangwhitea2@scranton.eduSearch for more papers by this author ANN A. PANG-WHITE, Corresponding Author ANN A. PANG-WHITE UNIVERSITY OF SCRANTONScranton, PennsylvaniaANN A. PANG-WHITE, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Scranton. Specialties: Augustine, Aquinas, Chinese and comparative philosophy. E-mail: pangwhitea2@scranton.eduSearch for more papers by this author First published: 05 May 2009 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6253.2009.01515.xCitations: 11Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume36, Issue2June 2009Pages 210-227 RelatedInformation