Reviewed by: Chinese Philosophy of History: From Ancient Confucianism to the End of the Eighteenth Century by Dawid Rogacz Don J. Wyatt (bio) Chinese Philosophy of History: From Ancient Confucianism to the End of the Eighteenth Century. By Dawid Rogacz. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Pp. vi + 258. Paper $39.95, ISBN 978-1-350215-34-4. Discernible in the very opening pages of Chinese Philosophy of History: From Ancient Confucianism to the End of the Eighteenth Century is the fact that, within a single work, Dawid Rogacz will be providing us with two services normally regarded as oppositional. On the one hand, clear from the very title is the discreteness of his undertaking. In other words, he will be straightforwardly addressing a subject that philosophers as well as historians of China frequently refer to but, nonetheless, so very seldom subject to critical examination--namely, the uniquely Chinese, as distinguished from that which subsequently developed in the West, philosophy of history. Yet, on the other hand, even as he is intent on immediately distinguishing between the two traditions, Rogacz simultaneously signals his desire throughout his study to bring the Chinese and the Western, almost exclusively European, traditions of the philosophy of history into fruitful comparative dialogue. To achieve these superficially adversative but, in reality, quite complementary goals, excluding its introduction and its exceedingly brief conclusion, wherein a fleeting summary of the immediate prelude to and installment of the Chinese Marxist philosophy of history is afforded to us, Rogacz has segmented his study into seven logically directed and sequenced chapters. Chapter 1 is devoted to the unavoidable discussion of what precisely the philosophy of history is. However, at least an equally prioritized function of this first chapter is the introduction and explication of the theoretical lens of interpretation on which Rogacz' ensuing analyses will rely. This crucial lens is the concept of holism, which was first developed and promoted by the South African politician, militarist, and philosopher Jan Christian Smuts (1870–1950) as a standpoint on understanding wherein such an intimate unity is forged between the parts of an entity that, in surpassing their aggregate, "'the whole and the part therefore reciprocally influence and determine each other'" (p. 16). In Chapter 2, Rogacz necessarily considers the Chinese philosophy of history as it was variously expressed by the all-important Confucians of the pre-imperial era. The predominant concept in this chapter is that of historiosophy, [End Page 1] which is employed to encompass the "religious, artistic, literary and historiographical visions of history" (p. 19). Rogacz' initial analysis is directed toward the two oldest of the works eventually incorporated in the initial Confucian canon, the Book of Songs (Shījīng 詩經) and the Book of Documents (Shūjīng 書經). The thread of historical continuity that Rogacz discovers as coursing throughout these two works is that of Tiān 天 or Heaven (pp. 24–27), which is found to be something like the arbiter of the knowledge to humankind that history bestows. Also here accounted for are the classic views of Mencius and Xunzi, who differ on this score just as consistently as they do on other questions of consequence, such as the quality of human nature (pp. 36–46). Chapter 3 of Chinese Philosophy of History focuses on the theories of the non-Confucian schools of the Warring States period (ca. 475–221 BC). In it, particular attention is understandably devoted to the disparate views of Legalists (pp. 49–56) but also the Mohists, the Daoists, and the School of Yin-Yang, headed by Zou Yan 鄒衍 (305–240 BC) (pp. 56–68). We may contrast the welter of views that emerged during these turbulent, war-torn centuries with the more uniformly adopted one that, as the subject of Chapter 4, established itself with the advent of the Han dynastic philosophy of history, rooted as it was in the idea of correlation between Heaven (which we may also interpret as physical nature) and humanity. Pointedly with reference to history, these correlations involved purported taxonomic connections between history and cyclical patterns of seasonal events. The state-preservationist doctrines of Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (ca. 179–104 BC) serve as the standard but the chapter concludes with a consideration...