Rational justification in Xunzi: On his use of the term Li

International Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 44, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 53-67

  Stalnaker, Aaron ^a  

^a GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62749106685     PISSN: 00190365     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/ipq200444164     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. These occur 112 and 117 times, respectively. For usage figures, see D. C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching, eds., A Concordance to the Xunzi (Hong Kong: The Commercial Press, 1996) p. 783. In what follows, all translations are my own. Further citations to the text of the Xunzi will be to this edition and will be given in the form: chapter/page/line.
2. John Knoblock, Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, 3 vols. (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988-94).
3. Wing-tsit Chan, "The Evolution of the Neo-Confucian Concept of Li as Principle," Tsing-Hua Journal of Chinese Studies 4 (1964) 123-49.
4. Antonio Cua, Ethical Argumentation: A Study in Hsun Tzu's Moral Epistemology (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1985) 22-24.
5. For a more recent but more general statement, see Cua, "Reason and Principle in Chinese Philosophy: An Interpretation of Li," in Eliot Deutsch and Ronald Bontekoe, eds., A Companion to World Philosophies (Maiden: Blackwell, 1997).
6. Philip Babcock Gove, ed., Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (Springfield: Merriam-Webster, 1986).
7. For an incisive discussion of the meaning of li in this later context, see A. C. Graham, Two Chinese Philosophers: Ch'eng Ming-Tao and Ch'eng Yi-ch'uan (London: Lund Humphries, 1958) 8-22.
8. Cua, Ethical Argumentation, pp. 20-29.
9. Nevertheless, there are occasional places where he uses it primarily descriptively, as in his criticisms of the patterns in the speech of competing thinkers, to be considered below. On these issues, cf. Cua, "Reason and Principle in Chinese Philosophy: An Interpretation of Li," 204.
10. This sort of "linkage" is of course common in premodern views. For a sustained examination of this theme in comparative religious ethics, see Robin Lovin and Frank Reynolds, eds., Cosmogony and Ethical Order: New Studies in Comparative Ethics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985).
11. For another description of the sage's patterning activity, see 12/58/6. For similar interpretations of Xunzi's views, see Philip J. Ivanhoe, "Human Nature and Moral Understanding in Xunzi," International Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1994) 170;
12. and Benjamin Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985) 301. It is difficult to avoid seeing Zhuangzi's story of Cook Ding, the splendidly skillful butcher who cuts oxen by going along with "Heaven's pattern" in them, behind this discussion of the Xunzian sage "cutting" the "Great Pattern" into the cosmos. (However, the verb ge which Xunzi uses is one Cook Ding consigns to mediocre cooks who still have to sharpen their knives.)
13. See Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi Jinzhu Jinyi, ed. Chen Guying (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju,1990) 99-100.
14. The first aspect of this stipulative account of "rationality" derives from 20th century Anglo-American philosophical debates about the rationality of alien cultural practices, which have often revolved around the objective truth of beliefs presupposed by such practices. The second aspect names what is probably the most common contemporary philosophical sense of "rationality," that is, the ability and inclination to offer reasons to justify beliefs and actions. The third aspect brings up older senses of "rationality" and especially "reason" that are no longer as widely held, but which bring out the distinctiveness of Xunzi's views. Important publications in the debate about alien cultural practices include: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1937);
15. Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958);
16. Alasdair MacIntyre, "Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?" (originally published 1964),
17. Winch, "Understanding a Primitive Society" (also 1964),
18. MacIntyre, "The Idea of a Social Science" (1967),
19. all reprinted with other fine essays in Bryan R. Wilson, ed., Rationality (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970);
20. Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes, eds., Rationality and Relativism (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1982);
21. Michael Krausz, ed., Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1989);
22. and Lawrence H. Simon, "Rationality and Alien Cultures" in Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein, eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy Volume XV: The Philosophy of the Human Sciences (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1990) 15-43.
23. Hagen, "The Concepts of Li and Lei in the Xunzi: Constructive Patterning of Categories," International Philosophical Quarterly 41 (2001) 183n1. Hagen obviously intends a different sort of "constructivism" than the neo-Kantian variety mentioned above in the introduction.
24. For a sophisticated discussion of Kantian constructivism, see Onora O'Neill, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant's Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989).
25. For a sample of Richard Rorty's views, see his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989).
26. On this theme, see Philip J. Ivanhoe, "A Happy Symmetry - Xunzi's Ethical Thought," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59 (1991) pp. 309-22.