Mind and Body in Early China critiques Orientalist accounts of early China as a radical "holistic" other, which saw no qualitative difference between mind and body. Drawing on knowledge and techniques from the sciences and digital humanities, Edward Slingerland demonstrates that seeing a difference between mind and body is a psychological universal, and that human sociality would be fundamentally impossible without it. This book has implications for anyone interested in comparative religion, early China, cultural studies, digital humanities, or (...) science-humanities integration. (shrink)

Wu-wei as conceptual metaphor. -- At ease in virtue: Wu-wei in the Analects. -- So-of-itself: Wu-wei in the Laozi. -- New technologies of the self: Wu-wei in the "inner training" and the Mohist rejection of Wu-wei. -- Cultivating the sprouts: Wu-wei in the Mencius. -- The tenuous self: Wu-wei in the Zhuangzi. -- Straightening the warped wood: Wu-wei in the Xunzi. -- Appendix 1: The "many-Dao theory" -- Appendix 2: Textual issues concerning the Analects. -- Appendix 3: Textual issues concerning (...) the Laozi. -- Appendix 4: Textual issues concerning the Zhuangzi. (shrink)

Western scholarship on early Chinese thought has tended to either dismiss the foundational role of metaphor or to see it as a uniquely Chinese mode of apprehending the world. This article argues that, while human cognition is in fact profoundly dependent on imagistic conceptual structures, such dependence is by no means a unique feature of Chinese thought. The article reviews empirical evidence supporting the claims that human thought is fundamentally imagistic; that sensorimotor schemas are often used to structure our understanding (...) of abstract concepts; that these schemas can be selectively combined to result in novel structures; and that there are inextricable connections between body, emotion, and thought in both everyday and philosophical cognition. It also provides a review of a recent trend where, explicitly or not, scholars from a variety of backgrounds have begun to take metaphor more seriously as a foundational bearer of philosophical meaning in early China. (shrink)

This edition goes beyond others that largely leave readers to their own devices in understanding this cryptic work, by providing an entrée into the text that parallels the traditional Chinese way of approaching it: alongside Slingerland's exquisite rendering of the work are his translations of a selection of classic Chinese commentaries that shed light on difficult passages, provide historical and cultural context, and invite the reader to ponder a range of interpretations. The ideal student edition, this volume also includes (...) a general introduction, notes, multiple appendices--including a glossary of technical terms, references to modern Western scholarship that point the way for further study, and an annotated bibliography. (shrink)

Explores "why we find spontaneity so elusive and shows how early Chinese philosophy points the way to happier, more authentic lives"--Dust jacket flap.

_The Essential Analects_ offers a representative selection from Edward Slingerland's acclaimed translation of the full work, including passages covering all major themes. An appendix of selected traditional commentaries keyed to each passage provides access to the text and to its reception and interpretation. Also included are a glossary of terms and short biographies of the disciples of Confucius and the traditional commentators cited.

This book presents a systematic account of the role of the personal spiritual ideal of wu-wei--literally "no doing," but better rendered as "effortless action"--in early Chinese thought. Edward Slingerland's analysis shows that wu-wei represents the most general of a set of conceptual metaphors having to do with a state of effortless ease and unself-consciousness. This concept of effortlessness, he contends, serves as a common ideal for both Daoist and Confucian thinkers. He also argues that this concept contains within (...) itself a conceptual tension that motivates the development of early Chinese thought: the so-called "paradox of wu-wei," or the question of how one can consciously "try not to try." Methodologically, this book represents a preliminary attempt to apply the contemporary theory of conceptual metaphor to the study of early Chinese thought. Although the focus is upon early China, both the subject matter and methodology have wider implications. The subject of wu-wei is relevant to anyone interested in later East Asian religious thought or in the so-called "virtue-ethics" tradition in the West. Moreover, the technique of conceptual metaphor analysis--along with the principle of "embodied realism" upon which it is based--provides an exciting new theoretical framework and methodological tool for the study of comparative thought, comparative religion, intellectual history, and even the humanities in general. Part of the purpose of this work is thus to help introduce scholars in the humanities and social sciences to this methodology, and provide an example of how it may be applied to a particular sub-field. (shrink)

This article argues that strong versions of the situationist critique of virtue ethics are empirically and conceptually unfounded, as well as that, even if one accepts that the predictive power of character may be limited, this is not a fatal problem for early Confucian virtue ethics. Early Confucianism has explicit strategies for strengthening and expanding character traits over time, as well as for managing a variety of situational forces. The article concludes by suggesting that Confucian virtue ethics represents a more (...) empirically responsible model of ethics than those currently dominant in Western philosophy. (shrink)

In support of the thesis that virtue ethics allows for a more comprehensive and consistent interpretation of the "Analects" than other possible models, the author uses a structural outline of a virtue ethic (derived from Alasdair MacIntyre's account of the Aristotelian tradition) to organize a discussion of the text. The resulting interpretation focuses attention on the religious aspects of Confucianism and accounts for aspects of the text that are otherwise difficult to explain. In addition, the author argues that the structural (...) similarities between the Aristotelian and Confucian conceptions of self-cultivation indicate a dimension of commensurability between the two traditions, despite very real variations in specific content. Finally, the author suggests how crosscultural commensurability, in general, can be understood on a theoretical level. (shrink)

The purpose here is to explore metaphorical conceptions of the self in a fourth century B.C.E. Chinese text, the Zhuangzi, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and the contemporary theory of metaphor. It is argued that the contemporary theory of metaphor provides scholars with an exciting new theoretical grounding for the study of comparative thought, as well as a concrete methodology for undertaking the comparative project. What is seen when the Zhuangzi is examined from the perspective of metaphor theory is (...) that conceptions of the self portrayed in this text are based on a relatively small set of interrelated conceptual metaphors, and that the metaphysics built into the Zhuangzi's classical Chinese metaphors resonates strongly with the (mostly unconscious) metaphysical assumptions built into the metaphors of modern American English. This should not be surprising, considering the claims of contemporary cognitive linguists that the metaphoric schemas making up the foundation of human abstract conceptual life are not arbitrarily created ex nihilo, but rather emerge from common embodied experience and are conceptual, rather than merely linguistic, in nature. (shrink)

What Science Offers the Humanities examines some of the deep problems facing the study of culture. It focuses on the excesses of postmodernism, but also acknowledges serious problems with postmodernism's harshest critics. In short, Edward Slingerland argues that in order for the humanities to progress, its scholars need to take seriously contributions from the natural sciences - and particular research on human cognition - which demonstrate that any separation of the mind and the body is entirely untenable. The (...) author provides suggestions for how humanists might begin to utilize these scientific discoveries without conceding that science has the last word on morality, religion, art, and literature. Calling into question such deeply entrenched dogmas as the 'blank slate' theory of nature, strong social constructivism, and the ideal of disembodied reason, What Science Offers the Humanities replaces the human-sciences divide with a more integrated approach to the study of culture. (shrink)

Exploring the power of spontaneity, an ancient Chinese virtue, this book, based on new research in psychology and neuroscience, reveals why it is essential to individual and societal well-being.

We present the first large-scale, quantitative examination of mind and body concepts in a set of historical sources by measuring the predictions of folk mind–body dualism against the surviving textual corpus of pre-Qin (pre-221 BCE) China. Our textual analysis found clear patterns in the historically evolving reference of the word xin (heart/heart–mind): It alone of the organs was regularly contrasted with the physical body, and during the Warring States period it became less associated with emotions and increasingly portrayed as the (...) unique locus of “higher” cognitive abilities. We interpret this as a semantic shift toward a shared cognitive bias in response to a vast and rapid expansion of literacy. Our study helps test the proposed universality of folk dualism, adds a new quantitative approach to the methods used in the humanities, and opens up a new and valuable data source for cognitive scientists: the record of dead minds. (shrink)

This volume takes a new approach to bridging the cultures of science and the humanities. The editors and contributors formulate how to develop a new shared framework of consilience beyond mere interdisciplinarity, in a way that both sides can accept.

In support of the thesis that virtue ethics allows for a more comprehensive and consistent interpretation of the Analects than other possible models, the author uses a structural outline of a virtue ethic (derived from Alasdair MacIntyre's account of the Aristotlelian tradition) to organize a discussion of the text. The resulting interpretation focuses attention on the religious aspects of Confucianism and accounts for aspects of the text that are otherwise difficult to explain. In addition, the author argues that the structural (...) similarities between the Aristotelian and Confucian conceptions of self‐cultivation indicate a dimension of commensurability between the two traditions, despite very real variations in specific content. Finally, the author suggests how crosscultural commensurability, in general, can be understood on a theoretical level. (shrink)

This paper discusses certain conceptual tensions in a set of archeological texts from the Warring States period, the Guodian corpus. One of the central themes of the Guodian corpus is the disanalogy between spontaneous, natural familial relationships and artificial political relationships. This is problematic because, like many early Chinese texts, the Guodian corpus believes that political relationships must come to be characterized by unselfconsciousness and spontaneity if social order is to prevail. This tension will be compared to my earlier work (...) on the “paradox of wu-wei (effortless action),” and the Guodian corpus’ “solution” to the problem of teaching spontaneity—drawing upon the transformative power of music—will be placed within the landscape of early “Confucian” and “Daoist” theories concerning human nature and self-cultivation. (shrink)

This chapter reviews how human reasoning and decision making evolves from the cognitive sciences, challenging basic assumptions of objectivism-rationalism along with ethical models based on reason. It emphasizes the significance of effortless attention in human reasoning and suggests that virtue ethics is preferable to authoritative thinking. By examining an early text from China, entitled “Analects of Confucius,” the chapter demonstrates how effortless attention and action can be developed and incorporated into moral behavior. This text is an important source of evidence (...) regarding the earliest examples of virtue ethic in world literature. These findings also reveal the presence of different human thinking systems that work on implicit and explicit levels, with knowledge operating at the implicit level. (shrink)

In his well-known 1994 work Descartes’ Error, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes his work with patients suffering from damage to the prefrontal cortex, a center of emotion processing in the brain. The accidents or strokes that had caused this damage had spared these patients’ “higher” cognitive faculties: their short- and long-term memories, abstract reasoning skills, mathematical aptitude, and performance on standard IQ tests were completely unimpaired. They were also perfectly healthy physically, with no apparent motor or sensory disabilities. Nonetheless, these (...) patients had been brought to Damasio’s attention as a physician because, despite their apparent lack of physical or cognitive impairment, they .. (shrink)

This dissertation has two major theses. The first is that the concept of "wu-wei" serves as a spiritual ideal for a group of five pre-Qin thinkers--Confucius, Laozi, Mencius, Zhuangzi and Xunzi--who share what might be called the "mainstream" Chinese worldview, and that this concept serves as a soteriological goal and spiritual ideal that cannot be understood except within the context of this worldview. More specifically, this worldview is primarily characterized by the belief that there is a normative order to the (...) cosmos , within which human beings have a proper place and proper mode of behavior; that human beings once existed in a state of accord with this order, but have since fallen out of this state of harmony; that wu-wei represents a re-establishment of this original ideal state; and that a person who has regained this state will acquire a type of charismatic virtue or inner power referred to as de. The second thesis is that this ideal of effortless action contains within it a tension--referred to as the "paradox of wu-wei"--that can be seen as the central problematic with which the five thinkers discussed in the dissertation were concerned. In its most basic form, the paradox is that wu-wei represents a state of effortless action that needs to be regained through a process of self-cultivation or transformation, but it is hard to see how one can try not to try. It is argued that this tension at the center of wu-wei is a productive one, for perhaps the most revealing way of understanding these thinkers is to see them as responding in various ways to both the paradox of wu-wei and previous thinkers' proposed "solutions" to the paradox. It is argued that this central problematic of mainstream pre-Qin thought continues to be a dominant theme throughout the entire history of Chinese religious thought and--as a tension that seems to appear in any philosophy of self-cultivation--is relevant as well to the Western "virtue ethical" tradition. (shrink)

One purpose of this article is to support the universalist claims of conceptual blending theory by documenting its application to an ancient Chinese philosophical text, and also to provide illustrations of complex multiple-scope blends constructed over the course of conceptual blending by suggesting that, in many cases, the primary purpose of achieving human scale is not to help us apprehend a situation, but rather to help us to know how too feel about it. This argument is essentially an attempt to (...) connect the insights of conceptual blending theorists with those of neuroscientists such Antonio Damasio who argues for the importance of somatic states and emotional reactions in human value-creation and decision-making. (shrink)

This article discusses critiques raised by historians of religion concerning Ara Norenzayan's Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), offering some defense of Norenzayan's position, but also discussing in detail the more substantive challenges. It concludes with some reflections on the current position of the history of religion within the Academy, and an argument for why large-scale explanatory projects and interdisciplinary collaboration should be part of the future of our field.

We respond to several important and valid concerns about our study (“The Prevalence of Folk Dualism in Early China,”Cognitive Science 35: 997–1007) by Klein and Klein, defending our interpretation of our data. We also argue that, despite the undeniable challenges involved in qualitatively coding texts from ancient cultures, the standard tools used throughout the cognitive sciences—large quantities of data, coders as blind to the hypothesis as possible, intercoder reliability measures, and statistical analysis—allow the noise of randomly distributed interpretative differences to (...) be distinguished from the signal of genuine historical patterns. (shrink)

We develop a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions and apply it to resolve two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history: (1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers and, simultaneously, (2) the spread of prosocial religions in the last 10–12 millennia. We argue that these two developments were importantly linked and mutually energizing. We explain how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing, supernatural agents, credible displays of faith, (...) and other psychologically active elements conducive to social solidarity promoted high fertility rates and large-scale cooperation with co-religionists, often contributing to success in intergroup competition and conflict. In turn, prosocial religious beliefs and practices spread and aggregated as these successful groups expanded, or were copied by less successful groups. This synthesis is grounded in the idea that although religious beliefs and practices originally arose as nonadaptive by-products of innate cognitive functions, particular cultural variants were then selected for their prosocial effects in a long-term, cultural evolutionary process. This framework (1) reconciles key aspects of the adaptationist and by-product approaches to the origins of religion, (2) explains a variety of empirical observations that have not received adequate attention, and (3) generates novel predictions. Converging lines of evidence drawn from diverse disciplines provide empirical support while at the same time encouraging new research directions and opening up new questions for exploration and debate. (shrink)

David Estlund’s Democratic Authority develops a novel doctrine of “normative consent,” according to which the nonconsent of those with a duty to consent is null. This article suggests that this doctrine can be defended by confining it to contexts involving consent to an authority, which raise distinctive normative challenges, but argues that Estlund’s attempt to deploy the doctrine fails, for it does not provide convincing reasons to think that citizens have any duty to consent. In closing, the article suggests that (...) the doctrine of normative consent might yet do some useful work in a quite different theoretical setting. (shrink)

Anthropologists have documented substantial cross-society variation in people’s willingness to treat strangers with impartial, universal norms versus favoring members of their local community. Researchers have proposed several adaptive accounts for these differences. One variant of the pathogen stress hypothesis predicts that people will be more likely to favor local in-group members when they are under greater infectious disease threat. The material security hypothesis instead proposes that institutions that permit people to meet their basic needs through impartial interactions with strangers reinforce (...) a tendency toward impartiality, whereas people lacking such institutions must rely on local community members to meet their basic needs. Some studies have examined these hypotheses using self-reported preferences, but not with behavioral measures. We conducted behavioral experiments in eight diverse societies that measure individuals’ willingness to favor in-group members by ignoring an impartial rule. Consistent with the material security hypothesis, members of societies enjoying better-quality government services and food security show a stronger preference for following an impartial rule over investing in their local in-group. Our data show no support for the pathogen stress hypothesis as applied to favoring in-groups and instead suggest that favoring in-group members more closely reflects a general adaptive fit with social institutions that have arisen in each society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early ChinaEdward SlingerlandMaterial Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early China. By Mark Csikszentmihalyi. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Pp. vi + 402. Hardcover $180.00.Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early China by Mark Csikszentmihalyi is a fascinating and meticulously researched study of early Chinese discussions of virtue and moral education in the period following what we might call the "physiological turn," (...) marked by a growing interest in the body and the embodiment of social ideals that begins sometime in the fourth century B.C.E. In Csikszentmihalyi's usage, the phrase "material virtue" refers "narrowly to descriptions of the virtues in terms of their quasi-material properties. More generally, such descriptions are characteristic of the view that, once cultivated, the virtues manifest themselves through physiological changes in the body that can be observed by others" (p. 5). This early Chinese development of this sort of nondualistic model of the self is a topic of growing interest to scholars of early China, with relevance to many contemporary debates about ethics and the mind-body relationship. This study's focus on a recently discovered archeological find, the text of the Wuxing 五行 (datable to sometime before 300 B.C.E.), also places it at the center of one of the most exciting recent developments in the field: the trove of newly discovered and, in many cases, previously unknown texts that are in the process of enriching and transforming our understanding of early Chinese thought. The two versions of the Wuxing that Csikszentmihalyi discusses come from Guodian (tomb closed ca. 300 B.C.E.) and Mawangdui (tomb closed 168 B.C.E.; this version also includes what seems to be a later commentary), two of the richest finds from the perspective of early Chinese philosophical and religious thought. Two substantial appendixes contain critical annotated editions of both texts, which summarize the state of the field with regard to their textual scholarship—an invaluable resource in itself.As Csikszentmihalyi notes, one important aspect of these finds is how they "have augmented the [received textual] record with different kinds of texts, challenging received notions of school and genre" (p. 1). This is one of the more interesting contributions of Csikszentmihalyi's study, part of a recent trend among scholars of early China to move beyond traditional "school" labels. Csikszentmihalyi presents the Wuxing, which modern scholars attribute to the disciple Zisi 子思,1 as a hitherto unheard voice in "an important conversation about the nature of the virtues in early China from the fourth through the second centuries B.C.E." (p. 2), and by doing so significantly increases the subtlety of our picture of the early Chinese philosophical [End Page 694] landscape. For instance, in place of a more-or-less linear picture of the development of "Confucian" thought, originating with Kongzi and then diverging with the two followers Mengzi and Xunzi, Csikszentmihalyi argues for a view of the ru 儒 tradition that sees it as consisting of many competing disciple lineages, united by a shared technical vocabulary and the acknowledgment of Kongzi as an authority, but much more internally diverse than traditionally thought.Csikszentmihalyi contextualizes his discussion of the Wuxing by placing it firmly in the Mengzi-Zisi lineage that appears as one of Xunzi's targets in his famous "Against Twelve Masters" chapter. He makes a strong case for doing so: besides Xunzi's comment that the misguided followers of Mengzi and Zisi "created a theory, and called it 'Five Kinds of Action' (wuxing)" (p. 60), there are many textual and conceptual parallels between the Wuxing and the Mengzi. Csikszentmihalyi also makes a strong case that both the Mengzi and the Wuxing can be seen as springing from a similar motivation: defending Confucianism from Primitivist charges of moral hypocrisy by arguing for a more internalist conception of virtue, grounded in the physical body and its animating qi. As he notes, "The 'psychologizing' or 'embodiment' of moral self cultivation implies that genuine virtue cannot be simulated because it is an observable physical process" (p. 86). For instance, in his interesting discussion of the Mencian concept of haoranzhiqi 浩然之氣 (usually translated as "flood-like" qi), Csikszentmihalyi follows... (shrink)

The turn to descriptive studies of ethics is inspired by the sense that our ethical theorizing needs to engage ethnography, history, and literature in order to address the full complexity of ethical life. This article examines four books that describe the cultivation of virtue in diverse cultural contexts, two concerning early China and two concerning Islam in recent years. All four emphasize the significance of embodiment, and they attend to the complex ways in which choice and agency interact with the (...) authority of tradition. In considering these books, this article examines the relations between our academic claims concerning the self and ethics, conceptual or theoretical claims made in the elite writings of traditions, and the lived experiences of the people we study. The conclusion turns to our methodological foundations for studying these topics both comparatively and constructively. (shrink)

In our response to the 27 commentaries, we refine the theoretical claims, clarify several misconceptions of our framework, and explore substantial disagreements. In doing so, we show that our framework accommodates multiple historical scenarios; debate the historical evidence, particularly about “pre-Axial” religions; offer important details about cultural evolutionary theory; clarify the termprosociality;and discuss proximal mechanisms. We review many interesting extensions, amplifications, and qualifications of our approach made by the commentators.

Edward Slingerland has been working on notions of spontaneity in classical Chinese thought and modern science for many years. In his newest title, Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity, he approaches this topic by weaving short anecdotes, recent discoveries in cognitive science, and classic Chinese philosophy into an eloquent tapestry that depicts both the everydayness and paradoxical nature of spontaneous action. The text does not read like many other contemporary academic books: it uses colloquial (...) language and does not directly address contemporary philosophical debates. But this does not compromise its ability to stimulate the intellect, or deliver solid philosophical arguments. Slingerland does... (shrink)