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  • Philosophy and History, Customs and Ethics
  • Hui-Chieh Loy (bio)
Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China: Contestation of Humaneness, Justice, and Personal Freedom. By Tao Jiang. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Tao Jiang's Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China is a serious tour de force of a study. In many ways, I am reminded of Angus Graham's Disputers of the Tao and Benjamin Schwartz' The World of Thought in Ancient China—but updated. A signal difference is that it is more constrained in its coverage of figures, texts, and especially in having the topical focus upon moral-political philosophy. At the same time and within the chosen (narrower) confines, it often examines its subject in greater detail and draws on more recent discussions.

One neat thing that Jiang does is to deliberately weave in explicit discussions of how each subsequent thinker or text incorporated or criticized ideas associated with earlier thinkers. (I formulated it this way since there isn't enough historical evidence about who-actually-read-what in the ancient world, citation practices being what they were.) In this regard, I am especially heartened to read, for example, the sections on "Traces of Mohist Elements in the Laozi" (3.3.2), and "Mohist Elements in Han Feizi's Thought" (7.3.3).

By no means should the desultory remarks below be counted as a full review or assessment (impressionistically, this is the sort of book I will recommend that my grad students read—there, I've said it). Think of them as humble shards of pottery thrown in the hope for some jade in response. To make my task more focused, I will comment on the Sinology versus Philosophy distinction, and Jiang's treatment of the Mohists.

I. Philosophy and History of Philosophy

An important part of Jiang's Introduction is devoted to discussing the situation of Chinese Philosophy as a field in the Western Academy, caught between Sinology on the one hand and academic Philosophy on the other. Due to the different scholarly objectives and norms in the two disciplines, scholars working on Chinese Philosophy often find themselves caught [End Page 420] between two distinct audiences who demand different things. Jiang's aim is to propose an "interpretive model to distinguish two sets of scholarly objects operative in Sinology and philosophy. These objects are related and at times overlap, but they are also often irreducibly distinct, i.e., original text versus inherited text, historical author versus textual author, and authorial intent versus textual intent, with the former in the pairs belonging to Sinologists and the latter to philosophers" (p. 7). In general, I am highly sympathetic to the distinctions Jiang draws. But I do wonder if we need to step back and start from a wider context involving what is potentially a deeper divide.

Now, it is entirely a caricature but the joke around the water cooler is that philosophers—especially those of a more "analytic" bent—often exude the attitude that they are not in the business of reading old books. Their project is one focused on issues and problems and puzzles that are ultimately about the natural and human world, rather than about texts and their interpretation, or even the historical thinkers themselves. To give some obvious examples, the intellectual questions they see themselves as answering are the likes of:

  • • Can we know that God exists, if God exists at all?

  • • What is the nature of moral claims? Do they admit of truth and falsity?

  • • How is causation related to possibility?

  • • Is a logic that dispenses with the law of non-contradiction viable?

  • • What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge?

  • • Is abortion morally justifiable?

Sometimes the questions they ask even infringe on the results and insights from nearby fields, for instance linguistics and the natural and empirical sciences:

  • • What is time?

  • • Can a presentist conception of time be made consistent with contemporary physics?

  • • What is the nature of consciousness? How is it related to physical neural states or informational computational processes?

  • • Can computers be sentient?

  • • How is morality related to the passions?

  • • In what sense is a political order that does justice to diversity of moral beliefs...

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