Chris Fraser 方克濤

I'm posting here an article about the interpretation of Mohism that I published in 2008. It appears in Journal of Chinese Philosophy 35.3 (2008): 437–54. Key points from this article will appear in my forthcoming book on Mohism. A main significance of the article is that it refutes a widespread misunderstanding of Mohist thought — a misunderstanding that is important insofar as it badly distorts our picture of early Chinese moral psychology. An abstract follows, along with a link to the full manuscript. Continued...

Our recent anthology Ethics in Early China, published by HKU Press, is available through Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and similar sites. For the table of contents and Introduction, see this page.

I’ve recently finished a paper entitled “The Limitations of Ritual Propriety: Ritual and Language in Xunzi and Zhuangzi.” The paper is a contribution to a special issue of Sophia: International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Metaphysical Theology and Ethics (51:2, 2012) that will be devoted to ritual in Chinese philosophy. Here’s an abstract of the paper: Continued…

I’ve belatedly posted this preprint of a paper written between 1998 and 2005 and published in Philosophy East & West 57.4 (2007): 420–56, because I think it makes a significant contribution to a debate highlighted recently in Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy. Unfortunately, the Dao discussion took place without any reference to the arguments in this paper, nor to the linguistic work by Dan Robins on which some of these arguments are based.

The paper critiques Chad Hansen’s “mass noun hypothesis,” arguing that though most Classical Chinese nouns do function as mass nouns, this fact does not support the claim that pre-Qín thinkers treat the extensions of common nouns as mereological wholes, nor does it explain why they adopt nominalist semantic theories. The paper shows that early texts explain the use of common nouns by appeal to similarity relations, not mereological relations. However, it further argues that some early texts do characterize the relation between individuals and collections as a mereological relation. It includes a detailed review of the literature on the mass noun hypothesis up to 2005.

For an abstract and full-text preprint, see this page.

I’ve posted a preprint of a forthcoming paper on the concept of truth in Mohist dialectics, including the Mozi core books and the dialectical texts. The paper discusses Chad Hansen’s well-known claim that Chinese philosophy has no concept of truth. I affirm two of Hansen’s key claims, namely that early Chinese thought overall has a practical or pragmatic orientation and that early Chinese philosophy of language focuses on subsentential expresssions such as terms or phrases rather than on subject-predicate sentences. However, I argue that neither of these points entails that the Mohists are unconcerned with truth, or concerned only with some pragmatic or ethical normative status other than truth, and that the Mohist dialectical texts clearly employ concepts whose expressive role corresponds to that of truth. The full paper is available here.

Update: This paper appears in Asian Philosophy 21.1 (2011): 97–121. A preprint can be downloaded here. For a related blog discussion, see this.

I've just returned from an August 27 conference at Chonnam 全南 University in Gwangju 光州, Korea, entitled "Reflection on Philosophical Roots of Korean Emotion," which covered Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. For me this was an interesting and unusual event, as most of the presentations were in Korean, with simultaneous interpretation. I'm grateful to Prof. Yonghwan Chung and the other organizers, who arranged a very successful program. It was a pleasure to see old friends such as Hagop Sarkissian and Georg Moeller and to meet many new colleagues from Korea, China, and Japan.

My contribution to the conference was an extension of recent work I've done on Zhuangzi. A precis follows. (Read more...)

On April 23, 2010, the "Philosophy, Therapy, and Medicine" research cluster of HKU's Centre for the Humanities and Medicine will hold a research workshop entitled "Death: Philosophy, Therapy, Medicine."  The workshop is organized by my colleague Barbara Dalle Pezze. I'll be giving a talk entitled "Xúnzǐ and Zhuāngzǐ: Two Approaches to Death in Classical Chinese Thought," as part of a panel on “Death, Dying, and Bereavement: Cross-cultural Considerations.” An abstract follows. (Read more...)

I’ve posted a discussion of the significance of Zhuangist political thought here at “Warp, Weft, and Way.” To my knowledge, this is among the few discussions of Daoist political philosophy available on line.