Name and Actuality in Early Chinese Thought

By John Makeham

Subjects: Chinese Religion And Philosophy
Series: SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture
Paperback : 9780791419847, 286 pages, July 1994
Hardcover : 9780791419830, 286 pages, August 1994

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One. Xu Gan's Theory of Naming

1. Xu Gan's Appropriation of the Name and Actuality Polarity

Part Two. The Philosophical Background

2. Confucius and the Correction of Names

3. Nominalist Theories of Naming in the Neo-Mohist Summa and Xun Zi

4. Han Fei's Xing Ming Thinking and Ming Shi

5. The Emergence of Correlative Theories of Naming in Guan Zi and Chun Qiu Fan Lu

Part Three. The Socio-intellectual Background

6. Ming Jiao in the Eastern Han

7. Word without a Message: Classical Scholarship in the Eastern Han

Part Four. The Application of Xu Gan's Theory of Naming

8. The Cosmological-cum-Ethical Implications of Name and Actuality Being in Accord or Disaccord

Conclusion

Appendices

 

A. History of the Text
B. Zhuang Zi's Scepticism about Names and Naming
C. Zheng Ming: A Legalist Interpolation?
D. An Etymological Note on the Xing Graph
E. On the Dating of the "Xin Shu Shang," "Xin Shu Xia," and "Bai Xin" Pian of Guan Zi
F. The Meaning of Ming Jiao
G. An Outline of the Old Text School-New Text School Rivalry in the Han Dynasty
H. Examples of Xu Gan's Classical Eclecticism
I. From Names and Actualities to Names and Principles

 

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Description

This is the first Western study of the philosophy of Xu Gan (170-217), a Confucian thinker who lived at a nodal point in the history of Chinese thought, when Han scholasticism had become ossified and the creative and independent quality that characterized Wei-Jin thought was just emerging. As the theme of his study, Makeham develops an original and richly detailed account of ming shi, 'name and actuality,' one of the key pairs of concepts in early Chinese thought. He shows how Xu Gan's understanding of the 'name and actuality' relationship was most immediately influenced by Xu Gan's understanding of why the Han dynasty had collapsed, yet had its roots in a tradition of discourse that spanned the classical period (circa 500-150 B. C.E. ).

In reconstructing the philosophical background of Xu Gan's understanding of the relationship between 'name and actuality,' Makeham identifies two antithetical theories of naming in early Chinese thought—nominalist and correlative—a distinction that is as great as the Realist-Nominalist distinction of Western thought. He shows how Xu Gan's views on the name and actuality relationship were animated, on the one hand, by a rejection of nominalist theories of naming, and on the other hand, by a novel appropriation of correlative theories of naming. The study also analyzes two of the more immediate social and intellectual issues in the late Eastern Han (25-220) period that had prompted Xu Gan to discuss the name and actuality relationship: the ethos of the scholar-gentry (ming jiao) and Han approaches to classical scholarship. Makeham demonstrates how Xu Gan's critique of these matters is valuable not only as a late Han philosophical account of what had led to the demise of the 400-year-old Han dynasty, but also as a mode of conceptualizing that contributed to the new direction that philosophical thinking took in the third century C. E..

John Makeham is Lecturer in Chinese, Centre for Asian Studies, University of Adelaide, South Australia.