Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

E574 Early Chinese Philosophy

Fall 2005

Time/Place: W 5:30-6:30 / GB 333

E574 is a graduate section of P374/E374. Its goals and requirements are identical with 374 in some respects. E574 students attend all lecture classes of 374. In addition, 574 students meet weekly during the term to discuss additional readings listed below and exchange research reports as the term comes towards a close.

E574 students take the 374 midterm and final exams, but instead of submitting two short papers, prepare only the second of the two short paper assignments and, in addition, a term paper of 15-20 pages.

All readings will be on Library Reserve or on E-Reserve. Reading assignments for E574 will be as follows:

Week of                            Reading

29 Aug.                       <no meeting>

5 Sept.             For discussion:  Benjamin Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China, 1-39 (B 126 .S345 1985) e-reserves
                        Additional reading:  Schwartz, 40-55, Library reserve

-- Schwartz's book is an excellent, non-theoretical introduction, informed by good comparative knowledge.  We will discuss in our meeting his general picture of the origins of Chinese thought.  His chapter on early Zhou pre-philosophical thought and its historical context will supplement lecture materials.  Consult the background page as you tackle Schwartz's Introduction. 

12 Sept.         Herbert Fingarette, Confucius — The Secular as Sacred (B 128 .C8 F48) Library reserve

 -- No single essay has had greater influence on the study of Confucianism in the West than Fingarette's tiny book.  It is really just an extended article; the chapters are more like essay sections.  Our discussion will try to inventory the main claims and examine their reasonableness.  Fingarette's book remains very controversial.

19 Sept.         David Hall & Roger Ames, Thinking Through Confucius (B 128 .C8 H35 1987), 11-25  e-reserves
                      David Hall & Roger Ames, "On Getting It Right," Philosophy East and West 34.1 (1984), 3-23 online

                        -- Hall and Ames built on Fingarette, but their goal was to establish early Chinese thought as a type of "counter-
                        tradition to premodern Western philosophy.  Pragmatism and "process ontology," 20th century philosophical movements,
                        figure heavily in their method.

26 Sept.       A.C. Graham, Later Mohist Logic, Ethics, and Science, 3-44  e-reserves
                    Chad Hansen, Language & Logic in Ancient China, 30-54 (PL 1035 .H34 1983) Library reserves

3 Oct.        Christoph Harbsmeier, "The Mass Noun Hypothesis" Library reserves
                   Dan Robins, “Mass Nouns and Count Nouns in Classical Chinese,” Early China 25 (2000), 147-184 e-reserves

10 Oct.     Roger Ames, "Mencius and a Process Notion of Human Nature," in Alan Chan, Mencius: Contexts and Interpretations
                        (Hawaii, 2002), 72-90  e-reserves
                 Irene Bloom, "Biology and Culture in the Mencian View of Human Nature, in Chan, 91-102  e-reserves

17 Oct.    Heiner Roetz, Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age (SUNY, 1993 [373 pp.]), pp. 1-32  e-reserves   
                David Nivison, "Motivation and Moral Action in Mencius," in The Ways of Confucianism, 91-119, 292-97  e-reserves

24 Oct.                        Midterm due Monday, 22 Oct., no meeting Wednesday

31 Oct.    Michael LaFargue, The Tao of the Tao Te Ching (BL 1900 .L26 E5 1992), selections Library reserves
                Hal Roth “The Laozi  in the Context of Early Daoist Mystical Praxis,” in Mark Csikszentmihalyi and Philip Ivanhoe,
                                        Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi (SUNY 1999), 59-96  Library reserve

7 Nov.     [Graham, A.C., “Taoist Spontaneity and the Dichotomy of ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’,” in Victor Mair,
                    Experimental Essays on Chuang-tzu (Hawaii, 1983), 3-23  e-reserves
                Chad Hansen, Language & Logic in Ancient China, 1-29 (PL 1035 .H34 1983) Library reserves]
                                (replaced by "The Inner Enterprise")

14 Nov.     Norman Girardot, Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism, 1-43 (BL 1920 .G56)
                  Edward Slingerland, "Conceptions of the Self in the Zhuangzi," Philosophy East & West 54.3 (July 2004), 322-42 online journal

21 Nov.    Thanksgiving

28 Nov.     "The Great Learning"    

 5 Dec.      "The Doctrine of the Mea"

 

TERM PAPERS

The deadline for choice of topic area is Oct. 31.  By that date, you should send me an email statement of what you intend to do.  Try not to be vague ("I'm going to write about Mencius's moral ideas . . . ") - include these three things:

 
    1) a research question that does not seem to have an obvious answer;
    2) what you anticipate as a likely research result (a hypothesis);
    3) the range of materials you expect to consult. 
 
For example:
 
"I will ask how the concept of moral nurturance is structured in the Mencius.  I expect to claim that ideas about nurturance are modeled by analogy with the way that sheep grow fat by grazing on Ox Mountain in 6A.8.  I'll look at the Mencius text and articles I find that address this issue, and I might also consider passages in the Xunzi that attack Mencius's ideas."
 
That's fine (longer paper plans are fine too).  The sheep analogy idea is silly, but you'd soon find that out - at this stage, the research hypothesis you come up with is not very likely to be correct, but you'll just adjust it as you get your research underway.  You don't want a research question such as, "How did Confucius show a commitment to ritual?"  Too obvious.  You don't want one that is so descriptive that your research result can't be framed as an answer to a question: "What rituals do we see in the Analects?"  The paper should be analytic, not descriptive.  If your question seems too narrow, I'll ask you to broaden it; if it seems too broad . . ."
 
The paper deadline will be noon Tuesday, December 13, by email attachment.  Early papers will be enthusiastically accepted.  The length of the paper should be 15-20 pages (a little shorter or longer is ok, but much shorter is too little and much longer won't be graded in time).  You should take time to consult some sources beyond the texts we're studying.  If you want to do a paper that aims at analysis of secondary literature (e.g., is Ames right or Roetz?) that's fine, but you need to have the foundation of your research grounded in the texts.