Semantic-Truth Approaches in Chinese Philosophy: A Unifying Pluralist Account

(Hardback)

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This book explains a distinctive pluralist account of truth, jointly-rooted perspectivism (JRP for short). This explanation unifies various representative while philosophically interesting truth-concern approaches in early Chinese philosophy on the basis of peoples pre-theoretic way-things-are-capturing understanding of truth. It explains how JRP provides effective interpretative resources to identify and explain one unifying line that runs through those distinct truth-concern approaches and how they can thus talk with and complement each other and contribute to the contemporary study of the issue of truth. In so doing, the book also engages with some distinct treatments in the modern study of Chinese philosophy. Through testing its explanatory power in effectively interpreting those representative truth-concern approaches in the Yi-Jing philosophy, Gongsun Longs philosophy, Later Mohist philosophy, classical Confucianism and classical Daoism, JRP is also further justified and strengthened. Mou defends JRP as an original unifying pluralist account in the context of cross-tradition philosophical engagement, which can also effectively engage with other accounts of truth (including other types of pluralist accounts) in contemporary philosophy. The purpose of this book is dual: (1) it is to enhance our understanding and treatment of the truth concern as one strategic foundation of various movements of thought in classical Chinese philosophy that are intended to capture how things are; (2) on the other hand, it is to explore how the relevant resources in Chinese philosophy can contribute to the contemporary exploration of the philosophical issue of truth in philosophically interesting and engaging way.

Reviews

Bo Mou has a rare combination of skills. He is thoroughly familiar with contemporary semantic theory and the formal logic that lies behind it, and he has a scholarly background in traditional Chinese philosophy. Moreover, he knows how to bring these two together. This book is sure to stimulate discussion not only about the interpretation of Chinese philosophy but also on what is universal and what is culture specific in the ways we think and talk. -- Adam Morton, University of British Columbia
The culmination of decades of research and reflection, this important book accomplishes three things at once. First, it reorients scholarly attention toward the importance in Chinese philosophy of the pre-theoretic concern to capture the way things are, which Dr. Mou calls a truth concern. Second, the book shows how various philosophical elaborations in early China of this pre-theoretical concern are well-explained as contributing to a distinctive and attractive pluralist account of truth. Finally, by taking these two points together we are treated to a model of constructive, cross-cultural philosophical engagement. Students of Chinese philosophy and philosophers interested in the concept of truth both have much to gain from this impressive volume. -- Stephen C. Angle, Wesleyan University

Author Bio

Bo Mou is professor of philosophy at San Jose State University.