Philosophy East and West, vol. 54, no. 3 (2004)

ARTICLES

The Consummation of Sorrow: An Analysis of Confucius’ Grief for Yan Hui
Amy Olberding, 279

Throughout the Analects, Confucius describes the capacity for grief as an ethically valuable trait. Here his own display of grief at the premature death of his beloved student Yan Hui is investigated as a model of the meaning and significance of grief in a flourishing life. This display, it is argued, provides a valuable portrait, in situ, of the specific species of grief that Confucius sanctions and encourages. It likewise makes clear the role played by vulnerability to injury in the articulation of well-being and value.

The Logic of Soku in the Kyoto School
Nicholaos John Jones, 302

Can contradictions be meaningful? How can one assert ‘P soku not-P’ or ‘P and yet not-P’ without sacrificing intelligibility? Expanding on previous attempts, mainly by Dilworth and Heisig, to demystify the soku connective, a formal system is presented here for the logic of soku. Through a formal distinction between internal and external negation, grammatical features of the soku connective are shown to be logically irrelevant, and the principle of non-contradiction is preserved. Disparities with traditional logic are noted, with a focus on negation rather than ‘soku’. The formal examination of the logic of soku is intended to present the logic in a way acceptable to more analytically minded philosophers and thereby enhance East-West and Japanese–Anglo-American interaction and criticism.

Conceptions of the Self in the Zhuangzi: Conceptual Metaphor Analysis and Comparative Thought
Edward Slingerland, 322

The purpose here is to explore metaphorical conceptions of the self in a fourth century B.C.E. Chinese text, the Zhuangzi, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and the contemporary theory of metaphor. It is argued that the contemporary theory of metaphor provides scholars with an exciting new theoretical grounding for the study of comparative thought, as well as a concrete methodology for undertaking the comparative project. What is seen when the Zhuangzi is examined from the perspective of metaphor theory is that conceptions of the self portrayed in this text are based on a relatively small set of interrelated conceptual metaphors, and that the metaphysics built into the Zhuangzi’s classical Chinese metaphors resonates strongly with the (mostly unconscious) metaphysical assumptions built into the metaphors of modern American English. This should not be surprising, considering the claims of contemporary cognitive linguists that the metaphoric schemas making up the foundation of human abstract conceptual life are not arbitrarily created ex nihilo, but rather emerge from common embodied experience and are conceptual, rather than merely linguistic, in nature.

War and Ghosts in Mozi’s Political Philosophy
Benjamin Wong and Hui-Chieh Loy, 343

It is argued here that Mozi’s critique of warfare in the chapter ‘‘Against Offensive War’’ (‘‘Fei gong’’) cannot be fully understood without the arguments presented in the chapter ‘‘Explaining Ghosts’’ (‘‘Ming gui’’). For Mozi, the problem of war can only be resolved if the existence of providential ghosts can be proven. But he indicates in his arguments concerning the existence of ghosts that it is doubtful whether such a condition can be met. Consequently, despite the apparently optimistic tenor of chapters such as ‘‘Imperial Love’’ (‘‘Jian ai’’), Mozi’s political thought reveals an implicit understanding of the rational limits of resolving fundamental problems of injustice in the world.