Speaker: Dirk Meyer (Oxford)

 Talk: The Dialectics Rule: Chinese Philosophy As Seen From *Mìng xùn

 Abstract: This paper looks at the way a philosophical argument is developed in a recently obtained, fourth century manuscript text from the Tsinghua collection of Chǔ Warring States texts, titled *Mìng xùn. The text has a close counterpart in the received tradition (Yì Zhōushū), which classes it as an utterance in the tradition of Shū (Documents), one of the core classics. I analyse the strategies with which meaning is produced in *Mìng xùn and suggest that the text is articulated in a dialectic manner in which the philosophical premise seeks to test itself continuously to avoid becoming doctrine, and thus philosophically void. My choice of a Shū text as an example of philosophically relevant meaning construction in early China challenges current methodology, which anachronistically considers zǐ-type literature (the Masters) as a disciplinary equivalent to Philosophy in ancient Greece. I argue that since philosophically relevant activities are a non-disciplinary praxis in early China, the articulations of this praxis are also not genre specific but found across the foundational literary texts of China.