Bo Mou

Especially since the beginning of this century, the significance and value of comparative philosophy as a general way of doing philosophy through cross-tradition engagement toward world philosophy has been recognized and strengthened through both theoretic exploration and reflective practice. The purpose of this essay is to explain how, from a holistic vantage point, cross-tradition philosophical engagement as a methodological approach can contribute to those truth-concern-sensitive (or critical-engagement-sensitive) studies in cross-cultural dialogue with enhanced “constructive-engagement” resources. For this purpose, with a further refined characterization of eligibility of methodological perspectives, I explain a further expanded meta-methodological framework for how to adequately look at the relation between distinct eligible perspectives on an object of study.

In reflective explorations of the nature of truth in the philosophical concern with truth (as conceived in people’s pre-theoretic understanding of truth), there are two seemingly opposed strategic directions of explaining the relationship between the two closely related but distinct basic semantic notions, truth (with sentential truth bearers) and reference (with referring terms at the subject position): by virtue of which to hook up to the world in the fundamental relationship between language, thought and the world; eventually which one is more fundamental in this connection, explaining truth by virtue of reference or explaining reference by virtue of truth. In this essay, through elaborating a holistic double-reference explanatory basis of truth, I explain how our pre-theoretic “way-things-are-capturing” understanding of truth fundamentally plays its normative-basis role for a unifying pluralist account of truth through the complementary interplay of its vertical “double-reference-based” dimension and horizontal “sentential-predication-based” dimension. For illustration and for a relatively complete understanding, in Appendix, I present a sample version of the suggested unifying pluralist account of truth which consists of the referentially enhanced base account, as explained in this essay, and sample accounts of some distinct types of perspective elaborations.

The _History of Chinese Philosophy_ is a comprehensive and authoritative examination of the movements and thinkers that have shaped Chinese philosophy over the last three thousand years. An outstanding team of international contributors provide seventeen accessible entries organised into five clear parts: Identity of Chinese Philosophy Classical Chinese Philosophy (I): Pre-Han Period Classical Chinese Philosophy (II): From _Han_ Through _Tang_ Classical Chinese Philosophy (III): From _Song _Through Early _Qing_ Modern Chinese Philosophy: From Late _Qing _Through 21st Century This outstanding collection is essential reading for students of Chinese philosophy, and will be of interest to those seeking to explore the lasting significance this rich and complex philosophical tradition.

This new 4 volume collection will be organized into four distinct but complementary volumes which as a whole give a synoptic view of the major issues, conceptions, approaches, and current engaging exploration in studies of Chinese philosophy. With an introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Chinese Philosophy provides everything a scholar needs to break into the field, and is an invaluable reference work for the expert.

In this paper, I give a metaphilosophical analysis of the core idea of deflationism by discussing some basic conceptual and methodological issues involved in the debate between deflationism and substantivism. In so doing, I argue for three positive points. First, the crux of the dispute between deflationism and substantivism is whether or not truth is substantive in its metaphysical nature and in its explanatory role in philosophical enterprises, rather than whether or not a minimal approach regarding conceptual resources is taken to explain truth; a minimal approach itself is philosophically innocent. Second, there is no intrinsic connection between the core idea of deflationism and the Tarski‐style equivalence thesis, which is often identified as implying or supporting the former. Third, there are some unbridged fundamental gaps between the core idea of deflationism and various redundancy theses; these redundancy theses cannot be identified as the former, nor can they be used to justify the former on their own.

This book presents a systematic unifying-pluralist account--a "constructive-engagement" account--of how cross-tradition engagement in philosophy is possible. The goal of this "constructive-engagement" account is, by way of reflective criticism, argumentation, and methodological guiding principles, to inquire into how distinct approaches from different philosophical traditions can talk to and learn from each other for the sake of making joint contributions to the contemporary development of philosophy. In Part I of the book, Bo Mou explores a range of fundamental theoretic and methodological issues in cross-tradition philosophical engagement and philosophical interpretation. In Part II, he analyzes several representative case studies that demonstrate how relevant resources in the Western and Chinese philosophical traditions can constructively engage with each other. These studies cover issues in philosophical methodology, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language and logic, and ethics. The book's theoretical and practical approaches expand the vision, coverage, and agenda of doing philosophy comparatively, and promote worldwide joint efforts of cross-tradition philosophical inquiries. Cross-Tradition Engagement in Philosophy will be of interest to graduate students and scholars interested in comparative philosophy and the intersection of Chinese and Western philosophy. It will also appeal to those who are interested in the ways in which cross-tradition philosophical engagement can enhance contemporary philosophical debates in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language and logic, and ethics.

This article gives a holistic re-examination of the semantic content and syntactic structure of the concept of relative identity: it suggests and explains an expanded and enhanced dual-track characterization of relative identity. It is expanded in this sense: its due coverage is not narrowly restricted to the equal-status case of identity statements (the symmetric case for identity simplex) but also includes the category-assimilating case (the asymmetric case for identity complex), both of which are unified by the shared semantic core content of relative identity. It is enhanced in this sense: it is intended to give a more refined characterization of relative identity for the sake of enhancing our understanding of the structure and content of real-life relative-identity statements in people’s basic employment of language in view of the relation between thought, language, and the world.

This article gives a holistic re-examination of the semantic content and syntactic structure of the concept of relative identity: it suggests and explains an expanded and enhanced dual-track characterization of relative identity. It is expanded in this sense: its due coverage is not narrowly restricted to the equal-status case of identity statements (the symmetric case for identity simplex) but also includes the category-assimilating case (the asymmetric case for identity complex), both of which are unified by the shared semantic core content of relative identity. It is enhanced in this sense: it is intended to give a more refined characterization of relative identity for the sake of enhancing our understanding of the structure and content of real-life relative-identity statements in people’s basic employment of language in view of the relation between thought, language, and the world.

Through a comparative case analysis regarding the Chinese language, it is discussed how the structure and functions of a natural language would bear upon the ways in which some philosophical problems are posed and some ontological insights shaped. Disagreeing with Chad Hansen's mass-noun hypothesis, a collective-noun hypothesis is argued for: (1) the denotational semantics and relevant grammatical features of Chinese nouns are like those of collective nouns; (2) their implicit ontology is a mereological ontology of collection-of-individuals with both part-whole and member-class structure; and (3) encouraged and shaped by the folk semantics of Chinese nouns, classical Chinese theorists of language take this kind of mereological nominalism for granted

The dissertation consists of two parts: a negative part and a positive part. The negative part is a critical examination of a contemporary approach to the problem of truth, deflationism, which argues against the traditional substantive approach. The positive part provides an account of truth, called 'substantive quietism', which attempts to preserve and develop what are reasonable in the contrary theories. ;The approach of the critical examination is analytic and critical, not historical or expository. I focus on the core idea and the basic line of deflationism as a whole. The critical examination consists of a general characterization of deflationism and two case analyses . ;The basic moral drawn from the critical examination is this: there are different projects intended to answer different questions concerning truth; those theses in different projects might be compatible with each other; however, an advocate of a certain theory of truth might mistake what he has done actually for one project to meet the demands of quite another. My basic conclusion is this: in spite of its brilliant linguistic descriptions of the logico-syntactic function of the truth predicate, deflationism fails to justify its core idea, i.e., truth is not substantive, by virtue of the descriptions, because the substantive notion of non-linguistic truth turns out to be compatible with the linguistic descriptions. ;Drawing upon the morals from the critical examination, the positive part is a theoretical construction of substantive quietism, which consists of a theory of truth called 'substantive quietist theory' and my surrounding arguments on behalf of its adequacy. SQT is composed of an account of non-linguistic truth and an account of the linguistic truth predicate. The former provides a general definition of what it is to be a definition of truth and a definition of truth, attempting to capture our pretheoretic understanding of non-linguistic truth with minimal explanatory resources. The latter endeavors to characterize the situated uses of the truth predicate that constitute its raison d'etre by an epistemico-pragmatic notion of the truth predicate

This paper is concerned with the issue of how predication is possible, as a significant common concern in the philosophy of language, metaphysics and semantics. A ‘subject-comment’ account is suggested in view of its constructive engagement with two relevant competing approaches, i.e., the traditional ‘subject-categorization’ account and the ‘topic-comment’ account. The suggested account views predication as a unifying two-level predication: the primary level of predication is made through recognizing and commenting on some particular attribute(s) of the subject’s semantic referent as a thick object (resulting in a weaker version of Russellian proposition) and the secondary level of predication through categorizing the subject’s semantic referent into a certain group via the Fregean conceptual content of the predicate.