Sonya Ozbey

This paper examines bodily tropes in the Xunzi’s discussions of effective governance and rulership, identifying five types: tropes that highlight the ruler’s bodily limitations; the interdependence of the ruler’s body and the polity; the notion that all constituents form one body; the merging of hearts; and the changing of hearts. Contextual analysis suggests that these tropes do not coalesce into a unified theory of governance but instead reflect diverse, sometimes conflicting, perspectives. Situating these findings within existing scholarship, the paper notes prior emphases on themes of unity and self-cultivation, and the assumption that the human body’s putatively necessary unity grounds these analogies. It then advances three new insights: in the Xunzi, unity appears in multiple forms; some tropes address practical questions of statecraft; and what the human body exemplifies is the effort required to achieve unity in its various forms—an effort that gives these analogies their force.

Different Beasts: Humans and Animals in Spinoza and the Zhuangzi studies conceptions of human and animal identity as articulated in the ancient Chinese text known as the Zhuangzi and in the works of the seventeenth-century European philosopher Benedict de Spinoza. By examining how, in these very different philosophies, notions of humanness and animality intersect with ideas about human unity and solidarity, social order, and categories of social difference (such as gender, descent, and ability), Different Beasts opens new paths for understanding Spinoza and the Zhuangzi while also developing methodological insights into the practice of cross-cultural comparative philosophy. With its contextually grounded approach, Different Beasts mobilizes its comparanda to understand how the complex machinery behind the human-animal binary operates in different philosophical systems. Through a careful analysis of arguments, tales, and metaphors involving animals and humans, the work tackles fresh new questions, such as what the role of storytelling is in one’s engagement with animal perspectives, what part humor plays in imagining alternative life-enriching futures, and how attitudes toward institutional order inflect the boundaries between “us” and “them.”

Many different and contradictory claims have been made about the political dimensions (or lack thereof) of the ancient Chinese text known as the Zhuangzi 莊子. The two main positions on this topic set the parameters of the debate. One interprets the Zhuangzi to be apathetic toward political participation, focusing on individual survival instead. The other emphasizes the text’s defiant streak and locates a deliberately subversive force within it. A third position redirects the focus of the debate to an important aspect of the Zhuangzi, recognizing that the text intentionally embraces ambiguity and multivocality, and investigates the political implications of this characteristic of the text. This article further explores the Zhuangzi’s engagement with notions of social and political indeterminacy, but through the lens of role performance. Attending to the text’s portrayal of various social actors’ engagement with established roles reveals a different kind of polysemic stance that lies in the intricate dynamics between societal expectations and individual actions. The article employs these examples to examine a type of role enactment that I contend muddies the line between the place of power and the place of resistance.

This article draws a parallel between the Zhuangzi’s discussions of having no sense of “oneself” or “I,” on the one hand, and its critique of institutionalized order and visions of the unification of society, on the other. Highlighting the way the text distances itself from rituals and tradition, this article identifies the source of the shift in its view on personhood not simply in the situating of humans in the wider world or in acknowledgment of natural processes of change, but in the character of one’s relation to the wider world and change. Although special attention is given here to the socially and politically disengaged tone of the text, I reject the view that the Zhuangzi’s goal is to help shed the “external,” “social,” or “constructed” layers of one’s person in order to unearth a “natural” or “authentic” core.

Donald J. Munro's essay, "When Science Is in Defense of Value-Linked Facts," takes a stand against the fact-value dichotomy which has been heavily pronounced within the Greco-European philosophical canon. As Munro also points out, the continuing persistence of the fact-value dichotomy is traceable to Moore's discussion of the "naturalistic fallacy" and Hume's discussion of the is-ought problem. In opposition to these two views, classical Confucian thinkers present us with descriptive statements about human commonalities, including their inborn affects....