Sonya Ozbey

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.

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.

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....