what did the greeks invent and is it relevant to

7/28/2019 What Did the Greeks Invent and is It Relevant To

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Monsieur Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd

Philosophy : what did the Greeks invent and is it relevant to

China ?In: Extrme-Orient, Extrme-Occident. 2005, N27, pp. 149-159.

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Lloyd Geoffrey E. R. Philosophy : what did the Greeks invent and is it relevant to China ?. In: Extrme-Orient, Extrme-

Occident. 2005, N27, pp. 149-159.

doi : 10.3406/oroc.2005.1203

http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/oroc_0754-5010_2005_num_27_27_1203
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/author/auteur_oroc_28http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/oroc.2005.1203http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/oroc_0754-5010_2005_num_27_27_1203http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/oroc_0754-5010_2005_num_27_27_1203http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/oroc.2005.1203http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/author/auteur_oroc_28


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Abstract

When the Greeks first coined the term philosophia and cognates

(philosophein, philosophos) in the fifth century BCE, they used them for different types of activity or

modes of intellectual curiosity. Those terms were, moreover, certainly not always used with approval

and the activities in question were certainly not carried on in institutions of higher education. First Plato

and then Aristotle appropriated the terms for their - each rather different - concepts of the highest

human activity, but neither among their contemporaries nor among later Greeks was there any

consensus on either the definition or the contents of philosophy. The tension or rivalry between different

interpretations of 'philosophy' continued, and continues in Europe to this day, as the different foci of

interests of what passes as philosophy in different institutions in the UK and the USA, as philosophie in

France, as Philosophie in Germany eloquently exhibit.

The primary task of the historian of Chinese thought is not to see whether the later terms coined or

introduced to express European concepts can be applied to classical Chinese studies. Rather it is to

examine how the Chinese thinkers themselves construed what they were doing - using their, actors',

categories, not later, observers', ones. The question of whether any given later term can or should be

applied to their work is, then, a secondary one, though it may be a politically sensitive one. The answer

will in any case depend on which mode of philosophising is in mind. But the Greek materials should be

reassuring in one respect, namely that they show that, from the outset, no one had a monopoly of what "

philosophy " should be.

Rsum

Philosophie : qu'ont invent les Grecs et est-ce pertinent pour la Chine ?

Lorsque les Grecs inventrent le mot philosophia et ses drivs (philosophein, philosophos) au Ve

sicle avant l're chrtienne, ils les utilisrent pour diffrents types d'activit ou mode de curiosit

intellectuelle. En outre, ces termes n'taient certes pas toujours employs dans un sens laudatif et les

activits en question certes pas toujours menes dans des institutions d'ducation suprieure. Platon,

puis Aristote, furent les premiers s'approprier ces termes pour leurs concepts - au demeurant assezdiffrents - de l'activit humaine la plus leve, mais pas plus chez leurs contemporains que chez leurs

successeurs, on ne trouve de consensus sur la dfinition ni sur le contenu de la philosophie. La tension

ou rivalit entre diffrentes interprtations de la philosophie s'est poursuivie, et se poursuit encore

en Europe de nos jours, comme le montrent amplement les diffrents centres d'intrt de ce qui passe

sous le vocable de philosophy dans diverses institutions en Grande-Bretagne et aux tats-Unis, de

philosophie en France et de Philosophie en Allemagne. La tche premire de l'historien de la pense

chinoise n'est pas de voir si les termes invents ou introduits plus tard pour dsigner des concepts

europens peuvent s'appliquer aux tudes classiques chinoises. Il s'agit plutt d'examiner la faon dont

les penseurs chinois eux-mmes ont interprt ce qu'ils faisaient, en recourant leurs propres

catgories en tant qu'acteurs, et non des catgories plus tardives d'observateurs. La question de

savoir si un quelconque terme apparu a posteriori peut ou doit s'appliquer leur travail est doncsecondaire, bien qu'elle puisse tre politiquement sensible. Quoi qu'il en soit, la rponse dpendra du

mode d'activit philosophique que l'on a l'esprit. Mais les sources grecques peuvent nous rassurer au

moins sur un point, savoir que, depuis l'origine, personne n'a eu le monopole de ce que la

philosophie devrait tre. aux tudes classiques chinoises. Il s'agit plutt d'examiner la faon dont les

penseurs chinois eux-mmes ont interprt ce qu'ils faisaient, en recourant leurs propres catgories

en tant qu'acteurs, et non des catgories plus tardives d'observateurs. La question de savoir si un

quelconque terme apparu posteriori peut ou doit s'appliquer leur travail est donc secondaire, bien

qu'elle puisse tre politiquement sensible. Quoi qu'il en soit, la rponse dpendra du mode d'activit

philosophique que l'on a l'esprit. Mais les sources grecques peuvent nous rassurer au moins sur un

point, savoir que, depuis l'origine, personne n'a eu le monopole de ce que la philosophie devrait

tre.


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"f

Extrme-Orient, Extrme-Occident 27 - 2005

"Philosophy": what did the Greeks inventand is it relevant to China?

Geoffrey Lloyd

The question of whether the ancient Chinese had "philosophy" is just one ofa series of issues that revolve around the applicability or otherwise of the majorcategories of thought that the Western world often treats with an easy familiarity,but which it would be most unwise to regard as in any way self-evident. Otherexamples, mentioned by Dyck, Defoort and Thoraval, include "science" and"religion". In such a case as "physics", to be sure, we are unlikely not to be on ourguard, since it is obvious that there have been major changes in what that studycovers in the last 50, let alone the last 300, years. But even in such a case as"mathematics", even though there are plenty of shared interests in differenttraditions in the investigations of numbers, shapes and so on, carried on indifferent cultures and at different periods, it is important not to underestimate thedifferent foci of interests in those traditions, the different ways in which the keyproblems have been defined and the different methods used to tackle them.All the terms cited in quotation marks in my last paragraph stem from Greekor Latin words. But first that has not meant that their subsequent fortunes in thevarious vernacular European languages that adopted them have been anything likeuniform. Nor secondly were their original Greek or Latin usages unproblematic.Both points need elaboration with regard to the term "philosophy" in particular '.

Philosophie , in France, still has an important place in secondary education- something that "philosophy" has never enjoyed in Britain. Those who studyphilosophy at Universities in the UK learn it from scratch, and what they aretaught is still mainly analytic philosophy in the style of Wittgenstein'sPhilosophical Investigations, rather than, say, metaphysics. To be autobiographical for a moment, when I received my own philosophical formation inCambridge - admittedly some 50 years ago now - almost no attention was paidto Heidegger, to Nietzsche, even to Hegel. Phenomenology was totally ignored,and existentialism only figured in the lectures offered by the Faculty responsiblefor teaching English literature. The history of philosophy was sidelined as ofmerely antiquarian interest: indeed it was not taught as such at all in what wascalled the Faculty of Moral Sciences. When I went on my first lecture tour of the


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United States in the 60s, I was taken aback at the very considerable differences inthe ways in which philosophy was taught in different Universities, reflecting theparticular interests of the professors. The dominant philosophical culture might beanything from what was called "continental" idealism, to logical positivism, andit is notorious that in some Universities it was even necessary to set up separateDepartments to accommodate what the squabbling factions saw as incompatibleinterpretations of "philosophy". A different parochialism existed meanwhile inFrance, for it took perhaps almost as long for A J. Ayer, J.L. Austin and W.V.O.Quine to be taken seriously south of la Manche as it did Sartre and Merleau-Ponty north of the English Channel.It is true that there have been encouraging signs, recently, of a greaterreadiness among many who consider themselves professional philosophers indifferent countries, not just to read one another's work, but to accept thelegitimacy of a diversity of philosophical traditions. Yet the famous recentcontroversy - one cannot call it a debate - between Derrida and Searle illustratesthat there remain fundamental differences of view about what philosophy is andhow it should be practised.Now some aspects of the diverse styles, areas and constructions of"philosophy" in the 21st century are of quite recent origin. I am thinking not justof deconstructionism, but also of phenomenology, existentialism, logicalpositivism, Marxism. From some points of view, therefore, matters were simplerin the ancient world. But if my first point has been to insist on the complexity anddivergence in what may pass as "philosophy" today, my next task is to illustratesome of the discrepancies that already existed when the Greeks first startedtalking about "philosophising".The terms philosophia, philosophein,philosophos do not occur with any greatfrequency in our extant texts before Plato and their origins are obscure. Cicero(Tusculans V, 3) and Diogenes Laertius (I, 12 ) associate their introduction withPythagoras, but that can hardly be said to be certain. It is striking that in two ofour earliest extant texts, they carry pejorative undertones. A fragment ofHeraclitus (35) says that "men who are philosophai must be inquirers (historas)into many things indeed". It is possible, but again not certain, that Heraclitus hadPythagoras, among others, in mind. In another fragment (129) the authenticity ofwhich has, however, been called into question, Heraclitus says that "Pythagoras,son of Mnesarchus, engaged in inquiry (histori) most of all men" and it goes onto accuse him of "wisdom of his own", "much learning" (polymathi) and"deceit". It is clear, in any event, that Heraclitus had a negative view of what hecalls "inquiry", since his own recipe for finding wisdom was to "search himself(Fr. 101). We may conclude that, whoever the philosophai of Fr. 35 were,Heraclitus did not approve of them. Pythagoras in person is quite definitelycriticised when he is named with several others in another fragment (40) asexamples of the dictum that "much learning" (polymathi again) "does not teachsense. Otherwise", Heraclitus goes on, "it would have taught Hesiod andPythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus". It says a lot about the150


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heterogeneity of the categories of learning at the time that Pythagoras is herelumped together with the archaic didactic poet Hesiod, the historian Hecataeus,and another poet, Xenophanes, who appears in conventional lists of the"Presocratic philosophers" but was also famous for the lyric poems he composedfor symposia.The second text that shows how philosophie could be no term of praise comesin the Hippocratic treatise On Ancient Medicine, of uncertain date but probably ofthe early 4th century BCE. In chapter 20 this writer criticises certain doctors and"sophists" for holding that medicine depends on knowing about the elementalconstituents of the body. But that, the writer says, takes you into philosophie, aword he evidently feels to be sufficiently unfamiliar that he needs to gloss it . Heexplains by referring to the kind of studies that Empedocles engaged in and otherswho had written about nature, about the constitution of human beings and so on.But it is not that the Hippocratic writer approves of their endeavours. From theoutset of the treatise he had been attacking those who based their medical theoriesand practices on arbitrary assumptions, hupotheseis, such as "the hot" "the cold""the wet" "the dry" or "anything else they fancy". Medicine, he insists, is atechn, an art or skill, that must be based on long experience. As in Heraclitus 'useof philosophos, the Hippocratic writer's idea of what he calls philosophie does notcarry the positive associations of a noble human intellectual endeavour, but thenegative ones, of idle speculation.Elsewhere in our pre-Platonic texts, this family of terms refers not so much toany intellectual discipline, as to intellectual curiosity in general. Herodotus (1, 30)speaks of Solon "philosophising" when he travelled the world to find out aboutother countries. In the funeral speech that Thucydides (II, 46) puts into the mouthof Pericles, he says that the Athenians "philosophise without weakness", by whichhe certainly does not mean that they engage in such a study as epistemology, noreven in the speculative thought criticised in On Ancient Medicine, nor even inethics, but rather that they have a penchant for argument and rational explanation.Before Plato, in fact, philosophia and philosophein have very wide semanticranges and applications. It took Plato himself to define "the love of wisdom" in

terms of the disinterested pursuit of truth he associated in the first instance withSocrates. The Delphic oracle is reported to have said that no human is wiser thanSocrates, but Plato has Socrates interpret that not in terms of his superiorknowledge, but rather in his realisation of his own ignorance. The one thing hecould be said to know was precisely that he knew nothing. So he was no wiseman, sophos, who could happily be associated with the traditional wise men ofancient Greece (Solon and Thaes among them). Rather he loved wisdom,devoting his life to the search for truth and the cultivation of his soul. But whereasSocrates' own sphere of activity was quite informal - since he could and didengage in dialectic with anyone he chanced to meet - Plato founded his Academyand in the Republic sketched out an ideal programme of education for those whomhe hoped to turn into "philosopher-kings". Evidently in Plato "d ialectic" was nolonger mere "conversation" (its root meaning) but the supreme study that the

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budding philosopher-kings will only be allowed to undertake after a rigoroustraining in the mathematical disciplines. The content of that Platonic study was theinvestigation of transcendent Forms, the true reality, ontology in other words, orwhat much later came to be called "metaphysics".While Plato's subsequent influence on the conception of "philosophy" wasimmense, it is essential to recognise that he was far from having it all his own way,among his contemporaries or his successors. His contemporary Isocrates alsotaught what he also called "philosophy", but that was not a matter of a metaphysical inquiry leading to a grasp of transcendent Forms, but rather of acquiringthe skills or wisdom that the trained orator will exhibit in discussion, especially ofpractical affairs (see Too, 1995). While Plato's pupil Aristotle agreed with him inrating the life devoted to "philosophy" as supreme, his ontology dictated adifferent conception of the goal and of how to reach it . Explanation was still byway of "forms", but these are instantiated by the phenomena to be explained, not(merely) imitated by them. It follows that close attention to those phenomena isimperative.Starting with Plato's Academy and Isocrates' school, institutions where"philosophy" was taught proliferated at Athens, first with Aristotle's Lyceum,then with the Hellenistic schools of Stoics, Epicureans, Cyrenaics, Cynics andothers. But this did nothing to standardise what "philosophy" should consist in,but rather institutionalised philosophical pluralism. Each group offered itsdistinctive answers to the fundamental questions, and more than that, proposeddivergent views as to what the fundamental questions were. It is true that all saw"philosophy" as leading to happiness, eudaimonia. None of these schools treat"philosophy" as what we should call an academic study. Rather, all thought it tobe essential to secure peace of mind or freedom from anxiety, ataraxia.It is true that the positive - or dogmatic - Hellenistic schools, especially bothStoics and Epicureans, shared the two views first that ethics was the mostimportant area of philosophy and secondly that that depended, at least up to acertain point, first on having the correct views on the criterion of truth, on logicand epistemology in other words, and secondly on having a proper understandingof "physics", covering both the fundamental constitution of physical objects andthe explanations of particular phenomena. But while both Stoics and Epicureansheld that having positive answers to what we should call the basic scientificquestions was an essential component of "philosophy", the Sceptics took a verydifferent line. They refused to "dogmatise" about underlying reality or hiddencauses. For every dogmatic view suggesting one theory on such subjects there wasanother of equal strength supporting its contradictory (the argument fromisostheneia). But if these arguments were of equal strength, they were of equalweakness. So the Sceptics recommendation was to suspend judgement. But thisagain was no mere "academic" position (in our sense) but a recipe for living. Theydid not set out to find freedom from anxiety (ataraxia), but that desirable statesupervened on their inquiry. It resulted from their realisation that there were nopositive answers to those metaphysical questions to be had. Yet thereby they152


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created a very different image of the content and methods of "philosophy" fromthat of their dogmatist opponents.Meanwhile the general use of the term philosophos continued, where it can beapplied to anyone who had some claim to be considered wise or a lover ofwisdom, irrespective of whether that person put forward particular proposals insuch areas as "ethics", "logic" or "physics".Given the dazzling variety of philosophical schools or tendencies in ancientGreece, it is naturally very difficult to arrive at any single valid generalcharacterisation concerning what "philosophy" stood for, even among those whoprofessed to teach it, let alone for the public at large. It stood, indeed, for differentthings for different individuals. If in some writers the interests were moretheoretical, in others they were more practical. Some, such as the fifth-centuryBCE so-called "Presocratic philosopher" Parmenides, thought that one shouldrely on reason alone to get to the truth. Sometimes that led to highly counterintuitive conclusions. On the basis of an argument that started from the statementthat "it is and it cannot not be", Parmenides himself denied both change andplurality. But when that happened, the response was not to say that since changeand plurality are obvious facts of empirical experience, something must have gonewrong with the argument, but rather to insist that our senses deceive us. Againstthat, the line that Aristotle, for example, took was that the job of the philosopheris to explain the phenomena. That does not mean accepting them at face value, formany common assumptions will, on reflection, need to be revised: one examplewas the idea that the earth is flat. However, he did maintain that it is absurd todeny change - not that its reality can be demonstrated, since there is no premissmore evident than the conclusion from which that conclusion could be shown. Atthe same time while there are considerable recurrent interests in epistemologicalor foundational problems - on the criterion of truth, as they said - we haveremarked that the Sceptics undermined both reason and perception, showing apurely negative interest in that traditional problem.Compared with most modern philosophical tends, the two most importantpoints about much Greek philosophy may lie in the following. First, there is thesense of the value of philosophy as a guide to happiness or as providing the basisfor a form of life: many philosophers held, indeed, that it was an essentialcomponent of happiness. Secondly there is a recognition - on the part of manythinkers - of the need for what we should call scientific knowledge as part of"philosophy", where we should distinguish that as belonging, precisely, to sciencerather than to philosophy. ,To conclude this first part of my paper. What the Greeks invented, when theyintroduced the vocabulary of "philosophers" and "philosophies", was not a singlewell-defined discipline, but rather a whole congeries of them. They all had veryvarying fortunes in terms of their influence on subsequent European thought,where at certain times and places theology came to replace dialectic ormetaphysics as the supreme discipline and where, for some, philosophy wascontrasted with that theology, while for others it served as its handmaid. Moreover

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most of those ancient Greek studies exhibited some similarity to, though none hada perfect correspondence with, any specific modern interpretation of whatphilosophy should consist in.I shall use these observations concerning Greek philosophy to comment, now,on the interests, aims and methods of Chinese thinkers, over whom rages theargument, discussed in the papers in this collection, as to whether or in what senseit is valid to talk of Chinese "philosophy". I shall argue that that is a question ofsubsidiary interest, and one that may distract the historian. Obviously we have toproceed with special caution since their Chinese - actors'- categories differappreciably from those I have just been discussing from ancient Greece. Asseveral contributors point out, the term for "philosophy" in modern Chinese,zhexue, is a borrowing from Japanese where those two graphs were used totranslate the European term.In classical Chinese - and I shall be mostly concerned with the period downto the end of the Han - the most general term for learning was xue. Two importantterms used at times for the learned were shi and boshi, but in both cases there aresignificant shifts in their senses and references, as Sivin has recently shown(Lloyd and Sivin, 2002, p. 17f and 27). To quote his analysis, "in the eighthcentury BC [shi] referred to the lower strata of hereditary aristocrats entitled tobear arms... As wars wiped out state after state, and ruling families and powerfulrivals struggled within states, the losers lost their status. [Shi] came to designateall sorts of wellborn men, no longer bred to fight, no longer heirs to power,supporting themselves by official employment, patronage and other pursuits thatrequired literacy or other expertise". By 100 BCE, shi "were likely to belandowners, wellborn but seldom titled and usually literate..." By 200 CE shi"tended to come from wealthy families (now wellborn by definition) and to beeducated in the classics". Analogously, boshi (scholars of great learning) the mostusual title for learned scholars, was "originally a label for broadly learned ritualand political consultants, who until the mid-third century [BCE] were not regularofficials and until the late second century [BCE] generally had no teaching duties"(cf. Zufferey, 1998).

To this we can add other widely used terms. Among the "guests", ke, whomthe rulers and ministers of the Warring States kingdoms gathered in their courtswere "literary scholars", wen xue, and "itinerant advisers", you shui. Those are thewords used of the circle of literati whom King Xuan of Qi gathered "below the Ji"gate, among whom our sources note the presence at different times of Zou Yanand Xunzi2. Confucius himself, much earlier, can be said both to have cultivatedliterary scholarship and to have travelled from state to state looking for a rulerworthy of his advice.Modern scholarship has been preoccupied with the relations between the"hundred schools", baijia, and especially between the six main such groups whofigure in Sima Tan's famous classification in Shiji 130. It has, however, onlyrecently been pointed out, by Csikszentmihalyi and Nylan (2003), that thataccount is idiosyncratic in shifting the emphasis from persons to convictions. He154


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names Mozi, for sure, but the other five groups comprise four abstractions(yinyang, the law, names and the dao itself) together with the ru. That term hasusually been translated "Confucian" though it sometimes suggests scholars ingeneral, regardless of affiliation, and it can on occasion be used with pejorativeundertones of pedantry (Sivin in Lloyd and Sivin, 2002 : 23). The ru werecertainly not a coherent single group with a single set of doctrines (Cheng, 2001).Those who express their admiration for Confucius were certainly capable ofcriticising others who had done the same before them, as when Xunzi castigatesZisi and Mencius themselves, as well as others such as Mo Di and Hui Shi (Xunzi6). But in the preoccupation with drawing up allegiances and groupings, betweenand within the ru, the Mohists, the School of Law, that of Names and the like,modern scholars have paid less attention to points of similarity between them.Admittedly when the dao is spoken of in this context, that may be less informativethan it might be. Even though the goal is often, even usually, said to be that offollowing the dao, what that comprises and how to go about it are matters ofconsiderable disagreement. Most represent it, however, not as a matter ofunderstanding some theory or doctrine, so much as one of embodying principlesfor living.But if we turn to that account that Sima Tan gives of the various intellectualtendencies as he describes them, he introduces them as all sharing an interest ingood government (zhi). Similarly Zhuangzi 33 says that all the individuals andgroups it mentions had grasped some of the art or tradition of the way (dao shu),though none had it all - and the result is great confusion (luan) in the world. Againin Xunzi 6 considerable emphasis is put on securing the welfare of all underheaven, and eliminating the harm done by the perverse persuaders of the presentday - and the disorder (luan again) that their teaching leads to.From the Spring and Autumn period through to the end of the Han andonwards, one of the key interests that many prominent teachers share is, precisely,that of offering advice on good government, on how to achieve order, avoiddisorder and secure the welfare of all under heaven. They have a duty, indeed, toremonstrate with rulers if they step out of line and jeopardise that goal and manyadvisers paid a high price, some losing their lives, in the process. One strikingfeature of the Chinese experience, when contrasted with the Greek, is the largenumber of intellectuals who either held high office themselves or saw advisingrulers as one of their chief roles. Apart from the case of Confucius, already noted,both Mencius and Xunzi are often represented as in audience with rulers. TheMohists set out to make themselves useful to rulers by becoming specialists indefensive warfare. Among those who acquired the label of the school of names,Hui Shi served as a minister and composed a law code for the King of Wei in thefourth century, and even Gongsun Long is said in our sources to have beenconcerned - like more or less everyone else


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learning, the Lushi chunqiu, Lii Buwei, was of course prime minister to the manwho was to become Qin Shi Huang Di. A second summa, around a century later,was put together under the auspices of Liu An, king of Huainan.Of course there are important exceptions, men who declined office (as isreported of Zhuangzi) or who (like Wang Chong) retired from an unsuccessfulofficial career to compose their works more or less as recluses. Yet it is strikingthat wu wei was not just a policy recommended to private persons, to attain thedao: it is adapted to apply to rulers, especially in such texts as Zhuangzi 13 andHuainanzi IX , la and 22b and XPV, 9a , but also in Lunyu 15 and even in adifferent guise in Han Feizi 8. In such contexts the chief point was often that theruler should distance himself from the hands-on day-to-day business ofgovernment, delegating that to ministers and leading by example.Looked at from a Hellenist's perspective there are certain distinctive featuresabout the ambitions and teaching of prominent members of the Chinese literateelite. In questions to do with politics, for example, they were far less concernedwith the analysis of the ideal constitution, than with identifying the factors thatcan ensure order and good government. Yet it is abundantly clear that in areas ofwhat we should call political thought, they developed sophisticated positions. Thesame is true of moral philosophy, where there was the famous long-running debateon whether human nature is good, bad or indifferent, that involved Gaozi,Mencius and Xunzi. But if it is surely obvious that we can exemplify moral andpolitical philosophical interests in China just as in ancient Greece, that should notdistract us from pursuing the further, maybe more important, question ofinvestigating their distinctive modalities - by asking what they were for in theviews of different thinkers in either civilisation. In that regard we may point to acloser relationship between precept and practice in some Chinese than in someGreek writers.Similar reflections apply also to the evidence for Chinese inquiries in suchareas as the relationship between words and things, in the problem of the criteriafor knowledge, and in reasoning itself. In the last two instances, especially, thelacunose nature of our evidence for Mohist thought is a major handicap. On thebasis of the extant sources we have to say that Chinese interests in epistemologicalquestions appear rather limited - which may be connected with the manner inwhich debates were conducted and face to face confrontations generally avoided.Yet issues to do with the justification of beliefs are raised from time to time. Thetopic of consistency was discussed not just via the famous example ofimpenetrable shields and unstoppable lances3, but also via the topic of bei("inconsistency"). While there is no interest, in our extant classical Chinesesources, in formal logic as such, there are intriguing discussions of the techniquesof persuasion, as in the Shuo nan chapter of Han Feizi. Where the relationshipbetween words and things is concerned, it is well known that the form the Chineseinterest took there, in Lunyu, Xunzi and many other texts, was in ensuring thatsocial roles and statuses are correct. The moral is surely clear: it is less importantto scour the sources to see whether there is a Chinese interest in what may be156


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called logic, than to examine precisely what form that interest took.Many more examples could be given, but I trust that enough material has beenpassed under review to substantiate two modest general conclusions. First just asdifferent Greek thinkers exhibit different degrees, and modalities, of interest in theareas we should call ethics and politics, language and logic, epistemology,ontology and cosmology, so too in China different thinkers from Confuciusonwards developed similarly divergent interests. In that regard it is essential notto lose sight of what in either civilisation, different types of investigation wereundertaken for, how they relate to strategic concepts of the good life and how theywere integrated into views of what a good teacher should teach.Secondly most areas of Greek philosophia are represented somewhere in theevidence we have for extant Chinese speculative thought, though, unsurprisingly,the intensity with which certain problems were investigated varies as betweenGreece (taken as a whole) and ancient China (taken as a whole). More interest isshown in foundational questions, in epistemology and formal logic, in ancientGreece. Conversely in China we should say there is a more concentrated focusthan there ever was in Greece on what is needed to secure the welfare of all underheaven. In both cases why that should be so poses interesting problems for thehistorian: no doubt such differences reflect, and are themselves reflected in,differences in the underlying social and political conditions of each ancientsociety and in the institutions within which the intellectual leaders worked4.However, if these points are accepted, then as a historian I should stand by myjudgement that the question of the validity of attaching the label "philosopher" toChinese thinkers is secondary to the task of analysing in detail how they saw theaims and purposes of their activities and investigations, the goals they setthemselves and the methods they thought appropriate to achieving them. Whenwe undertake that task for the ancient Greeks, the picture that emerges is aninterestingly complex one. We should not expect the situation to be any simplerin a society whose map of intellectual endeavours did not depend on the group ofterms that stand as the distant origin of our own heterogeneous views ofphilosophy.

Notes1. The chapter entitled "the pluralism of philosophical traditions" in my recently publishedbook The Delusions oflnvulnerablity goes in greater detail into many of the issues I discussin this article.2. Sivin 1995 showed that it is misleading to speak of the Jixia "Academy", if that suggeststhat the scholars involved had a teaching function.3. One version of this story appears in Han Feizi 36: cf. Harbsmeier, 1998 : 215ff.4. Lloyd and Sivin (2002) introduced the term "cultural manifold" to capture the two-wayinteraction between the leading ideas proposed by thinkers and the social contexts in whichthey worked.

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Geoffrey Lloyd

ReferencesCheng, A., "What did it mean to be a ru in Han times?", Asia Major 14 , 2001, p. 101-18.Csikszentmihalyi, M. and Nylan, M., "Constructing Lineages and Inventing TraditionsThrough Exemplary Figures in Early China", T'oung Poo 89, 2003, p. 59-99.Harbsmher, C, Science and Civilisation in China VII. 1 : Language and Logic, Cambridge,1998.Lloyd, G.E.R., Th e Delusions of Invulnerability, London, 2005.Lloyd, G.E.R. and Sivin, N. The Way and the Word, New Haven, 2002.Sivin, N., The Myth of the Naturalists", in Medicine, Philosophy and Religion in Ancient China,chapter IV, Aldershot, 1995.Too, Yun Lee, Th e Rhetoric of Identity in Isocrates, Cambridge, 1995.Zufeerey, N., "rudits et lettrs au dbut de la dynastie Han", Asiatische Studien 52, 1998,p. 915-65.

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