I have been thinking about the philosophical issue of truth for more than two decades. It is one of several fascinating philosophical issues that motivated me to change my primary re ective interest to philosophy after receiving BS in mathem- ics in 1982. Some serious academic work in this connection started around the late eighties when I translated into Chinese a dozen of Donald Davidson’s representative essays on truth and meaning and when I assumed translator for Adam Morton who gave a series of lectures on the issue in Beijing (1988), which was co-sponsored by my then institution (Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Science). I have loved the issue both for its own sake (as one speci c major issue in the phil- ophy of language and metaphysics) and for the sake of its signi cant involvement in many philosophical issues in different subjects of philosophy. Having been attracted to the analytic approach, I was then interested in looking at the issue both from the points of view of classical Chinese philosophy and Marxist philosophy, two major styles or frameworks of doing philosophy during that time in China, and from the point of view of contemporary analytic philosophy, which was then less recognized in the Chinese philosophical circle.

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 book explains a distinctive pluralist account of truth, jointly-rooted perspectivism (‘JRP’ for short). This explanation unifies various representative while philosophically interesting truth-concern approaches in early Chinese philosophy on the basis of people’s pre-theoretic “way-things-are-capturing” understanding of truth. It explains how JRP provides effective interpretative resources to identify and explain one unifying line that runs through those distinct truth-concern approaches and how they can thus talk with and complement each other and contribute to the contemporary study of the issue of truth. In so doing, the book also engages with some distinct treatments in the modern study of Chinese philosophy. Through testing its explanatory power in effectively interpreting those representative truth-concern approaches in the Yi-Jing philosophy, Gongsun Long’s philosophy, Later Mohist philosophy, classical Confucianism and classical Daoism, JRP is also further justified and strengthened. Mou defends JRP as an original unifying pluralist account in the context of cross-tradition philosophical engagement, which can also effectively engage with other accounts of truth (including other types of pluralist accounts) in contemporary philosophy. The purpose of this book is dual: (1) it is to enhance our understanding and treatment of the truth concern as one strategic foundation of various movements of thought in classical Chinese philosophy that are intended to capture “how things are”; (2) on the other hand, it is to explore how the relevant resources in Chinese philosophy can contribute to the contemporary exploration of the philosophical issue of truth in philosophically interesting and engaging way.

This book examines different views on the concept of truth in early Chinese philosophy, and considers a variety of theories of truth in Chinese and comparative thought.

For too long, analytic philosophy discounted insights from the Chinese philosophical tradition. In the last decade or so, however, philosophers have begun to bring the insights of Chinese to bear on current philosophical issues. This volume brings together leading scholars from East and West who are working at the intersection of traditional Chinese philosophy and mainstream analytic philosophy. Their essays draw on the work of Chinese philosophers ranging from early Daoists and Confucians to twentieth-century Chinese thinkers, offering new perspectives on issues in moral psychology, political philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Taken together, these essays show that serious engagement with Chinese philosophy can not only enrich modern philosophical discussion but also shift the debate in a meaningful way. Each essay challenges a current position in the philosophical literature--including positions expressed by John Rawls, Peter Singer, Nel Noddings, W. V. Quine, and Harry Frankfurt. The topics include compassion as a developmental virtue, empathy, human worth and democracy, ethical self-restriction, epistemological naturalism, ideas of oneness, know-how, and action without agency. -- Inside jacket flap.

From the vantage point of doing philosophy of language comparatively, Philosophy of Language, Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy explores how reflective elaboration of some distinct features of Chinese and of relevant resources in Chinese philosophy and the development of philosophy of language can contribute to each other.

The definitive and essential collection of classic and new essays on analytic theories of truth, revised and updated, with seventeen new chapters. The question "What is truth?" is so philosophical that it can seem rhetorical. Yet truth matters, especially in a "post-truth" society in which lies are tolerated and facts are ignored. If we want to understand why truth matters, we first need to understand what it is. The Nature of Truth offers the definitive collection of classic and contemporary essays on analytic theories of truth. This second edition has been extensively revised and updated, incorporating both historically central readings on truth's nature as well as up-to-the-moment contemporary essays. Seventeen new chapters reflect the current trajectory of research on truth.