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, ExtrmeOccident. 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

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 assez diffrents - 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 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. 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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Extrme-Orient, Extrme-Occident 27 - 2005

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

Geoffrey Lloyd

The question of whether the ancient Chinese had "philosophy" is just one of a series of issues that revolve around the applicability or otherwise of the major categories 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. Other examples, 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 our guard, since it is obvious that there have been major changes in what that study covers 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 different traditions in the investigations of numbers, shapes and so on, carried on in different cultures and at different periods, it is important not to underestimate the different foci of interests in those traditions, the different ways in which the key problems have been defined and the different methods used to tackle them. All the terms cited in quotation marks in my last paragraph stem from Greek or Latin words. But first that has not meant that their subsequent fortunes in the various vernacular European languages that adopted them have been anything like uniform. 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 study philosophy at Universities in the UK learn it from scratch, and what they are taught is still mainly analytic philosophy in the style of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, rather than, say, metaphysics. To be auto biographical for a moment, when I received my own philosophical formation in Cambridge - admittedly some 50 years ago now - almost no attention was paid to Heidegger, to Nietzsche, even to Hegel. Phenomenology was totally ignored, and existentialism only figured in the lectures offered by the Faculty responsible for teaching English literature. The history of philosophy was sidelined as of merely antiquarian interest: indeed it was not taught as such at all in what was called the Faculty of Moral Sciences. When I went on my first lecture tour of the

Geoffrey Lloyd United States in the 60s, I was taken aback at the very considerable differences in the ways in which philosophy was taught in different Universities, reflecting the particular interests of the professors. The dominant philosophical culture might be anything from what was called "continental" idealism, to logical positivism, and it is notorious that in some Universities it was even necessary to set up separate Departments to accommodate what the squabbling factions saw as incompatible interpretations of "philosophy". A different parochialism existed meanwhile in France, 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 MerleauPonty north of the English Channel. It is true that there have been encouraging signs, recently, of a greater readiness among many who consider themselves professional philosophers in different countries, not just to read one another's work, but to accept the legitimacy of a diversity of philosophical traditions. Yet the famous recent controversy - one cannot call it a debate - between Derrida and Searle illustrates that there remain fundamental differences of view about what philosophy is and how 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 just of deconstructionism, but also of phenomenology, existentialism, logical positivism, Marxism. From some points of view, therefore, matters were simpler in the ancient world. But if my first point has been to insist on the complexity and divergence in what may pass as "philosophy" today, my next task is to illustrate some of the discrepancies that already existed when the Greeks first started talking about "philosophising". The terms philosophia, philosophein, philosophos do not occur with any great frequency in our extant texts before Plato and their origins are obscure. Cicero (Tusculans V, 3) and Diogenes Laertius (I, 12) associate their introduction with Pythagoras, but that can hardly be said to be certain. It is striking that in two of our earliest extant texts, they carry pejorative undertones. A fragment of Heraclitus (35) says that "men who are philosophai must be inquirers (historas) into many things indeed". It is possible, but again not certain, that Heraclitus had Pythagoras, among others, in mind. In another fragment (129) the authenticity of which has, however, been called into question, Heraclitus says that "Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, engaged in inquiry (histori) most of all men" and it goes on to 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 he calls "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 definitely criticised when he is named with several others in another fragment (40) as examples of the dictum that "much learning" (polymathi again) "does not teach sense. Otherwise", Heraclitus goes on, "it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus". It says a lot about the 150

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heterogeneity of the categories of learning at the time that Pythagoras is here lumped 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 composed for symposia. The second text that shows how philosophie could be no term of praise comes in the Hippocratic treatise On Ancient Medicine, of uncertain date but probably of the early 4th century BCE. In chapter 20 this writer criticises certain doctors and "sophists" for holding that medicine depends on knowing about the elemental constituents of the body. But that, the writer says, takes you into philosophie, a word he evidently feels to be sufficiently unfamiliar that he needs to gloss it. He explains by referring to the kind of studies that Empedocles engaged in and others who 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 the outset of the treatise he had been attacking those who based their medical theories and practices on arbitrary assumptions, hupotheseis, such as "the hot" "the cold" "the wet" "the dry" or "anything else they fancy". Medicine, he insists, is a techn, an art or skill, that must be based on long experience. As in Heraclitus 'use of philosophos, the Hippocratic writer's idea of what he calls philosophie does not carry the positive associations of a noble human intellectual endeavour, but the negative ones, of idle speculation. Elsewhere in our pre-Platonic texts, this family of terms refers not so much to any intellectual discipline, as to intellectual curiosity in general. Herodotus (1, 30) speaks of Solon "philosophising" when he travelled the world to find out about other countries. In the funeral speech that Thucydides (II, 46) puts into the mouth of Pericles, he says that the Athenians "philosophise without weakness", by which he certainly does not mean that they engage in such a study as epistemology, nor even in the speculative thought criticised in On Ancient Medicine, nor even in ethics, but rather that they have a penchant for argument and rational explanation. Before Plato, in fact, philosophia and philosophein have very wide semantic ranges 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 with Socrates. The Delphic oracle is reported to have said that no human is wiser than Socrates, but Plato has Socrates interpret that not in terms of his superior knowledge, but rather in his realisation of his own ignorance. The one thing he could be said to know was precisely that he knew nothing. So he was no wise man, sophos, who could happily be associated with the traditional wise men of ancient 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 whereas Socrates' own sphere of activity was quite informal - since he could and did engage in dialectic with anyone he chanced to meet - Plato founded his Academy and in the Republic sketched out an ideal programme of education for those whom he hoped to turn into "philosopher-kings". Evidently in Plato "dialectic" was no longer mere "conversation" (its root meaning) but the supreme study that the 151

Geoffrey Lloyd budding philosopher-kings will only be allowed to undertake after a rigorous training in the mathematical disciplines. The content of that Platonic study was the investigation of transcendent Forms, the true reality, ontology in other words, or what much later came to be called "metaphysics". While Plato's subsequent influence on the conception of "philosophy" was immense, 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 also taught what he also called "philosophy", but that was not a matter of a meta physical inquiry leading to a grasp of transcendent Forms, but rather of acquiring the skills or wisdom that the trained orator will exhibit in discussion, especially of practical affairs (see Too, 1995). While Plato's pupil Aristotle agreed with him in rating the life devoted to "philosophy" as supreme, his ontology dictated a different conception of the goal and of how to reach it. Explanation was still by way 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 is imperative. 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 and others. But this did nothing to standardise what "philosophy" should consist in, but rather institutionalised philosophical pluralism. Each group offered its distinctive answers to the fundamental questions, and more than that, proposed divergent 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 to be essential to secure peace of mind or freedom from anxiety, ataraxia. It is true that the positive - or dogmatic - Hellenistic schools, especially both Stoics and Epicureans, shared the two views first that ethics was the most important area of philosophy and secondly that that depended, at least up to a certain point, first on having the correct views on the criterion of truth, on logic and epistemology in other words, and secondly on having a proper understanding of "physics", covering both the fundamental constitution of physical objects and the explanations of particular phenomena. But while both Stoics and Epicureans held that having positive answers to what we should call the basic scientific questions was an essential component of "philosophy", the Sceptics took a very different line. They refused to "dogmatise" about underlying reality or hidden causes. For every dogmatic view suggesting one theory on such subjects there was another of equal strength supporting its contradictory (the argument from isostheneia). But if these arguments were of equal strength, they were of equal weakness. So the Sceptics 'recommendation was to suspend judgement. But this again was no mere "academic" position (in our sense) but a recipe for living. They did not set out to find freedom from anxiety (ataraxia), but that desirable state supervened on their inquiry. It resulted from their realisation that there were no positive answers to those metaphysical questions to be had. Yet thereby they 152

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created a very different image of the content and methods of "philosophy" from that of their dogmatist opponents. Meanwhile the general use of the term philosophos continued, where it can be applied to anyone who had some claim to be considered wise or a lover of wisdom, irrespective of whether that person put forward particular proposals in such areas as "ethics", "logic" or "physics". Given the dazzling variety of philosophical schools or tendencies in ancient Greece, it is naturally very difficult to arrive at any single valid general characterisation concerning what "philosophy" stood for, even among those who professed to teach it, let alone for the public at large. It stood, indeed, for different things for different individuals. If in some writers the interests were more theoretical, in others they were more practical. Some, such as the fifth-century BCE so-called "Presocratic philosopher" Parmenides, thought that one should rely on reason alone to get to the truth. Sometimes that led to highly counteri ntuitive conclusions. On the basis of an argument that started from the statement that "it is and it cannot not be", Parmenides himself denied both change and plurality. But when that happened, the response was not to say that since change and plurality are obvious facts of empirical experience, something must have gone wrong with the argument, but rather to insist that our senses deceive us. Against that, the line that Aristotle, for example, took was that the job of the philosopher is to explain the phenomena. That does not mean accepting them at face value, for many common assumptions will, on reflection, need to be revised: one example was the idea that the earth is flat. However, he did maintain that it is absurd to deny change - not that its reality can be demonstrated, since there is no premiss more evident than the conclusion from which that conclusion could be shown. At the same time while there are considerable recurrent interests in epistemological or foundational problems - on the criterion of truth, as they said - we have remarked that the Sceptics undermined both reason and perception, showing a purely negative interest in that traditional problem. Compared with most modern philosophical tends, the two most important points about much Greek philosophy may lie in the following. First, there is the sense of the value of philosophy as a guide to happiness or as providing the basis for a form of life: many philosophers held, indeed, that it was an essential component of happiness. Secondly there is a recognition - on the part of many thinkers - of the need for what we should call scientific knowledge as part of "philosophy", where we should distinguish that as belonging, precisely, to science rather than to philosophy. , To conclude this first part of my paper. What the Greeks invented, when they introduced the vocabulary of "philosophers" and "philosophies", was not a single well-defined discipline, but rather a whole congeries of them. They all had very varying fortunes in terms of their influence on subsequent European thought, where at certain times and places theology came to replace dialectic or metaphysics as the supreme discipline and where, for some, philosophy was contrasted with that theology, while for others it served as its handmaid. Moreover 153

Geoffrey Lloyd most of those ancient Greek studies exhibited some similarity to, though none had a perfect correspondence with, any specific modern interpretation of what philosophy 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 the argument, discussed in the papers in this collection, as to whether or in what sense it is valid to talk of Chinese "philosophy". I shall argue that that is a question of subsidiary interest, and one that may distract the historian. Obviously we have to proceed with special caution since their Chinese - actors'- categories differ appreciably from those I have just been discussing from ancient Greece. As several contributors point out, the term for "philosophy" in modern Chinese, zhexue, is a borrowing from Japanese where those two graphs were used to translate the European term. In classical Chinese - and I shall be mostly concerned with the period down to the end of the Han - the most general term for learning was xue. Two important terms used at times for the learned were shi and boshi, but in both cases there are significant 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 eighth century BC [shi] referred to the lower strata of hereditary aristocrats entitled to bear arms... As wars wiped out state after state, and ruling families and powerful rivals struggled within states, the losers lost their status. [Shi] came to designate all sorts of wellborn men, no longer bred to fight, no longer heirs to power, supporting themselves by official employment, patronage and other pursuits that required literacy or other expertise". By 100 BCE, shi "were likely to be landowners, wellborn but seldom titled and usually literate..." By 200 CE shi "tended to come from wealthy families (now wellborn by definition) and to be educated in the classics". Analogously, boshi (scholars of great learning) the most usual title for learned scholars, was "originally a label for broadly learned ritual and political consultants, who until the mid-third century [BCE] were not regular officials 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, whom the rulers and ministers of the Warring States kingdoms gathered in their courts were "literary scholars", wen xue, and "itinerant advisers", you shui. Those are the words 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 Yan and Xunzi2. Confucius himself, much earlier, can be said both to have cultivated literary scholarship and to have travelled from state to state looking for a ruler worthy of his advice. Modern scholarship has been preoccupied with the relations between the "hundred schools", baijia, and especially between the six main such groups who figure in Sima Tan's famous classification in Shiji 130. It has, however, only recently been pointed out, by Csikszentmihalyi and Nylan (2003), that that account is idiosyncratic in shifting the emphasis from persons to convictions. He 154

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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 has usually been translated "Confucian" though it sometimes suggests scholars in general, regardless of affiliation, and it can on occasion be used with pejorative undertones of pedantry (Sivin in Lloyd and Sivin, 2002 : 23). The ru were certainly not a coherent single group with a single set of doctrines (Cheng, 2001). Those who express their admiration for Confucius were certainly capable of criticising others who had done the same before them, as when Xunzi castigates Zisi and Mencius themselves, as well as others such as Mo Di and Hui Shi (Xunzi 6). But in the preoccupation with drawing up allegiances and groupings, between and 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 informative than it might be. Even though the goal is often, even usually, said to be that of following the dao, what that comprises and how to go about it are matters of considerable disagreement. Most represent it, however, not as a matter of understanding some theory or doctrine, so much as one of embodying principles for living. But if we turn to that account that Sima Tan gives of the various intellectual tendencies as he describes them, he introduces them as all sharing an interest in good government (zhi). Similarly Zhuangzi 33 says that all the individuals and groups 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. Again in Xunzi 6 considerable emphasis is put on securing the welfare of all under heaven, and eliminating the harm done by the perverse persuaders of the present day - and the disorder (luan again) that their teaching leads to. From the Spring and Autumn period through to the end of the Han and onwards, one of the key interests that many prominent teachers share is, precisely, that of offering advice on good government, on how to achieve order, avoid disorder and secure the welfare of all under heaven. They have a duty, indeed, to remonstrate with rulers if they step out of line and jeopardise that goal and many advisers paid a high price, some losing their lives, in the process. One striking feature of the Chinese experience, when contrasted with the Greek, is the large number of intellectuals who either held high office themselves or saw advising rulers 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. The Mohists set out to make themselves useful to rulers by becoming specialists in defensive 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 the fourth century, and even Gongsun Long is said in our sources to have been concerned - like more or less everyone else <* with good government. The "Legalist" Han Fei was a nobleman and adviser to kings. The pattern continues during and after the unification. The compiler of the first great "summa" of 155

Geoffrey Lloyd learning, the Lushi chunqiu, Lii Buwei, was of course prime minister to the man who 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 is reported of Zhuangzi) or who (like Wang Chong) retired from an unsuccessful official career to compose their works more or less as recluses. Yet it is striking that wu wei was not just a policy recommended to private persons, to attain the dao: it is adapted to apply to rulers, especially in such texts as Zhuangzi 13 and Huainanzi IX, la and 22b and XPV, 9a, but also in Lunyu 15 and even in a different guise in Han Feizi 8. In such contexts the chief point was often that the ruler should distance himself from the hands-on day-to-day business of government, delegating that to ministers and leading by example. Looked at from a Hellenist's perspective there are certain distinctive features about the ambitions and teaching of prominent members of the Chinese literate elite. In questions to do with politics, for example, they were far less concerned with the analysis of the ideal constitution, than with identifying the factors that can ensure order and good government. Yet it is abundantly clear that in areas of what we should call political thought, they developed sophisticated positions. The same is true of moral philosophy, where there was the famous long-running debate on 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 and political philosophical interests in China just as in ancient Greece, that should not distract us from pursuing the further, maybe more important, question of investigating their distinctive modalities - by asking what they were for in the views of different thinkers in either civilisation. In that regard we may point to a closer relationship between precept and practice in some Chinese than in some Greek writers. Similar reflections apply also to the evidence for Chinese inquiries in such areas as the relationship between words and things, in the problem of the criteria for knowledge, and in reasoning itself. In the last two instances, especially, the lacunose nature of our evidence for Mohist thought is a major handicap. On the basis of the extant sources we have to say that Chinese interests in epistemological questions appear rather limited - which may be connected with the manner in which 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. The topic of consistency was discussed not just via the famous example of impenetrable shields and unstoppable lances3, but also via the topic of bei ("inconsistency"). While there is no interest, in our extant classical Chinese sources, in formal logic as such, there are intriguing discussions of the techniques of persuasion, as in the Shuo nan chapter of Han Feizi. Where the relationship between words and things is concerned, it is well known that the form the Chinese interest took there, in Lunyu, Xunzi and many other texts, was in ensuring that social roles and statuses are correct. The moral is surely clear: it is less important to scour the sources to see whether there is a Chinese interest in what may be 156

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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 been passed under review to substantiate two modest general conclusions. First just as different Greek thinkers exhibit different degrees, and modalities, of interest in the areas we should call ethics and politics, language and logic, epistemology, ontology and cosmology, so too in China different thinkers from Confucius onwards developed similarly divergent interests. In that regard it is essential not to lose sight of what in either civilisation, different types of investigation were undertaken for, how they relate to strategic concepts of the good life and how they were integrated into views of what a good teacher should teach. Secondly most areas of Greek philosophia are represented somewhere in the evidence we have for extant Chinese speculative thought, though, unsurprisingly, the intensity with which certain problems were investigated varies as between Greece (taken as a whole) and ancient China (taken as a whole). More interest is shown in foundational questions, in epistemology and formal logic, in ancient Greece. Conversely in China we should say there is a more concentrated focus than there ever was in Greece on what is needed to secure the welfare of all under heaven. In both cases why that should be so poses interesting problems for the historian: no doubt such differences reflect, and are themselves reflected in, differences in the underlying social and political conditions of each ancient society and in the institutions within which the intellectual leaders worked4. However, if these points are accepted, then as a historian I should stand by my judgement that the question of the validity of attaching the label "philosopher" to Chinese thinkers is secondary to the task of analysing in detail how they saw the aims and purposes of their activities and investigations, the goals they set themselves and the methods they thought appropriate to achieving them. When we undertake that task for the ancient Greeks, the picture that emerges is an interestingly complex one. We should not expect the situation to be any simpler in a society whose map of intellectual endeavours did not depend on the group of terms that stand as the distant origin of our own heterogeneous views of philosophy. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. The chapter entitled "the pluralism of philosophical traditions" in my recently published book The Delusions oflnvulnerablity goes in greater detail into many of the issues I discuss in this article. Sivin 1995 showed that it is misleading to speak of the Jixia "Academy", if that suggests that the scholars involved had a teaching function. One version of this story appears in Han Feizi 36: cf. Harbsmeier, 1998 : 215ff. Lloyd and Sivin (2002) introduced the term "cultural manifold" to capture the two-way interaction between the leading ideas proposed by thinkers and the social contexts in which they worked.

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Geoffrey Lloyd References Cheng, 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 Traditions Through 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., The 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, The 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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Glossary

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