Literary Forms of Argument in Early China

Literary Forms of Argument in Early China explores formal approaches to the study of philosophical texts to present new methods for the analysis of pre-modern thought in China. Attempts made by Chinese thinkers to generate literary forms of philosophical reasoning have gone unrecognised within scholarship in China and the West. Drawing together the expertise of leading scholars of early Chinese textuality, this volume addresses this omission by examining the formal characteristics of an argument, the interrelationship between form and content, as well as patterned compositions and non-linear semantic utterances. With these comprehensive new readings, the volume makes a landmark contribution to the study of written thinking in early China.
Contributors include: Wim De Reu, Joachim Gentz, Christoph Harbsmeier, Martin Kern, Dirk Meyer, Michael Nylan, Andrew H. Plaks, David Schaberg, Rudolf G. Wagner.

Joachim Gentz, Ph.D. (1998), University of Heidelberg, is Chair of Chinese Philosophy and Religion at the University of Edinburgh. He has published a number of monographs and many articles on China, including Das Gongyang zhuan (2001) and Keywords Re-Oriented (2009).

Dirk Meyer, PhD. (2008), Leiden University, is Associate Professor of Chinese Philosophy, and Fellow of The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. He publishes on meaning production and the history of thought. His monograph, Philosophy on Bamboo, appeared with Brill in 2012.