The topic of this issue of Contemporary Chinese Thought is the authorship, annotations, and philosophical interpretation of the Wuxing and evidence of the thought of Zisi and Mencius in the Wuxing. Four of the essays translated here are by Chen Lai, formerly professor of Chinese philosophy at Peking University and now dean of the School of Traditional Chinese Learning at Tsinghua University. An essay by Xing Wen, of Dartmouth College, provides context for a proper understanding of the Wuxing and Chen (...) Lai's scholarship on the Wuxing. (shrink)

Since our visual perception of physical things essentially involves our identifying objects by their colours, any theory of visual perception must contain some account of the colours of things. The central problem with colour has to do with relating our normal, everyday colour perceptions to what science, i.e. physics, teaches us about physical objects and their qualities. Although we perceive colours as categorical surface properties of things, colour perceptions are explained by introducing physical properties like reflectance profiles or dispositions to (...) cause certain experiences in normal human perceivers. Hence, it seems as if colours as they are experienced by us have no place in the physical world, because they are fundamentally different from the properties which we ascribe to physical objects in scientific accounts of colour perceptions. This special issue on perspectives on colour perception presents new suggestions to solve to this major problem. (shrink)

Everyone knows that the investigation and transcription of characters directly determine the meaning of textual materials. As in the case of the Guodian Chu slips, the publication of the transcriptions of the Chu slips is the basis for scholars to understand and do research on the Guodian Chu slips. However, making public transcriptions of any type of excavated textual material will always stir up a broad range of controversy concerning issues in the investigation and transcription of characters. The significance of (...) some of these issues lies primarily in the nature of philology itself; but there are also problems that fundamentally affect the understanding of a whole text or a whole cache of textual material. This paper attempts to give a critical account of the paleographical issues and their significance, as seen in Guodian Chu slip research. (shrink)

Contemporary scholarship, such as Professor Li Xueqin's work on the formative stage of the "first classic," helps us better understand not only "the first of all Chinese classics," but also the philosophical and cultural continuum between the Shang and Zhou dynasties. By reexamining several perplexing issues, going from the authenticity of the Guicang to the interpretation of "King Wen of Zhou developed the Zhouyi," I argue that archaeological evidence is of critical importance in the study of the preclassics era.

The "Wanzhang" chapter in the Mencius has this famously quoted passage:1.