Beyond the Troubled Water of Shifei

<p><b>Offers the first focused study of the </b><b><i>shifei</i></b><b> debates of the Warring States period in ancient China and challenges the imposition of Western conceptual categories onto these debates.</b></p><p>In recent decades a growing concern in studies in Chinese intellectual history is that Chinese classics have been forced into systems of classification prevalent in Western philosophy and thus imperceptibly transformed into examples that echo Western philosophy. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel offer a methodology to counter this approach and illustrate their method by carrying out a transcultural inquiry into the complexities involved in understanding <i>shi</i> and <i>fei</i> and their cognate phrases in the Warring States texts the <i>Zhuangzi</i> in particular. The authors discuss important features of Zhuangzi's stance with regard to language-meaning knowledge-doubt questioning equalizing and his well-known deconstruction of the discourse in ancient China on <i>shifei</i>. Ma and van Brakel suggest that <i>shi</i> and <i>fei</i> apply to both descriptive and prescriptive languages and do not presuppose any fact/value dichotomy and thus cannot be translated as either true/false or right/wrong. Instead <i>shi</i> and <i>fei</i> can be grasped in terms of a pre-philosophical notion of fitting. Ma and van Brakel also highlight Zhuangzi's idea of walking-two-roads as the most significant component of his stance. In addition they argue that all of Zhuangzi's positive recommendations are presented in a language whose meaning is not fixed and that every stance he is committed to remains subject to fundamental questioning as a way of life.</p>