Essays on the Moral Philosophy of Mengzi

This volume joins an impressive series of collections of essays on classical Chinese thinkers, which have been consistently put together by Philip Ivanhoe and various collaborators: the collection on Zhuangzi (1996), Laozi (1999) and Xunzi (2000). The English-language scholarship of Mengzi (390–305 BCE) has flourished in recent years, and it is indeed high time for us to have such a splendid volume on Mengzi’s moral philosophy. This volume, edited by Xiusheng Liu and Ivanhoe, consists of eight essays. Three of them have been published before; the other five are published here for the first time. A. C. Graham’s and Irene Bloom’s essays are about Mengzi’s view on human nature; Liu’s essay is on Mengzi’s view on the relationship between moral judgment and motivation; David Nivison’s essay focuses on one major difference between Mengzi’s and Xunzi’s moral psychology; Xinyan Jiang’s essay is on Mengzi’s view on courage; and the last three essays by Eric Hutton, David Wong, and Ivanhoe focus on moral reasoning in the Mengzi. It is difficult to do justice to the richness of all the essays in this short review. Instead of trying to cover them all, I focus on the common themes that emerge from the book as a whole. The most striking feature of this volume is that most of the authors have adopted an analytic philosopher’s approach— they read Mengzi as a philosopher, and they aim to articulate and reconstruct Mengzi’s views and arguments as rigorously as possible. This is no easy task, given the fact that, unlike the Xunzi, which consists of treatise-like essays, the Mengzi is a collection of fragmentary remarks and compressed dialogues. The authors seem to have come up with two strategies to deal with this problem. The first is to cast a narrow net by applying their analytic skills to only a limited number of passages, sometimes focusing on just one elliptical passage (e.g. Liu’s essay is devoted to 6A4, Wong’s and Ivanhoe’s essays to 1A7). The second strategy is to make use of well-defined concepts from contemporary ethical theory to articulate Mengzi’s moral philosophy. Mengzi emerges from