jeeloo liu THE STATUS OF COSMIC PRINCIPLE (LI) IN NEO-CONFUCIAN METAPHYSICS

In this article, I attempt to make use of Western metaphysical notions to explicate the cosmological variances in Chinese philosophical thinking, with specific reference to the debates among the NeoConfucian thinkers. While I do not presume and argue that Chinese philosophers dealt with the same Western issues, I do believe that a comparative study of this nature can point to a new direction of thinking concerning metaphysical pondering in Neo-Confucianism. This article is divided into three parts. In Part I, I employ Robert Nozick’s notion of natural cosmic state to analyze the fundamental difference between the Confucian and Daoist cosmologies. Even though this notion of natural cosmic state has no comparable match in Chinese philosophy, it may serve as an analytic and explanatory device for our comparative study of Chinese cosmology. In Part II, I employ Nicholas Rescher’s distinction between “laws of nature” and “laws for nature” to analyze the debate on the status of cosmic principle (li) between Zhou Dunyi and Zhu Xi on the one hand, and Zhang Zai and Wang Fuzhi on the other. In Part III, I employ the notion of supervenience, as defined by Jaegwon Kim, to argue that in the debate on the status of cosmic principle, it is Zhang Zai and Wang Fuzhi’s view that better preserves the causal relevance of cosmic principle in a physicalistic universe. In light of the three notions borrowed from contemporary Western metaphysics, I hope to offer an analytic reconstruction of the age-old debate on the status of cosmic principle (li).