One longstanding criticism of Chinese thought is that is not truly “philosophical” because it lacks viable protocols of argumentation. Thus it qualifies at best as “wisdom”; Confucius, for example, might provide valuable guidance, or thoughtful epigrams to ponder, but nothing in the way of formal reasoning that would permit his audience to reconstruct and reconsider his arguments in any conceivable context. This criticism stands only if one accepts the premise that all argumentation must be deductive argumentation. (This claim does not require any unusual definition of “deduction”; the Aristotelian definition is as good as any.) For it is true that the most famous Chinese arguments tend to be non-deductive in nature. This paper will survey the types of non-deductive argumentation commonly found in Chinese philosophy. One of the most prolific types of non-deductive argumentation is appeal to example, and this, I contend, is the basis of the strong interest in anecdotes as a genre of philosophical literature from the Springs and Autumns at least through the Six Dynasties. There are important examples of deductive argumentation as well, which will be briefly reviewed. Whether these observations are sufficient to rescue Chinese thought from the wilderness of “wisdom” and enshrine it in the halls of “philosophy” will be left for the reader to decide, but a conception of “philosophy” that can account for Chinese thought is naturally more interesting than one that cannot.

Paul R. Goldin is Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. His main research focus is Warring States China (ca. 5th-3rd centuries B.C.), with interdisciplinary interests in history,archaeology, art history, literature, philosophy, and religion. He is the author of Confucianism (2011), After Confucius: Studies in Early Chinese Philosophy (2005), The Culture of Sex in Ancient China (2002), and Rituals of the Way: The Philosophy of Xunzi (1999). In addition, he has edited or co-edited the Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Han Fei (2012), the Hawai’i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture (2005), and the new edition of R.H. van Gulik’s Sexual Life in Ancient China (2003).