Book Review

Balanced Discourses: A Bilingual Edition

Asselin, Mark Laurent

2005

Overview

Chapter eight, for example, \"An Examination of Disputation\" ..., not only exhibits trenchant criticism of the disputation of the School of Names (Mingjia ...), and reflects the prevailing sentiment of the late Han clerisy that the glib were want to use shallow and misleading disputation to secure favor and official position, but also offers still useful advice sure to appeal to readers today, e.g., \"Deriving pleasure from letting the other person complete what he has to say, and being skilled at bringing forth the intention behind the other person's words enables each discussant to achieve fully his wishes, and each interlocutor to understand what the other speaker is saying\" (p. 101). Makeham notes that Xu Can may not have titled the work himself, and that it may have been named by the author of Zhong lun's unsigned preface to mirror the quality of the essays rather than just their content, i.e., \"suggesting that the particular mode of expression common to the individual essays was itself ordered in accordance with the mode of ordering which the collection as a whole expounded\" (p. xl).

• Publisher: American Oriental Society
• Subject: Academic achievement / Bilingualism / Chinese languages / Discourses / Nonfiction / Philosophers / Philosophy / Pleasure / Reviews of Books