Powerful Arguments

Martin Hofmann, Ph.D. (2007) is Assistant Professor for East Asian Intellectual History at Heidelberg University’s Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies. He has mainly published on historical cartography, practices of argumentation, and the text-image relation in late imperial China. Joachim Kurtz, Ph.D. (2003), is Professor of Intellectual History at Heidelberg University. He is the author of The Discovery of Chinese Logic (Brill, 2011), and has published widely on circulations of knowledge between China and Europe. Ari Daniel Levine, Ph.D (2002) is Associate Professor of History at the University of Georgia. The author of Divided by a Common Language (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008), he is currently the Editor of the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies.

Contents



Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Notes on Contributors



Introduction: Toward a History of Argumentative Practice in Late Imperial China

 Martin Hofmann, Joachim Kurtz, and Ari Daniel Levine



Part 1: Comparison, Collation, Validation

 1 Historical and Political Arguments: Debates on the Veritable Records in the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644)

  Peter Ditmanson

 2 A Performance of Transparency: Discourses of Veracity and Practices of Verification in Li Tao’s Long Draft

  Ari Daniel Levine

 3 Learning with Metal and Stone: On the Discursive Formation of Song Epigraphy

  Jeffrey Moser



Part 2: Visualization, Demonstration, Calculation

 4 The Persuasive Power of Tu: A Case Study on Commentaries to the Book of Documents

  Martin Hofmann

 5 Inductive Arguments in the Midst of Smoke: “Proving” Rhetorically and Visually That Algorithms Work

  Andrea Bréard

 6 Keeping Your Ear to the Cosmos: Coherence as the Standard of Good Music in the Northern Song

  Ya Zuo

 7 The Textual Nature of Nature: Astronomical Debates in Eighteenth-Century China

  Ori Sela



Part 3: Verification, Evaluation, Authentication

 8 Identity Verification as a Standard of Validity in Late Imperial Civil Service Examinations

  John Williams

 9 Standards of Validity and Essay Grading in Early Qing Civil Service Examinations

  Li Yu虞莉

 10 Some Problems with Corpses: Standards of Validity in Qing Homicide Cases

  Matthew H. Sommer

 11 Value and Validity: Seeing through Silver in Late Imperial China

  Bruce Rusk



Part 4: Corroboration, Refutation, Presentation

 12 Philological Arguments as Religious Suasion: Liu Ning and His Study of Chinese Characters

  Pingyi Chu

 13 A Moral Verdict of Reasonable Doubts: Ouyi Zhixu’s Argumentative Strategies in the Collection of Refutations against Vicious Doctrines

  Manuel Sassmann

 14 Reasoning in Style: The Formation of “Logical Writing” in Late Qing China

  Joachim Kurtz



Index