CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT DIALOGUE (1.3) REPLIES TO BRONS AND MOU ON WANG CHONG AND PLURALISM

I would first like to thank Lajos Brons and Bo Mou for their thoughtful and detailed comments and criticisms on my work on Wang Chong, and on Wang Chong as a theorist in general. Wang has not received the attention he deserves from philosophers, and I am glad to see this step forward in the pages of Comparative Philosophy. This is a long overdue conversation. The philosophical investigation of Wang Chong’s work is sorely needed, and already we see in this engagement some of the possible fruits of this investigation. I will focus my comments on responding to a few of the very insightful comments and criticisms of Brons and Mou. Since their remarks are included in this issue of Comparative Philosophy, I will for the most part allow them to speak for themselves, and refrain from reconstructing their positions, instead focusing on response. 1. A Brief Methodological Note My own methodological considerations when constructing interpretations are textual and conceptual. While there are numerous methods of interpretation in the history of philosophy, and even more in comparative philosophy, I tend to interpret figures in the history of philosophy (whether Chinese, Western, Maya, or other) using these two considerations. The textual question is this: how can we make sense of a text in the most charitable way possible, given conceptions of rationality, consistency, and justification that the authors and people in their time would have found plausible? This may be somewhat problematic, given that we have to simply assume that the thinkers who wrote the text(s) in question held certain conceptions of rationality, etc. where they are unclear from the historical context. Thus any interpretation comes with an implicit conditional caveat: if thinker x shared my/our conceptions of rationality, consistency, etc, then this interpretation can explain what is written i