Acknowledgments
As should be evident from the image on the cover, this volume is the product of an extended and enjoyable conversation amongst old friends. The image has been cropped from a much larger Qing-dynasty handscroll painting, entitled A Picture of a Hundred Philosophers (Bailao tu 百老圖), so that only a handful of the gathered philosophers are visible on the front of this book. While not claiming the mantle of these wise men, as editors we welcome the opportunity to acknowledge the debts we have incurred and thank the many friends and institutions whose advice and support has been indispensable, if not always visible, as this project has evolved from a vague hunch into a decade-long international collaboration, moving from Atlanta to Berlin to Heidelberg.
The initial idea took shape in casual discussions between Joachim, Ari, and Rui Magone over lunches at the Brick Store Pub in Decatur, Georgia. The question from which we started was as simple as it remains intricate: if pre-twentieth-century China had neither known nor felt the need for explicit logical theories, as Joachim had shown in his earlier book, how could the truth of any claim be validated or falsified? To answer this question, we soon agreed, we would need to recover the explicit and implicit standards of validity that late-imperial Chinese scholars relied on to construct, critique, and defend powerful arguments. But how could this be done? At first, we imagined a set of limited case studies examining, say, the criteria by which legal testimony was evaluated, how historical analogies gained their rhetorical force, or the standards according to which examination essays were ranked. However, we soon realized that the problem required much more comprehensive and collaborative treatment, as the epistemological and conceptual issues it raised were pertinent for our understanding of the most diverse realms of late imperial Chinese thought and discourse, from law, historiography, and education to canonical exegesis and literary criticism, to mathematics, medicine, and natural studies. This led us to embark on an essentially boundless project that would not have achieved liftoff without the sustained support of many colleagues and institutions.
The first step was to build a network of scholars who shared our passion for expanding the boundaries of the history of knowledge in premodern China. This was initially made possible by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, which agreed to support a research group devoted to our topic in 2009. Martin joined the project at this point and has carried the bulk of its work from the time it moved to Heidelberg later that same year. We are grateful for the exceptionally generous institutional, financial, and scholarly support we have received since then from the Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Cluster provided a congenial environment to test and develop our ideas as part of its Research Area on “Historicities and Heritage.” Ari, who enjoyed shuttling back and forth between Atlanta and Heidelberg for occasional visits to the Karl Jaspers Centre, is grateful to the Willson Center for Arts and Humanities at the University of Georgia for a Faculty Research Grant that funded his travels in summer 2016. And we are all indebted to Shupin Lang, who has provided unfailing logistical support for our project from the beginning.
Our first international workshop, Standards of Validity in Late Imperial China, was held at and funded by the Cluster on 27–28 April 2012. We would like to thank all of the participants who contributed papers and joined our discussion, including Iwo Amelung, Richard Davis, Hilde De Weerdt, Catherine Jami, Rui Magone, Naomi Standen, and Dominic Steavu. Thanks to a grant from the American Council for Learned Societies, with support from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, we were fortunate to fund and organize an international conference, also held in Heidelberg, on 4–6 October 2013. Although they ultimately did not contribute to the volume, we are grateful to Iwo Amelung, Rui Magone, Tian Miao, and Chiu Peng-sheng for presenting their research and sharing in three days of highly collegial conversations.
None of us would have imagined that it would take us almost six years to turn these conference papers into this volume. (Professional and familial responsibilities, and the vicissitudes of Germany’s academic funding model, interfered.) We are grateful to all of the contributors to this volume for their patience and hard work in revising their chapters as part of an evolving discussion, and to two anonymous readers for Brill, whose comments were instrumental in restructuring and reframing this volume for publication. At Brill, Albert Hoffstädt was the first to appreciate the potential of this book, and Patricia Radder expertly guided it through the editing and production process. We are grateful to Kelly Buttermore at ACLS for generous subvention of some of the volume’s production costs. Our thanks also go to Bruce Tindall for his attentive copyediting. And kudos to Matthias Arnold for his design assistance with the cover image.
As this volume gradually took its present form, the three of us enjoyed many enjoyable afternoons of cappuccinos at Café Rossi, Kaffee und Kuchen at Coffee Nerd, and summer evenings in the Biergarten at Essighaus. We would also like to thank our partners—Zhou Haipeng, ReLiang Tsang, and Xie Shuyue—who endured this madness for so long, and our children Patrick Kurtz and Sophie Levine-Tsang, who grew up in the meantime.
Joachim Kurtz, Ari Daniel Levine, and Martin Hofmann
02.02.2020