is the showpiece of our university: every freshman student is required to follow a general course on philosophy. But regardless of the ways in which this course may be considered general, the fact is that attention to non-Western cultures is absent throughout. The course is not titled "General Western Philosophy," and yet philosophy is, quite simply, a Western matter. This demands no further explanation; it is taken for granted. It should come as no surprise that China starts from an entirely different presupposition. Several philosophy departments have a branch dealing with Chinese philosophy, analogous to those offering Western and often even Indian philosophy. But not one Chinese university teaches exclusively Chinese philosophy, let alone under the title "General Philosophy."'In the light of such an imposing state of affairs, the question inevitably comes to the fore: is there indeed such a thing as "Chinese philosophy"? However, the degree of certainty with which the conflicting positions are held is not the result of thorough research, painstaking debate, or well-founded reasoning. For these have hardly even begun. In both the West and China, the answer to this question consists mostly of implicit presuppositions. It belongs less to the domain of explicit opinion than to the implicit frame within which we function: the organization of universities, bookshops, journals, and conferences all confirm a vision that, in fact, they have seldom explicitly discussed. The topic is therefore rather sensitive: any explicit rejection of the existence of Chinese philosophy implies not only a painful break with the raison d'etre of more than a thousand Chinese academics but also a blow to China's national pride. On the other hand, the insistence that general introductory courses to philosophy ought to include philosophical traditions laid claim to by other cultures would certainly disturb Western colleagues in the field.From this one might be inclined to conclude that such strong emotions and exaggerated sensitivities-a Western chauvinism on the one hand and an overly sensitive Chinese self-insistence on the other-are obstacles to a mature discussion of this nevertheless fundamental question. The arguments presented here, on the contrary, shall endeavor to show that this conclusion is not entirely correct. Several concrete arguments have been forwarded in this debate, and insofar as this conclusion is correct, I will argue that this very sensitivity is an interesting phenomenon, one that is unjustly being neglected.The following analysis of the implicit debate has a relevance beyond the field of "Chinese philosophy" since a similar problematic forwards itself not only in

There is a tendency in academia to read early Chinese masters as consistent philosophers. This is to some extent caused by the specific form in which these masters have been studied and taught for more than a century. Convinced of the influence that the form of transmission has on the content, this article studies the more fragmented parts of the book Zhuangzi-instruction scenes or dialogues-and more specifically their formal traits rather than the philosophical content conveyed in them. The focus is on one fragment in Chapter 7 which portrays Liezi, a shaman and Master Calabash. The persons and stages of the instructions scenes in the Zhuangzi seem to promote a non-teaching, in which the learner learns while the teacher does not teach. The non-availability of the teacher and his unwillingness to teach are, paradoxically, at the core of the teaching, although not presented as a valuable alternative.

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In order to introduce Mozi's thought, almost every contemporary textbook on Chinese philosophy refers to his ten novel theses or dogmas, which have been preserved as the titles of the Core chapters (8–37): to elevate the worthy, to conform upward, to care for all, to condemn military aggression, to moderate expenses as well as burials, to acknowledge the will of Heaven and the percipient ghosts, and to condemn music as well as fatalism. Through a close reading of the Mozi and other early sources written by or attributed to masters, this paper argues, first, that these ten core ideas may not have been promoted by the earliest spokesmen of Mohism but gradually emerged while various layers of the book Mozi were written, and, second, that these ten ideas were not consistently attributed to early Mohism by Zhou and Han masters: their association of Mo with these specific mottos is limited and inconsistent. A focus on the most well-known motto – “care for all” – shows that there was no awareness of its belonging exclusively to one thinker or school. The difference between the earliest and the contemporary characterizations of Mozi sheds new light not only on early Mohism, but also on our preconceptions when reading early sources.

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