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Virtue, Nature, and Moral Agency in the Xunzi. Edited, with introduction, by T. C. Kline III and Philip J. Ivanhoe. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000. Pp. xvii + 268.
Reviewed by Kurtis Hagen University of Hawai'i
Virtue, Nature, and Moral Agency in the Xunzi, edited by T. C. Kline III and Philip J. Ivanhoe, is an anthology that has much to recommend it. It brings together several seminal papers on Xunzi by established and distinguished scholars of Chinese philosophy, such as Antonio S. Cua, D. C. Lau, David S. Nivison, and Henry Rosemont, Jr. It also includes contributions from relative newcomers, who focused their dissertations on Xunzi's philosophy, namely T. C. Kline III and Eric Hutton. While most of these essays have been previously published, some appear in print for the first time in this volume. There is also a succinct introduction, name and subject indexes, and a targeted bibliography, which may serve as a reading list for those interested in supplementing their study of Xunzi. Another nicety is that references to passages in the Xunzi in older articles have been updated to include John Knoblock's translation' as well as A Concordance to the Xunzi,2 and romanizations have been standardized to pinyin.
For the most part, the title Virtue, Nature, and Moral Agency in the Xunzi accurately represents the most prominent subject matter of the book. However, by "nature" what is meant is apparently "human nature," if that is an adequate translation for the concept Xunzi designates with the character xing ... . Xunzi's view of tian ... (the propensities of nature, the heavens) is not prominently discussed.3 Most of the essays, chapters 4 through 11 (the final chapter), deal extensively if not primarily with understanding Xunzi's conception of human nature. Chapters 5 through 7 are tied even closer together under the theme of moral agency (more on their connection below). Virtue is the topic of chapter 3 and plays a role in chapters 4 and 7.
Although the first two chapters seem not to fall neatly within these categories, Henry Rosemont, Jr.'s contribution, "State and Society in the Xunzi: A Philosophical Commentary," seems an appropriate choice for the lead chapter of this collection. A sweeping polemic in...