Name and Actuality in Early Chinese Thought (review)

204 China Review International: Vol. 6, No. ?, Spring 1999 speculation about its extent, and three pointed case studies. Last, but by no means least, are Bachner's penetrating remarks about the downside ofrapid economic growth—environmental degradation. In the delta region as a whole, including Hong Kong, material well-being is severely compromised by all kinds of pollution, in the air, water, and soil. There is a need for laws that can protect the environment, and there are two models that may surprise the reader: "free market " Hong Kong is seen moving toward greater state regulation, while the reverse is the case in the "socialist market" of Guangdong. Some solutions are necessary to avert ecological crises, but in neither Hong Kong nor Guangdong is there as yet any effective regulation. This is a sobering punctuation mark to end the book. The essays here are an engaging collection. Some appear to be working drafts, and an effort to incorporate them into some overall statement might have provided the reader a framework in which to assess them. They are all worth reading, and all give a sense of the complexity of the processes that are unfolding in Hong Kong's dynamic hinterland—over which Hong Kong has had such a profound influence. Graham E. Johnson University of British Columbia Graham E. Johnson is a professor ofsociology in the Department ofAnthropology and Sociology. He is the author with Glen D. Peterson ofA Historical Dictionary of Guangzhou (Canton) and Guangdong (Lanhan, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1999). mm John Makeham. Name and Actuality in Early Chinese Thought. New York: State University ofNew York Press, 1994. 286 pp. Hardcover, isbn 0-79141983 -5. Paperback, isbn 0-7914-1984-3. This thoughtful and painstakingly researched study, published in the SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture, should be consulted by scholars working in the field of Chinese epistemological terminology and its philosophical implications . It is richly and usefully footnoted and has nine appendixes. Ofthe book's eight chapters, chapters 2-7 develop the author's earlier published articles on y niversi y £hou an¿ Han "name and actuality" problems. The framing chapters, 1, 7, and 8, are devoted to the late Han thinker Xu Gan (170-217). The author writes, "My purpose in this study is to elucidate Xu Gan's concept ofthe name and actuality ofHawai'i Press Reviews 205 [ming-shi] relationship in the context ofits philosophical and socio-intellectual background" (p. xi). The author seeks to examine the relationship ofXu Gan's epistemology to the better-known formulations found in Confucian, Mohist, and Legalist works ofthe late Zhou and early Han periods. He writes, "most pre-Han thinkers were nominalists. As a consequence oftheir nominalist premises, many thinkers held that ming [name] could and should be used to prescribe and determine shi [actuality]" (pp. 146-147). In chapter 2 Makeham defines diis kind ofthinking as "nominal prescriptivist." "Confucius," he writes, "did not regard names as labels but rather as social, and hence political, catalysts which could bring about new states of affairs." The author, by contrast, regards Xu Gan as a "correlative" thinker, for whom names are not "arbitrarily determined by man" (p. 12) but a reflection ofthe cosmic order, a "special correlation . . . [that obtains] between names and actualities." Thus, for Xu Gan, names are responsive (or integral) to and ideally in harmony with actualities rather than agents affecting actualities. Makeham writes, "The key difference between Confucius' zheng mingphilosophy and Xu Gan's concept ofthe name and actuality relationship is the issue ofnominal prescriptivism. [For Confucius, names'] real value lay in the fact that they could be used to prescribe, and not simply describe [sociopolitical] distinctions" (p. 47). This "was the philosophical antithesis ofXu Gan's basic tenet that names followed from actualities. He saw the contrary view—using names to manipulate states of affairs—as resulting in the dislocation ofname and actuality" (p. 48). In the opinion of this reviewer, the author is treating names in an insufficiently mediated or contextualized way. The Analects' locus classicus on names, 13.3, simply makes (a) the "rectification ofnames" (zheng ming) or "correct definition ofterms" the prerequisite for (b) logical statements and (c) successful action: to begin...