Thinking Through Hall and Ames: On the Art of Comparative Philosophy

With the publication of their first collaborative book Thinking Through Confucius, David Hall and Roger Ames launched a comparative philosophical project juxtaposing American pragmatism and Chinese Confucianism (Hall and Ames 1987). This essay focuses on the role pragmatic assumptions play in Hall’s and Ames’s announced goal of opening a “new route” into Chinese intellectual history. Hall and Ames aim to teach scholars whose scholarly sensibilities have been formed in the West what they must acknowledge about their own traditions before they can engage Chinese thinkers constructively. After happily acknowledging my own debt to Hall and Ames and defending as hugely helpful the broad arc of their work, this essay raises questions about the way they deploy pragmatic assumptions as tools for “removing the useless lumber” that they claim “block” Western thinkers’ access to Chinese intellectual history. Specifically it argues that the “useless lumber” metaphor is misplaced.