Research Area D Making Powerful Arguments (D15)

Project Leaders: Martin Hofmann, Joachim Kurtz
Project Member: Dominic Steavu

Making Powerful Arguments aimed to fill a significant lacuna in the global histories of truth and rationality. By assembling evidence on the distinct modes of knowledge production that shaped learned discourses in late imperial China, the project laid the foundations for a history of argumentative practice in one of the richest textual cultures outside of Europe. In contrast to existing studies that have, so far unsuccessfully, focused on recovering explicit Chinese theories of reasoning, Making Powerful Arguments reconstructed the standards of validity embodied in concrete and historically situated instances of argumentation. The initial focus was on case studies in five interrelated areas of central concern to the imperial Chinese state: education, law, canonical exegesis, historiography and natural studies. In a second step, the project traced how practices in each of these areas were transformed, and standards of validity altered, by encounters with different forms of discursive rationality in the wake of the European expansion.