Whatever roles A. C. Graham played during his life--provocative scholar, philosopher, philologist, poet, translator, teacher--he was most certainly a renaissance man of many and amazing parts. Nowhere is this range of talent and interests better demonstrated than in the two books under review. While no single work by the polymatch Graham or a collection of essays written by his friends can encompass the whoel range of his philological, philosophic, textual, historical, and artistic interests over the years, his last collection of philosophic essays as well as the festschrift do give us clues to the direction of a remarkable intellectual life lived between West and East. With a characteristic flourish, Graham, in commenting on each of the festschrift essays, manages both to respond to his friends and critics and to use this exchange to reexamine the scholarly issue under discussion. Like Confucius, he was a teacher of teachers.
the book of lieh tzu
I can remember taking a class with H. G. Creel at the University of Chicago in the early 1970s on the Chuang Tzu. One of the required readings for the class was Graham's brilliant essay "The Date and Composition of the Lieh Tzu."(1) It was the kind of inspired textual study that many of us would have sacrificed greatly to imitate. Only later did it become clear that it was not merely an exercise in scholastic Sinological erudition; it was the product of a mind that could hold many disciplines and issues in focus at one time and then produce a synthesis without entangling any of the lines of inquiry.(2) And on top of all this Sinological genius, Graham also was a fine translator of T'ang poetry, no mean feat by itself.(3) Graham has the ability to make classical Chinese come alive in modern English. His translations are as readable as they are accurate. This facility with the language of poetry was matched by an ability to interpret Chinese philosophy from the classical pre-Han period to the Neo-Confucians of the Northern and Southern Sung.(4) Later I became intrigued to discover that Graham was also an accomplished philosopher and had written an early work about values theory.(5) Graham noted that his early book on philosophy did not generate much interest in philosophic circles. But then, what can we make of a Sinologist who has good things to say about Laclos's Valmont in Les liaisons dangereuses? Graham was never a run-of-the-mill scholar.
1 16 China Review International: Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall 1994 act in accord with one anoAier, with one set of goals. Nor does Gill look at Asiandex and other arms fairs, which play an important role in China's arms trade. Admittedly this is a complex subject, and data is hard to obtain, but without the author addressing this topic the reader is left with an incomplete picture. The People's Liberation Army, for example, needs to sell military equipment to make up for declining military budgets. This matters when analyzing the relationship between security, political, and economic goals in China's arms transfers. The internal nature of China's arms export establishment also matters when discussing the sale of missiles and the Missile Technology Control Regime, as well as several other issues raised in this book. Other scholars have addressed this subject , and it deserves more than Aie passing mention Aiat Gill gives. This is a very useful book but it is not as good as it could have been. Thomas Bickford University of California, Berkeley F A. C. Graham. Two Chinese Philosophers: The Metaphysics ofthe Brothers Ch'eng. Foreword by Irene Bloom. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1992. 202 pp. Specialists in Neo-Confucianism will be pleased to know that Angus Graham's (1919-1991) seminal monograph on the Ch'eng brothers, Two Chinese Philosophers : The Metaphysics ofthe Brothers Ch'eng (London: Lund Humphries, 1958; reprinted in 1967), is back in print. Finally, scholars and students can purchase what must have been one of the most frequenfiy photocopied monographs in the history ofWestern-language literature on Neo-Confucianism. Yet scholars may be disappointed to find that Open Court's new edition of Two Chinese Philosophers is little more than a reprint of the earlier work. Along with the minor change in title, this edition includes a most gracious "Foreword" by Irene Bloom and a very helpful new index by P. J. Ivanhoe and Jon W. Schofer. Minor corrections in the text have also been made. But unfortunately there are no new essays by Graham which rethink or redevelop his earlier claims about the philosophy of Aie Ch'engs. Tb appreciate the extent of Graham's contribution to the field, one need only 1994 by University ?00? 2ff7e9595c
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