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China and Inner Asia
Organized Panel Session
“Experience” or “sensory experience” is undoubtedly a useful category for studying pre-modern Chinese thought, but to what extent is it philosophically accurate? This paper provides an in-depth answer by analyzing a host of related conceptual issues. First, I survey some major Chinese concepts conventionally translated as or compared to sensory experience, e.g., wenjian 聞見 (lit. “hearing and seeing”) and jingyan 經驗, and clarify their similarities and dissimilarities with experience in Western contexts. Second, I probe into the philosophical horizons of these Chinese concepts and reveal their distinctive epistemological and ontological characteristics embedded in the original contexts. I focus on a couple of critical distinctions, for instance, the lack of a two-tier ontology and varied construals of ontological differentiation, the assignment of functions to the senses, and the structures via which observable content was organized into sensory experience. I situate my discussions in the empirical contexts such as science and medicine in pre-modern China, where historians have accumulated major insights regarding the use of the aforementioned concepts. I hope to contribute by evincing philosophical nuances and articulating caveats pertinent to the use of “experience” and its cousin concepts, such as sense perception and empiricism.
Ya Zuo
Bowdoin College