The essays in Powerful Arguments reconstruct the standards of validity underlying argumentative practices in a wide array of late imperial Chinese discourses, from the Song through the Qing dynasties. The fourteen case studies analyze concrete arguments defended or contested in areas ranging from historiography, philosophy, law, and religion to natural studies, literature, and the civil examination system. By examining uses of evidence, habits of inference, and the criteria by which some arguments were judged to be more persuasive than others, the contributions recreate distinct cultures of reasoning. Together, they lay the foundations for a history of argumentative practice in one of the richest scholarly traditions outside of Europe and add a chapter to the as yet elusive global history of rationality.

Table of Contents:
Contents Acknowledgements List of Figures Notes on Contributors Introduction: Toward a History of Argumentative Practice in Late Imperial China  Martin Hofmann, Joachim Kurtz, and Ari Daniel Levine Part 1: Comparison, Collation, Validation  1 Historical and Political Arguments: Debates on the Veritable Records in the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644)   Peter Ditmanson  2 A Performance of Transparency: Discourses of Veracity and Practices of Verification in Li Tao’s Long Draft   Ari Daniel Levine  3 Learning with Metal and Stone: On the Discursive Formation of Song Epigraphy   Jeffrey Moser Part 2: Visualization, Demonstration, Calculation  4 The Persuasive Power of Tu: A Case Study on Commentaries to the Book of Documents   Martin Hofmann  5 Inductive Arguments in the Midst of Smoke: “Proving” Rhetorically and Visually That Algorithms Work   Andrea Bréard  6 Keeping Your Ear to the Cosmos: Coherence as the Standard of Good Music in the Northern Song   Ya Zuo  7 The Textual Nature of Nature: Astronomical Debates in Eighteenth-Century China   Ori Sela Part 3: Verification, Evaluation, Authentication  8 Identity Verification as a Standard of Validity in Late Imperial Civil Service Examinations   John Williams  9 Standards of Validity and Essay Grading in Early Qing Civil Service Examinations   Li Yu虞莉  10 Some Problems with Corpses: Standards of Validity in Qing Homicide Cases   Matthew H. Sommer  11 Value and Validity: Seeing through Silver in Late Imperial China   Bruce Rusk Part 4: Corroboration, Refutation, Presentation  12 Philological Arguments as Religious Suasion: Liu Ning and His Study of Chinese Characters   Pingyi Chu  13 A Moral Verdict of Reasonable Doubts: Ouyi Zhixu’s Argumentative Strategies in the Collection of Refutations against Vicious Doctrines   Manuel Sassmann  14 Reasoning in Style: The Formation of “Logical Writing” in Late Qing China   Joachim Kurtz Index