Methodology and limits

About this project

What this is, what it is not, who its absences are, and the design principles that produced this version after one earlier attempt was abandoned for being anchored too narrowly on a single thinker.

What this is

An interactive atlas of comparative philosophy of Asian and Western thought, applied to the U.S.–China question. Three primary objects, each a node-type on the map: concepts (terms with intellectual content, like 勢, telos, basho, tianxia, ren, the moral law), thinkers (the philosophers and sinologists who have worked these concepts), and disputes (the debates that organize the field — the Needham question, the Asian Values debate, Mou Zongsan against Kant on intellectual intuition, Billeter against Jullien on method, role-ethics versus rights, tianxia and the international order, the wuwei debate, the immanence/transcendence question itself, and the classical tradition's own quarrels — Mencius against Mozi on the scope of care, Mencius against Xunzi on human nature).

Concepts come from eight intellectual lineages: Chinese-classical, Chinese-Buddhist, Neo-Confucian, modern Chinese, Greek-classical, modern European, the Kyoto School, and comparative philosophy itself. Thinkers stand inside one lineage but typically work across at least two. The graph's edges encode three kinds of relation: concept-to-concept (écart, parallel, pair, kinship, lineage), thinker-to-concept (coined, central, advanced, critiqued), and thinker-to-thinker (influence, critique, dispute).

The redesign

An earlier version of this site was organized through François Jullien's framework: a single voice, his méthod (the détour, the écart), and his vocabulary (l'entre, le commun, dé-coïncidence) supplied the spine. That version was honest about its anchoring and produced something useful, but it understated the field. Comparative philosophy of Chinese and Western thought has been worked by Granet a century ago, by Needham across twenty-seven volumes, by A. C. Graham in close textual reading, by Schwartz in axial-age comparison, by the Kyoto School from a Japanese vantage, by Hall and Ames in pragmatist register, by Mou Zongsan and the New Confucians from inside the Chinese tradition reading German philosophy back, by Slingerland from cognitive science, by Zhao Tingyang in the IR register, and by Billeter as the principal scholarly critic of Jullien's program — among many others.

The current version is built around the field rather than around a single voice. Jullien remains a substantial node, his methodological vocabulary is preserved and labeled as his (not as the field's), and the five essays applying his framework to U.S.–China are kept under Readings — but they are now one school's reading among others, not the structure of the site.

Three primary surfaces

The Map is the homepage: a force-directed graph in which concepts are circles and thinkers are rounded rectangles. Filters separate the layers (concepts only, thinkers only, both, plus the thinker-to-thinker network). Search ranges across terms, transliterations, and contributions. Click any node for a side-panel summary; click again for the full page.

The Thinkers page lists the twenty-nine figures grouped by tradition. Each thinker page surfaces the concepts they coined, advanced, or critiqued, the dialogues and disputes they were in, and selected works. The Traditions page gives capsule summaries of the eight intellectual lineages and the concepts and thinkers each contains. The Disputes page lays out ten live debates, each with its principal positions, the thinkers arguing them, and the concepts at stake.

What this is not

This is not an introduction to classical Chinese philosophy in the strict sense — for that the reader should consult sinologists who handle the texts directly (Graham, Cheng, Schwartz, Billeter all listed under Sources). It is not a survey of comparative philosophy as an academic field — there are good ones in print, several authored by figures profiled here. It is not a brief for any U.S.–China policy, nor is it strategic intelligence. It is an attempt to ask whether the comparative-philosophy framework, taken seriously across multiple voices, sharpens specific perceptions about the U.S.–China relation that more standard frames blur.

All concept glosses, thinker profiles, dispute summaries, and analytical commentary on this site are original prose composed for the project. No copyrighted text from any of the works cited has been reproduced. Bibliographic citations are factual reference; readers wishing to read the source texts should obtain them through legitimate channels.

What I'm betting on

The premise is that the dominant U.S.-side framings of the relation with China — convergence (they will eventually become like us), clash (they are simply opposed and must be defeated), or sentimental dialogue (we share the same humanity, let us find common ground) — each fail to capture what is actually happening, and each fails in characteristic ways the comparative-philosophy frameworks help to diagnose. The convergence frame underestimates the écart. The clash frame overestimates the coherence of either "civilizational" identity. The sentimental frame is the most pleasant and the most evasive: it dissolves the écart prematurely.

The field's offer is none of these. It is to take the gap between configurations as productive — as the condition under which thought becomes possible — and to do the slow work of reading each configuration through the écart with the other. Different schools execute this differently: Jullien through the détour, Hall–Ames through pragmatist process-Confucianism, Mou Zongsan through Kant-inflected New Confucianism, the Kyoto School through Heidegger-inflected Buddhism, Slingerland through cognitive science, Zhao through tianxia. The atlas keeps these schools distinguishable rather than blending them into a single voice.

Limits and caveats

Several caveats are owed.

"Asian" and "Western" are not natural kinds. The site uses these labels as orientation, not as essence. Within "Asian" the atlas covers Chinese, Japanese, and Indian-influenced (via Buddhism) traditions but not Korean, Vietnamese, or Tibetan thought, all of which would belong in a fuller atlas. Within "Western" the atlas covers Greek and modern European but not Latin medieval, Russian, or Latin American philosophy, all of which have their own claims on this material. The narrowing is pragmatic; it is not principled.

Indian thought is the most consequential omission. The Buddhist tradition appears here only as a tributary of Chinese thought (the Chinese-Buddhist tradition node) and through its reception in the Kyoto School, but Hindu and Indian Buddhist philosophy in their own right are not represented. A more complete atlas would include them as a third major axis, not as a footnote to East Asia.

Chinese thought is plural. The labels "Chinese-classical" and "Confucian" mask substantial internal disputes — Mencius and Xunzi on human nature, Confucians and Mohists on the universality of love, Daoists and Confucians on civilization, Legalists and Confucians on rule by law versus rule by virtue. The site attempts to honor this plurality (Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Mozi, Laozi, and Zhuangzi each have their own thinker entries, and the Mencius–Mozi and Mencius–Xunzi quarrels are disputes in their own right) but cannot fully reproduce it within a graph organized around comparative purposes.

The included thinkers are partly contingent. Twenty-nine thinkers across two and a half millennia is a curated selection, not a comprehensive one. Major figures absent for space rather than principle include: Tang Junyi, Feng Youlan, Wang Yangming, Zhu Xi (acknowledged in concepts but not in their own entries), Wing-tsit Chan, Henry Rosemont (whose role-ethics work is folded into the Hall–Ames entry), Karl Jaspers, Reinhard May, the rest of the Kyoto School (Tanabe, Nishitani), Joseph Adler, Sarah Allan, Bryan Van Norden, Stephen Angle, and many others. Their absence is not a verdict on their importance.

The disputes are also a curated selection. Ten disputes suggest a settled set; in fact the field has dozens of live debates and these ten are the ones most directly relevant to the U.S.–China question that organizes the project.

The atlas is heuristic, not predictive. Nothing on this site predicts what either polity will do. The concepts and disputes are tools for sharper description and, perhaps, sharper questions. A more attentive description of where the écart lies in a specific dossier (technology competition, climate cooperation, diplomatic communication, military signaling) is the most this kind of analysis can hope to produce.

How the graph is built

The Map is a D3.js v7 force-directed layout. Concepts are circles colored by tradition; thinkers are rounded rectangles. Edges encode three relation kinds: concept-to-concept (with five sub-types: écart, parallel, pair, kinship, lineage), thinker-to-concept (coined, central, advanced, critiqued), thinker-to-thinker (influence, critique, dispute). Forces nudge Chinese-tradition nodes left, Western-tradition nodes right, comparative-method nodes upward; Kyoto-School nodes float between. The geometry is a visual hint, not an argument. Drag any node to test an alternative arrangement.

The site is a static HTML/CSS/JavaScript build with no backend. All concept, thinker, tradition, and dispute data live in two JavaScript files — data/atlas.js for the East–West atlas and data/lightcone.js for the Lightcone atlas, which also holds the cross-map edges between the two — and can be edited to add or revise entries. A third file, data/axes.js, holds the axes — the problems both atlases configure — from which the cross-map edge types are derived. The build runs offline once loaded.

The two ontologies and the mapping between them are consistency-checked by an audit script (tools/atlas-audit.mjs in the repository, run with npm run atlas:audit): it verifies that every edge, counterpart, dispute position, and attribution resolves to a real entry, that cross-map edges genuinely connect the two maps and carry a provenance, that each edge's type is the one its axis implies, and that every concept with no relation across the gap states why. The conceptual analysis behind the mapping — what the edge types claim, why counterpart lists are directional, and why the unmapped residue is a result rather than a gap — is set out on the Cross-map page.

Acknowledgments

The intellectual debt is to the many thinkers whose work this atlas indexes. Errors of interpretation, application, and emphasis — particularly in the U.S.–China commentary on the concept pages and in the readings — are this project's, not theirs. Where the field's framework is sharper than the standard policy discourse, the credit is the field's; where the application is forced, the responsibility is the project's.