Substantive Perspectivism: An Essay on Philosophical Concern with Truth

I have been thinking about the philosophical issue of truth for more than two decades. It is one of several fascinating philosophical issues that motivated me to change my primary re ective interest to philosophy after receiving BS in mathem- ics in 1982. Some serious academic work in this connection started around the late eighties when I translated into Chinese a dozen of Donald Davidson's representative essays on truth and meaning and when I assumed translator for Adam Morton who gave a series of lectures on the issue in Beijing (1988), which was co-sponsored by my then institution (Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Science). I have loved the issue both for its own sake (as one speci c major issue in the phil- ophy of language and metaphysics) and for the sake of its signi cant involvement in many philosophical issues in different subjects of philosophy. Having been attracted to the analytic approach, I was then interested in looking at the issue both from the points of view of classical Chinese philosophy and Marxist philosophy, two major styles or frameworks of doing philosophy during that time in China, and from the point of view of contemporary analytic philosophy, which was then less recognized in the Chinese philosophical circle.

Bo Mou is Professor of Philosophy [effective in May 2009] and Director of the Center for Comparative Philosophy at San Jose State University in California, USA. After receiving B.S. in mathematics, Mou obtained graduate degrees in philosophy from Graduate School, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (M.A.) and from University of Rochester, USA (M.A. and Ph.D.). Mou was President (2002-5) of the International Society for Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Philosophy (ISCWP). He has published widely in analytic philosophy, Chinese philosophy and comparative philosophy, concerning philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophical methodology and ethics. His scholarly articles appear in such journals as Synthese, Metaphilosophy, the Southern Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy East & West, Asian Philosophy, the Journal of Chinese Philosophy and Polylog. He is contributing editor of Two Roads to Wisdom? -Chinese and Analytic Philosophical Traditions (Open Court, 2001), Comparative Approaches to Chinese Philosophy (Ashgate, 2003), Davidson's Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy: Constructive Engagement (Brill, 2006), Searle's Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy: Constructive Engagement (Brill, 2008), and History of Chinese Philosophy (Routledge, 2009). He is author of Chinese Philosophy A-Z (Edinburgh University Press, 2009) and editor (primary translator) of Truth, Meaning, and Method: Selections from the Philosophical Writings of Donald Davidson (Commercial Press, 2008) (in Chinese). Mou is currently finishing a monograph on reference and predication concerning the relation of language to objects and thought.