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I bring a new thesis of historical holism to bear on the well-known Mencius-Xunzi dispute about xing/性. The significance of doing so seems bi-directional: in the first direction, i.e. applying the thesis to the dispute, my reconstruction of both Mencius's and Xunzi's views aims at revealing a largely neglected but important aspect of Confucian thought. While in the second direction, whoever is otherwise convinced by the Mencian insight may find its successful reconstruction as a case of historical holism good evidence for the thesis itself, which seems ground-breaking in certain areas of contemporary analytic philosophy. The paper largely focuses on the first direction, with quite detailed exposition of key analytic elements for understanding historical holism. A notion of retrospective necessity stands out in the exposition, supporting the main idea of path-bound normativity which turns out to be, for our present case, a notion of implicit and endogenous normativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on certain relevant aspects of normativity and further clarification or elaboration of certain important lines in the arguments. It mentions Donald Davidson's causal theory of action (CTA) and relevant issues concerning the possibility of weakness of will or other forms of irrationality. It also mentions steps which have successive pairwise counterfactual dependence relation in the backward direction.

This essay critiques or engages a wide range of existing works on the ancient and well-contested issue of weakness of will, from a new perspective of comparative philosophy combined with a focus on a largely neglected Davidsonian paradox of irrationality. It aims at revealing the interplay between the descriptive and the normative in the very notion of critical interpretation, as well as a special relation between holding-true and making-true which helps to explain the non-accidentalness of the descriptive coat of the Plato Principle and some of the Mencian paradigmatic tenets. By the same token, it also sheds light on some holistic picture about a certain implicit type of dynamic normativity, which seems evidently applicable to, for example, the Mencius-Xunzi 荀子 dispute on human nature, but scarcely noticed or articulated in contemporary contexts of comparative philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]