A Critique of Ziporyn’s Interpretation of Early Chinese Thought: from the Constructive-Engagement Vantage Point

Sameness and difference are among the most fundamental and yet most tension-laden categories in philosophy, bearing directly on the conditions under which judgment, classification, and meaning become possible. This article critically reconstructs and compares two influential but methodologically divergent approaches to this issue in contemporary comparative philosophy. One is Brook Ziporyn’s idea of coherence, which seeks to articulate a non-substantialist metaphysics as a response to tensions internal to the Western metaphysical tradition. The other is Bo Mou’s enhanced account of relative identity, which revises both absolute and modern relative identity theories through a bottom-up, semantically grounded framework oriented toward cross-tradition identity judgment. This article argues that these two approaches represent not merely alternative theoretical answers to the issue of sameness and difference, but two distinct methodological trajectories in comparative philosophy. Brook Ziporyn strategically radicalizes Sino–Western difference by staging competing truth-claims, thereby challenging the hegemony of a single dominant conception of truth. By contrast, Bo Mou takes shared cross–tradition philosophical concerns as his anchoring point, enabling Chinese and Western traditions to enter into relations of mutual critique and complementarity rather than standing in principled opposition. It concludes that the philosophical significance of Chinese thought should not be confined to functioning as a self-contained alternative to Western traditions but should instead be activated through sustained engagement with jointly concerned philosophical issues, contributing to the ongoing reconfiguration of world philosophy.