On the Coherence of Mencius’ Concept of Li: An Analysis Based on Moral Reasons Internalism

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I don't fully understand the specific issue studied in this article, but I believe it is a professional research paper. My only suggestion is that the author could improve the format of citations and references in the text. For example, the name of the article of Mencius quoted, would it be better to write the name of the article itself?

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 1 Comments

Point 1: My only suggestion is that the author could improve the format of citations and references in the text. For example, the name of the article of Mencius quoted, would it be better to write the name of the article itself?

Response 1: Thank you for your suggestion. I think you are referring to my use of the citation style of Mencius like Mencius 7A21. However, most papers in recent scholarship cite the work of Mencius in this way, including published papers on Religions. I have consulted the editor of Religions about this matter, she told me that I could just leave this task to their layout editor.

 

 

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The issue put forth by the author concerning the seeming contradiction between externalism versus internalism in the Mencius is long-standing, and what the author presents are ways to reconcile them. I am certain that there are other scholarly works, besides Liu and Tiberas, that have done previous work on the question of two understandings of Mencius' understanding of li, and if the author could provide a few more footnotes/ brief discussions about why his/ her work differs from theirs, it would be helpful. Or even a survey of the field would recognize more of that previous work.

However, the arguments of the paper are relatively clear. The author does a good job of distinguishing the honors bestowed by heaven and the honors bestowed by man, and once again I wonder if there are other scholarly works that discussed this that the author could briefly discuss. I appreciate the author's thought process, but it seems that s/he is following in the previous footsteps of previous work. The distinction is so fundamental that I would be surprised if the Confucian exegetical tradition itself had not already confronted the issue.

The paper is fine to go to the next step, but these extra elements, if the author can present them, would strengthen it.

The references are not correct, and for example citations for the quotes from Mencius should provide the translator/ year/ page number etc. The Chinese titles for texts should be given, as well there are many missing characters that need to be supplied, for instance li itself. On line 219, what is "yu shi"? Chinese names do not use hyphens, such as Gong-hang Zi etc.

The issue put forth by the author concerning the seeming contradiction between externalism versus internalism in the Mencius is long-standing, and what the author presents are ways to reconcile them. I am certain that there are other scholarly works, besides Liu and Tiberas, that have done previous work on the question of two understandings of Mencius' understanding of li, and if the author could provide a few more footnotes/ brief discussions about why his/ her work differs from theirs, it would be helpful. Or even a survey of the field would recognize more of that previous work.

However, the arguments of the paper are relatively clear. The author does a good job of distinguishing the honors bestowed by heaven and the honors bestowed by man, and once again I wonder if there are other scholarly works that discussed this that the author could briefly discuss. I appreciate the author's thought process, but it seems that s/he is following in the previous footsteps of previous work. The distinction is so fundamental that I would be surprised if the Confucian exegetical tradition itself had not already confronted the issue.

The paper is fine to go to the next step, but these extra elements, if the author can present them, would strengthen it.

The references are not correct, and for example citations for the quotes from Mencius should provide the translator/ year/ page number etc. The Chinese titles for texts should be given, as well there are many missing characters that need to be supplied, for instance li itself. On line 219, what is "yu shi"? Chinese names do not use hyphens, such as Gong-hang Zi etc.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf