On The Art Of Sophistry Of Xunzi

Xunzi is an outstanding representative of the prose of the pre-Qin period,However,from the perspective of logic,some arguments are not rigorous,and thus have some sophistry color.This paper mainly studied the art of sophistry of Xunzi in a systematic way from the Angle of rhetoric and logic.Deeply analyzed the relationship between rhetorical devices and way of argumentation and sophistry of Xunzi,and explored the logical relationship between them.The sophistry of Xunzi was mainly about the phenomena of nature and daily life which reflects the way of thinking that things and I united as one and had strong political and ethical inclination.Meanwhile,there were some logic defects such as subjective,overgeneralization and fictitious argument under the influence of historical background of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period.Next this paper studied the rhetoric and logic of Xunzi through text analysis.The art of sophistry in Xunzi's prose is mainly manifested by the use of various rhetorical devices such as parables,analogies,parallelism,duality and so on,caused many sophistry like mixed nature and humanity and compared with different kinds,the false causality and disguised replacement of concept.Finally this paper analyzed the characteristic of sophistry of Xunzi by comparing with other contemporary scholars.The sophistry of Xunzi mainly used the logical structure of parataxis in the course of argument which inherited from The Analects of Confucius and mainly based on the essential contents.Meanwhile,The sophistry of Xunzi were clever with continuous metaphor and formed a endless and powerful writing style.Based on this delicate rhetoric and remarkable literary grace,The sophistry of Xunzi reflected the literariness of Xunzi and the relationship between rhetoric and sophism.The art of sophistry of Xunzi is the product of The Times,which inwardly inherited and developed the way of image thinking in ancient China and reflected the Chinese characters of poetic and humanistic.