Some accounts say that when Zou Yan turned up at the city gates, the rulers of the city came out to welcome him – the kind of reception the ancient Confucians could only have dreamed of. And there is some evidence that in the context of his time, Zou Yan was a more popular philosopher than the early Confucians. Interestingly, in the Shiji, Sima Qian writes considerably more about Zou Yan than about the now far more well-known Confucian philosophers Mencius and Xunzi. His approach to knowledge was inferential: in pursuit of knowledge, he said, one should first “examine small objects” and from this “draw conclusions about large ones.” His written output was considerable, and it encompassed everything from geography and natural history to history and philosophy. ![]() The Shiji says that Zou Yan came from the state of Qi. What biographical information we have about Zou Yan comes from Sima Qian’s Shiji or Records of the Grand Historian. ![]() He is associated with the so-called Yin Yang School ( yinyang jia 陰陽家), also sometimes referred to as the school of Chinese naturalism. The philosopher Zou Yan (鄒衍) lived between 305 and 240CE.
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