The final version of this paper is published in: Metaphilosophy, 51(2-3): 187-205. Philosophy and the Good Life in the Zhuangzi Pengbo Liu, Bentley University Abstract: The ancient Chinese text, the Zhuangzi, raises a mix of epistemological, psychological and conceptual challenges against the value and usefulness of philosophical disputation. But instead of advocating the elimination of philosophy, it implicitly embraces a broader conception of philosophy, the goal of which is to engage us to reflect on our limitations, question things we take for granted, and better appreciate alternative perspectives and possibilities. Philosophy thus understood is compatible with a variety of methods and approaches: fictions, jokes, paradoxes, spiritual exercises, argument, disputation, and so on. Philosophical practices, on this view, also pave the way for an open-minded, adaptive and flexible way of living that is at the core of the Zhuangist good life. 1. Introduction Skeptical themes and arguments have been a central topic in contemporary studies of the philosophy of the Zhuangzi. 1 Scholars have debated the extent to which Zhuangzi 2 is genuinely a skeptic or a relativist (or both), and if he is, what kind of skeptical stance he adopts: is his skepticism primarily doctrinal (Hansen 2003; Fraser 2009), or therapeutic (Ivanhoe 1993; Schwitzgebel 1996), or interrogative (Wong 2006)? It is not, however, the aim of this paper to 1 See the essays in Kjellberg and Ivanhoe (1996). For more recent discussions, see Hansen (2003), Wong (2005), Fraser (2009), Chung (2017), Chiu (2018), among others. 2 I follow the dominant contemporary interpretative approach to the Zhuangzi in assuming the text is the work of multiple authors, edited and compiled over many decades. For the ease of exposition, I use “Zhuangzi” and “the Zhuangzi” interchangeably, but the Zhuangist view as I interpret it is, following common practice, mainly based on and reconstructed from the Inner Chapters (which are generally recognized as attributable to a single author, probably the historic Zhuangzi) and related material in the Miscellaneous Chapters (esp., chapters 23—27).