yang xiao AGENCY AND PRACTICAL REASONING IN THE ANALECTS AND THE MENCIUS What are the early Chinese philosophers’ concepts and theories of action or agency? This is a very difficult question, and some of the difficulties have to do with the fact that, unlike Aristotle, early Chinese philosophers do not theorize about action or agency in a direct and systematic manner. For instance, none of them has pro- vided an account of voluntary action, decision, deliberation, and wish, as Aristotle does in book 3 of the Nichomachean Ethics (see Liao Shenbai’s article in this issue). The central aim of this article is to propose that there are at least two ways to answer the question of action or agency in early Chinese philosophy.The first can be called the “practical reasoning” approach, which is based on the assumption that we can get a good sense of one’s notion of action or agency if we know how one deliberates and reasons about what one ought to do. In other words, there seems to be an intimate connection between agency and practical reasoning. The second can be called the “motivation” approach, which is based on the assumption that we can get a good sense of one’s notion of action or agency if we know how one thinks what the motivations (or sources) of virtuous action ought to be. In this article, I argue for three theses; the first two theses are based on the practical reasoning approach, although I focus on only one aspect of practical reasoning, namely, how Confucius and Mencius give justifications of their normative claims about virtuous actions or policies, and the third thesis is based on the motivation approach. The first thesis is that in the Analects and the Mencius, we can find what I call the “pragmatic” mode of rational justification for their normative claims. The second thesis is that the “rationality” in the pragmatic mode of rational justification in the Analects and the Mencius is instrumental and prudential rationality. The third thesis is that, even though Confucius and Mencius have an instrumentalist concept of rational agency when they reason with others, they do not identify this YANG XIAO,Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Kenyon College. Special- ties: ethics and moral psychology, Chinese philosophy, philosophy of language. E-mail: xiaoy@kenyon.edu Journal of Chinese Philosophy 36:4 (December 2009) 629–641 © 2009 Journal of Chinese Philosophy