David Shepherd Nivison, emeritus professor of philosophy, religious studies, and Chinese language at Stanford University, passed away peacefully on October 16, 2014, aged 91. I am honored to have been one of his doctoral students.

Nivison had a career trajectory that would be almost impossible in the contemporary academic world, and a range of intellectual interests and talents that almost no one could match. He was studying classics at Harvard when WWII broke out. Like many people of his generation who went on to become Sinologists or Japanologists, he was drafted and assigned to learn Japanese and become a codebreaker. After the war, Nivison switched his major to Chinese, eventually receiving his doctorate from Harvard. He then came to work at Stanford, where he remained for the remainder of his career. Nivison was hired into what was then called the Oriental Languages Department (at a time when that was not a pejorative term). His first book,The Life and Thought of Chang Hsueh-ch’eng: 1738-1801(published 1966), was an intellectual biography of an influential Chinese historian and philosopher of history, who has been compared to Hegel and Vico. The book was immediately recognized as a landmark contribution, and is still required reading for anyone seriously interested in the intellectual history of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911).

While working and teaching in the Oriental Studies Department, Nivison struck up a friendship with Professor Patrick Suppes of Stanford's Philosophy Department. One day Nivison noticed a book on Suppes’s desk and flipped through a few pages. Finding it interesting, Nivison asked to borrow it. The book wasMethods of Logic作者是W.V.O.奎因(哈佛大学教授，后来成为20世纪最重要的哲学家之一)。当他还书的时候，尼维森问Suppes是否可以在哲学系教一门逻辑学课程。Suppes同意了，并由此开始了Nivison与斯坦福哲学系长期而富有成效的合作关系。不久，尼维森开始教授各种各样的课程，包括历史哲学和马克思主义思想。尼维森与哲学系的接触对他的研究过程产生了重大影响，他的研究开始越来越关注“分析哲学”的技术和问题在中国思想中的应用。这几乎是闻所未闻的，并开始了一场比较哲学的革命。唐纳德·戴维森(Donald Davidson)是奎因的学生，现在是尼韦森在哲学系的同事之一，两人就“意志薄弱”的问题进行了卓有成效的交谈。这是一个人是否有可能不去做她认为是正确的事情的问题(如果有，怎么可能)。尼维森认识到，这个在西方至少可以追溯到苏格拉底时期的问题，在中国哲学中也有讨论。事实上，尼维森证明了中国儒家哲学家王阳明对这个问题的解决方法与苏格拉底非常相似。 Nivison’s contributions were appreciated by other members of the philosophical community. Donald Davidson thanked Nivison in the acknowledgments to his widely-cited anthology,Essays on Actions and Events, and Nivison was elected President of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association.

By the end of his teaching career, Nivison was active in three departments (long before “multidisciplinary” was a buzzword): the (renamed) Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Philosophy, and Religious Studies. He worked closely with undergraduate majors and graduate students in all three departments, and a number of them went on to become influential scholars in their own right, including Mark Csikszentmihalyi, of the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department at the University of California at Berkeley, Philip J. Ivanhoe, of the City University of Hong Kong, Kwong-loi Shun, of the Philosophy Department at Berkeley, Paul Kjellberg of the Philosophy Department at Whittier College, and the author of this obituary, who teaches in the Philosophy Department at Vassar College. Although he was very active as a scholar, many of Nivison’s most interesting essays were delivered as conference presentations and remained unpublished, circulated among a small but admiring group of other scholars as photocopies or even blue “ditto-sheet” copies. This situation was remedied with the publication of many of Nivison’s important philosophical essays inThe Ways of Confucianism(published 1996). Through this anthology, later generations of specialists in comparative philosophy have come to know Nivison’s work. Particularly influential is Nivison’s discussion of how, according to Confucianism, we can be ethically required to cultivate certain feelings.

Near the end of his teaching career, Nivison came to be fascinated with the Bamboo Annals, a historical chronicle that most scholars regarded as unreliable. Nivison argued that the text not only includes accurate historical material, but also can be used to date the founding of the Zhou dynasty. The founding of the Zhou is a seminal event in Chinese history, but one whose exact date Western and Chinese scholars had struggled to pin down. The date Nivison determined is now widely accepted by many Sinologists, and even those who disagree with Nivison acknowledge the original and provocative nature of his work. The final book that Nivison published in his lifetime, The Riddle of the Bamboo Annals (2009), is concerned with this topic, and Nivison continued to work in this area after his retirement from Stanford. (An earlier version of this obituary inaccurately attributed to Nivison the identification of a conjunction of the planets mentioned in the Bamboo Annals with the conjunction of 1059 BCE. This identification was actually made by a former student of Nivison’s, David Pankenier. I regret the misattribution. For Nivison’s views on this topic, see David S. Nivison and Kevin D. Pang, “Astronomical Evidence for the ‘Bamboo Annals’ Chronicle of Early Xia,” Early China 15 [1990]: 87-95, 97-196.)

The preceding sketch cannot do justice to the full range of Nivison’s interests, which included oracle bone inscriptions (the earliest surviving form of Chinese writing, and the hardest to interpret), the ethics of Chinese communism, and English-language poetry. He (along with Philip J. Ivanhoe) were also early pioneers in the development of computerized concordances for Chinese texts. As a person, Nivison was tall, reserved, and distinguished, a Western version of a Confucian gentleman. However, like Confucius himself, he could display a whimsical sense of humor or a willingness to violate convention when it seemed appropriate. When the great political philosopher John Rawls gave a lecture at Stanford to a standing-room-only auditorium, Nivison showed up right before the start of the talk, due to a previous commitment. Rather than inconvenience people standing tightly together by the doorway, Nivison climbed in through an open, ground-floor window, in order to take an unoccupied spot further in the room. Unforgettable as a person and having left an indelible influence in many intellectual disciplines, David will be missed.