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The Zhuangzi is a deliciously protean text: it is concerned not
only with personal realization, but also (albeit incidentally) with
social and political order. In many ways the Zhuangzi established a
unique literary and philosophical genre of its own, and while
clearly the work of many hands, it is one of the finest pieces
ofliterature in the classical Chinese corpus. It employs every
trope and literary device available to set off rhetorically charged
flashes of insight into the most unrestrained way to live one's
life, free from oppressive, conventional judgments and values. The
essays presented here constitute an attempt by a distinguished
community of international scholars to provide a variety of
exegeses of one of the Zhuangzi's most frequently rehearsed
anecdotes, often referred to as "the Happy Fish debate." The
editors have brought together essays from the broadest possible
compass of scholarship, offering interpretations that range from
formal logic to alternative epistemologies to transcendental
mysticism. Many were commissioned by the editors and appear for the
first time. Some of them have been available in other
languages-Chinese, Japanese, German, Spanish-and were translated
especially for this anthology. And several older essays were chosen
for the quality and variety of their arguments, formulated over
years of engagement by their authors. All, however, demonstrate
that the Zhuangzi as a text and as a philosophy is never one thing;
indeed, it has always been and continues to be, many different
things to many different people.
Joseph Grange's beautifully written book provides a unique
synthesis of two major figures of world philosophy, John Dewey and
Confucius, and points the way to a global philosophy based on
American and Confucian values. Grange concentrates on the major
themes of experience, felt intelligence, and culture to make the
connections between these two giants of Western and Eastern
thought. He explains why the Chinese called Dewey "A Second
Confucius," and deepens our understanding of Confucius's concepts
of the way (dao) of human excellence (ren). The important
dimensions of American and Chinese cultural philosophy are welded
into an argument that calls for the liberation of what is finest in
both traditions. The work gives a new appreciation of fundamental
issues facing Chinese and American relations and brings the
opportunities and dangers of globalization into focus.
Sun Bins' Art of Warfare is an essential text of Chinese military
philosophy and of strategy in general. This book, lost for over two
thousand years and rediscovered only in 1972, has not yet reached
the prominence of Sunzi's (Sun-tzu) The Art of Warfare, which is
the best-known military treatise in the world. Sun Bin's work is an
indispensable companion to the work of Sunzi, who is believed to be
his ancestor, but deserves to be better known in its own right,
both philosophically and historically. Here, noted sinologists D.C.
Lau and Roger T. Ames offer an admirably lucid translation, and
provide an introduction examining the life, times, and original
philosophical contributions of Sun Bin. Sun Bin, advisor to King
Wei of the state of Qi, worked and wrote during the mid-fourth
century B.C.E. during China's Warring States period. It was a time
of unprecedented violence; without a central national authority,
nation-states fought fiercely amongst one another. New technologies
made fighting more deadly, so that between the mid-fourth and
mid-third centuries B.C.E, the number of battlefield casualties
increased tenfold. Sun Bin's work is the key to understanding the
physical and intellectual revolution that made such "progress" in
the efficiency of warfare possible.
The ""Zhongyong"" - translated here as ""Focusing the Familiar""
has been regarded as a document of enormous wisdom for more than
two millennia and is one of Confucianism's most sacred and seminal
texts. It achieved truly canonical preeminence when it became one
of the Four Books compiled and annotated by the Southern Song
dynasty philosopher Zhu Xi (1130-1200). Within the compass of world
literature, the influence of these books (Analects of Confucius,
Great Learning, Zhongyong, and Mencius) on the Sinitic world of
East Asia has been no less than the Bible and the Qu'ran on Western
civilization. With this translation David Hall and Roger Ames seek
to provide a distinctly philosophical interpretation of the
Zhongyong, remaining attentive to the semantic and conceptual
nuances of the text to account for its central place within
classical Chinese literature. They present the text in such a way
as to provide Western philosophers and other intellectuals access
to a set of interpretations and arguments that offer insights into
issues and concerns common to both Chinese and Western thinkers.
The "Zhongyong" - translated here as "Focusing the Familiar" has
been regarded as a document of enormous wisdom for more than two
millennia and is one of Confucianism's most sacred and seminal
texts. It achieved truly canonical preeminence when it became one
of the Four Books compiled and annotated by the Southern Song
dynasty philosopher Zhu Xi (1130-1200). Within the compass of world
literature, the influence of these books (Analects of Confucius,
Great Learning, Zhongyong, and Mencius) on the Sinitic world of
East Asia has been no less than the Bible and the Qu'ran on Western
civilization. With this translation David Hall and Roger Ames seek
to provide a distinctly philosophical interpretation of the
Zhongyong, remaining attentive to the semantic and conceptual
nuances of the text to account for its central place within
classical Chinese literature. They present the text in such a way
as to provide Western philosophers and other intellectuals access
to a set of interpretations and arguments that offer insights into
issues and concerns common to both Chinese and Western thinkers.
This book continues a comparative project begun with the authors'
Thinking Through Confucius and Anticipating China. It continues the
comparative discussions by focusing upon three concepts -- self,
truth, transcendence -- which best illuminate the distinctive
characters of the two cultures. "Self" specifies the meaning of the
human subject, "truth" considers that subject's manner of relating
to the world of which it is a part, and "transcendence" raises the
issue as to whether the self/world relationship is grounded in
something other than the elements resourced immediately in self and
world. Considered together, the discussions of these concepts
advertise in a most dramatic fashion the intellectual barriers
currently existing between Chinese and Western thinkers. More
importantly, these discussions reformulate Chinese and Western
vocabularies in a manner that will enhance the possibilities of
intercultural communication.
In the light of Chinese prosody and various mutually illuminating
major cases from the original English, Chinese, French, Japanese
and German classical literary texts, the book explores the
possibility of discovering "a road not taken" within the road
well-trodden in literature. In an approach of "what Wittgenstein
calls criss-crossing," this monographic study, the first ever of
this nature, as Roger T. Ames points out in the Foreword, also
emphasizes a pivotal "recognition that these Chinese values
[revealed in the book] are immediately relevant to the Western
narrative as well"; the book demonstrates, in other words, how such
a "criss-crossing" approach would be unequivocally possible as long
as our critical attention be adequately turned to or pivoted upon
the "trivial" matters, a posteriori, in accordance with the live
syntactic-prosodic context, such as pauses, stresses, phonemes,
function words, or the at once text-enlivened and text-enlivening
ambiguity of "parts of speech," which often vary or alter
simultaneously according to and against any definitive definition
or set category a priori. This issue pertains to any literary text
across cultures because no literary text would ever be possible if
it were not, for instance, literally enlivened by the otherwise
overlooked "meaningless" function words or phonemes; the texts
simultaneously also enliven these "meaningless" elements and often
turn them surreptitiously into sometimes serendipitously meaningful
and beautiful sea-change-effecting "les mots justes." Through the
immeasurable and yet often imperceptible influences of these
exactly "right words," our literary texts, such as a poem, could
thus not simply "be" but subtly "mean" as if by mere means of its
simple, rich, and naturally worded being, truly a special "word
picture" of das Ding an sich. Describable metaphorically as "museum
effect" and "symphonic tapestry," a special synaesthetic impact
could also likely result from such les-mots-justes-facilitated
subtle and yet phenomenal sea changes in the texts.
Tianxia—conventionally translated as "all-under-Heaven"—in
everyday Chinese parlance simply means "the world." But tianxia is
also a geopolitical term found in canonical writings that has a
deeper historical and philosophical significance. Although there
are many understandings of tianxia in this literature,
interpretations within the Chinese process cosmology generally
begin with an ecological understanding of intra-national relations
that acknowledge the mutuality and interdependence of all economic
and political activity. This volume contextualizes the tianxia
vision of geopolitical order within a variety of strategies drawn
from a broad spectrum of cultures and peoples: Buddhist, Islamic,
Indian, African, Confucian, European. The conversation among the
contributors is guided by several central questions: Is tianxia the
only model of cosmopolitanism? Are there ideas and ideals
comparable to tianxia that exist in other cultures? What
alternative perspectives of global justice have inspired Western,
Indian, Islamic, Buddhist, and African cultural traditions? The
fundamental premise here is that in order for a planetary tianxia
system to be relevant and significant for the present time and for
our vision of the future, it must acknowledge the plurality of
moral ideals defining the world’s cultures while at the same time
seek practical ways to formulate a minimalist morality that can
provide the solidarity needed to bring the world’s people
together.
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Responsibility (Hardcover, New)
Barbara Darling-Smith; Contributions by Roger T. Ames, Thomas M. Chappell, M. David Eckel, Anna Lannstroem, …
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R3,722
Discovery Miles 37 220
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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In this book philosophers, scholars of religion, and activists
address the theme of responsibility. Barbara Darling-Smith brings
together an enlightening collection of essays that analyze the
ethics of responsibility, its relational nature, and its global
struggle. With references to Homer's the Iliad and Buddhist
teachings, these essays demonstrate that while selfhood is an
illusion, there is still a conventional self that must be held
responsible. This book finds the underlying distinctions between
ultimate and conventional understandings of selfhood, which lead to
variations on the role of responsibility in the community and
government. With essays from CEOs to historical theologians,
Responsibility offers a variety of perspectives that will captivate
the interest of philosophers and scholars of ethnics and religion.
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Responsibility (Paperback)
Barbara Darling-Smith; Contributions by Roger T. Ames, Thomas M. Chappell, M. David Eckel, Anna Lannstroem, …
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R1,686
Discovery Miles 16 860
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
In this book philosophers, scholars of religion, and activists
address the theme of responsibility. Barbara Darling-Smith brings
together an enlightening collection of essays that analyze the
ethics of responsibility, its relational nature, and its global
struggle. With references to Homer's the Iliad and Buddhist
teachings, these essays demonstrate that while selfhood is an
illusion, there is still a conventional self that must be held
responsible. This book finds the underlying distinctions between
ultimate and conventional understandings of selfhood, which lead to
variations on the role of responsibility in the community and
government. With essays from CEOs to historical theologians,
Responsibility offers a variety of perspectives that will captivate
the interest of philosophers and scholars of ethnics and religion.
|
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