Why Traditional Chinese Philosophy Still Matters PDF Download

Author: Ming Dong Gu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351356003
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Traditional Chinese philosophy, if engaged at all, is often regarded as an object of antiquated curiosity and dismissed as unimportant in the current age of globalization. Written by a team of internationally renowned scholars, this book, however, challenges this judgement and offers an in-depth study of pre-modern Chinese philosophy from an interdisciplinary perspective. Exploring the relevance of traditional Chinese philosophy for the global age, it takes a comparative approach, analysing ancient Chinese philosophy in its relation to Western ideas and contemporary postmodernist theories. The conversation extends over a broad spectrum of philosophical areas and themes, ranging from metaphysics, hermeneutics, political theory, religion and aesthetics to specific philosophical schools including Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. By engaging many time-honoured philosophical issues from a comparative perspective, this book bridges the gap between Eastern and Western thought and emphasises the need for a newly fortified global humanism and a deeper appreciation of different philosophical and religious values in an age gripped by large-scale crises. Arguing that traditional Chinese philosophy has immediate relevance to the many challenges of modern life, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Asian Philosophy and Asian Studies in general.

Author: Daniel Dingxiong Ding
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527559890
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
This book traces Chinese technical communication from its beginnings, investigating how it began and the major factors that shaped its practice. It also looks at the major philosophical and historical traditions in Chinese technical communication, and how historical and philosophical threads play out in contemporary Chinese technical communication practice. In considering such issues, the book gives attention to some of the major classical Chinese texts, but treats them as artefacts of technical communication. It explores the roots of Chinese technical communication, reviews traditional philosophy that has shaped such practice, discusses the key links in the history of Chinese technical communication, and recounts historical roots and contemporary practice side by side. It provides the reader with compelling perspectives on the historical roots of Chinese technical communication.

Author: Robert H. Scott
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143849243X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
This anthology provides an accessible introduction to East Asian Buddhism, focusing specifically on China, Korea, and Japan. It begins with a detailed historical introduction that includes an overview of the development of the various schools of Buddhism in East Asia and traces the transmission of Buddhism from Northwest India to China in the first century CE, and then to Korea and Japan in the fourth and sixth centuries CE. The first part of the book contains five chapters that offer creative pedagogies that can help college professors infuse East Asian Buddhism into their courses. The second part includes six interdisciplinary chapters that explore thematic links between East Asian Buddhism and religious studies, philosophy, film studies, literature, and environmental studies.

Author: Ming Dong Gu
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000916359
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
This book initiates a paradigm shift away from Zen/Chan as quintessentially Buddhist and examines what makes Chan thought and practice unique and original through an interdisciplinary investigation of the nature and rationale of Chan and its enlightenment. Exploring how enlightenment is achieved through Chan practice and how this differs from other forms of Buddhism, the book offers an entirely new view of Chan that embraces historical scholarship, philosophical inquiry, textual analysis, psychological studies, Chan practice, and neuroscientific research and locates the core of Chan in its founder Huineng’s theory of no thinking which creatively integrates the Taoist ideas of zuowang (forgetting in seated meditation) and xinzhai (fast of heart-mind) with his personal experiences of enlightenment. It concludes that Chan is the crystallization of an innovative synthesis of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism as well as other resources of somatic and spiritual cultivation, and that enlightenment is a momentary return to the mental state of a baby before birth. This book will appeal to students and scholars of religion, philosophy, and neuroscience. It will also offer new insights to thinkers, writers, artists, therapists and neuroscientists as well as those practicing Zen, Mindfulness, and psychotherapy.

Author: Karyn L. Lai
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521846462
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
This comprehensive introductory textbook to early Chinese philosophy covers a range of philosophical traditions which arose during the Spring and Autumn (722-476 BCE) and Warring States (475-221 BCE) periods in China, including Confucianism, Mohism, Daoism, and Legalism. It considers concepts, themes and argumentative methods of early Chinese philosophy and follows the development of some ideas in subsequent periods, including the introduction of Buddhism into China. The book examines key issues and debates in early Chinese philosophy, cross-influences between its traditions and interpretations by scholars up to the present day. The discussion draws upon both primary texts and secondary sources, and there are suggestions for further reading. This will be an invaluable guide for all who are interested in the foundations of Chinese philosophy and its richness and continuing relevance.

Author: Benjamin Wai-ming Ng
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9813362286
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
This book represents an ambitious effort to bring leading Yijing scholars together to examine the globalisation and localisation of the 'Book of Changes' from cross-cultural and comparative perspectives. It focuses on how the Yijing has been used to support ideologies, converted into knowledge, and assimilated into global cultures in the modern period, transported from the Sinosphere to British, American and French cultural traditions, travelling from East Asia to Europe and the United States. The book provides conceptualised narratives and cross-cultural analyses of the global popularisation and local assimilation of the Yijing, highlighting the transformation and application of the Yijing in different cultural traditions, and demonstrating how it acquired different meanings and took on different roles in the context of a global setting. In presenting a novel contribution to understandings of the multifaceted nature of the Yijing, this book is essential reading for scholars and students interested in the 'Classic of Changes'. It is also a useful reference for those studying Chinese culture, Asian philosophy, East Asian studies, and translation studies.

Author: Richard Nisbett
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1857884191
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
When Richard Nisbett showed an animated underwater scene to his American students, they zeroed in on a big fish swimming among smaller fish. Japanese subjects, on the other hand, made observations about the background environment...and the different "seeings" are a clue to profound underlying cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians. As Professor Nisbett shows in The Geography of Thought people actually think - and even see - the world differently, because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China, and that have survived into the modern world. As a result, East Asian thought is "holistic" - drawn to the perceptual field as a whole, and to relations among objects and events within that field. By comparison to Western modes of reasoning, East Asian thought relies far less on categories, or on formal logic; it is fundamentally dialectic, seeking a "middle way" between opposing thoughts. By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to categories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behaviour.

Author: Yu Sang
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004431586
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Xiong Shili 熊十力(1885-1968) was one of the most important Chinese philosophers of the twentieth century, and a founding figure of the modern New Confucian school of philosophy. At the core of his metaphysics is one of the key conceptual polarities in traditional Chinese philosophy: Reality (ti 體) and Function (yong 用). Xiong Shili’s Understanding of Reality and Function, 1920-1937 presents a detailed examination and analysis of the development of Xiong Shili’s conception of Reality and Function between 1920 and 1937. While scholars have tended to focus on Xiong’s mature ti-yong philosophical system, which was initially established in the early 1930s, this study explains how that system was gradually formed, providing a more comprehensive basis for understanding the development of Xiong’s philosophical thought in later periods.

Author: Alexus McLeod
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197505937
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Mental illness complicates views of agency and moral responsibility in ethics. Particularly for traditions and theories focused on self-cultivation, such as Aristotelian virtue ethics and many systems of ethics in early Chinese philosophy, mental illness offers powerful challenges. Can the mentally ill person cultivate herself and achieve a level of virtue, character, or thriving similar to the mentally healthy? Does mental illness result from failures in self-cultivation, failure in social institutions or rulership, or other features of human activity? Can a life complicated by struggles with mental illness be a good one? The Dao of Madness investigates the role of mental illness, specifically "madness" (kuang), in discussions of self-cultivation and ideal personhood in early Chinese philosophical and medical thought, and the ways in which early Chinese thinkers probed difficult questions surrounding mental health. Alexus McLeod explores three central accounts: the early "traditional" views of those, including Confucians, taking madness to be the result of character flaw; the challenge from Zhuangists celebrating madness as a freedom from standard norms connected to knowledge; and the "medicalization" of madness within the naturalistic shift of Han Dynasty thought. Understanding views on madness in the ancient world helps reveal key features of Chinese thinkers' conceptions of personhood and agency, as well as their accounts of ideal activity. Further, it exposes the motivations behind the origins of the medical tradition, and of the key links between philosophy and medicine in early Chinese thought. The early Chinese medical tradition has crucial and understudied connections to early philosophy, connections which this volume works to uncover.

Author: Yang Guorong
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004396306
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Professor Yang Guorong is one of the foremost living philosophers in China, and is widely known for the development of his “concrete metaphysics.” In Philosophical Horizons Yang offers penetrating discussions of some of the most important issues in modern philosophy—especially those topics related to comparative and Chinese philosophy. Drawing freely and adroitly on Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist texts, while staging a dialogue with Western thinkers such as from Kant and Hegel to Marx, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, Yang shows how contemporary Chinese philosophy has adopted, localized, and critically developed Western ideas alongside traditional Chinese concepts.