A History of Classical Chinese Thought


Book Description

Li Zehou is widely regarded as one of China’s most influential contemporary thinkers. He has produced influential theories of the development of Chinese thought and the place of aesthetics in Chinese ethics and value theory. This book is the first English-language translation of Li Zehou’s work on classical Chinese thought. It includes chapters on the classical Chinese thinkers, including Confucius, Mozi, Laozi, Sunzi, Xunzi and Zhuangzi, and also on later eras and thinkers such as Dong Zhongshu in the Han Dynasty and the Song-Ming Neo-Confucians. The essays in this book not only discuss these historical figures and their ideas, but also consider their historical significance, and how key themes from these early schools reappeared in and shaped later periods and thinkers. Taken together, they highlight the breadth of Li Zehou’s scholarship and his syncretic approach—his explanations of prominent thinkers and key periods in Chinese intellectual history blend ideas from both the Chinese and Western canons, while also drawing on contemporary thinkers in both traditions. The book also includes an introduction written by the translator that helpfully explains the significance of Li Zehou’s work and its prospects for fostering cross-cultural dialogue with Western philosophy. A History of Chinese Classical Thought will be of interest to advanced students and scholars interested in Chinese philosophy, comparative philosophy, and Chinese intellectual and social history.




Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy


Book Description

This book is an introduction in the very best sense of the word. It provides the beginner with an accurate, sophisticated, yet accessible account, and offers new insights and challenging perspectives to those who have more specialized knowledge. Focusing on the period in Chinese philosophy that is surely most easily approachable and perhaps is most important, it ranges over of rich set of competing options. It also, with admirable self-consciousness, presents a number of daring attempts to relate those options to philosophical figures and movements from the West. I recommend it very highly.--Lee H. Yearley, Walter Y. Evans-Wentz Professor, Religious Studies, Stanford University




Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (Second Edition)


Book Description

This new edition offers expanded selections from the works of Kongzi (Confucius), Mengzi (Mencius), Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), and Xunzi (Hsun Tzu); two new works, the dialogues 'Robber Zhi' and 'White Horse'; a concise general introduction; brief introductions to, and selective bibliographies for, each work; and four appendices that shed light on important figures, periods, texts, and terms in Chinese thought.




The World of Thought in Ancient China


Book Description

The center of this prodigious work of scholarship is a fresh examination of the range of Chinese culture thought during the formative period of Chinese culture. Benjamin Schwartz looks at the surviving texts of this period with a particular focus on the range of diversity to be found in them. While emphasizing the problematic and complex nature of this thought he also considers views which stress the unity of Chinese culture. Attention is accorded to pre-Confucian texts, to the evolution of early Confucianism, to Mo-Tzu, to the Taoists the legalists, the Ying-Yang school, the five classics as well as to intellectual issues which cut across the conventional classification of schools. The main focus is on the high cultural texts, but Mr. Schwartz also explores the question of the relationship of these texts to the vast realm of popular culture.




Heaven and Earth Are Not Humane


Book Description

That bad things happen to good people was as true in early China as it is today. Franklin Perkins uses this observation as the thread by which to trace the effort by Chinese thinkers of the Warring States Period (c.475-221 BCE), a time of great conflict and division, to seek reconciliation between humankind and the world. Perkins provides rich new readings of classical Chinese texts and reflects on their significance for Western philosophical discourse.




Chinese Philosophy of History


Book Description

Challenging the Eurocentric misconception that the philosophy of history is a Western invention, this book reconstructs Chinese thought and offers the first systematic treatment of classical Chinese philosophy of history. Dawid Rogacz charts the development from pre-imperial Confucian philosophy of history, the Warring States period and the Han dynasty through to the neo-Confucian philosophy of the Tang and Song era and finally to the Ming and Qing dynasties. Revealing underexplored areas of Chinese thought, he provides Western readers with new insight into original texts and the ideas of over 40 Chinese philosophers, including Mencius, Shang Yang, Dong Zhongshu, Wang Chong, Liu Zongyuan, Shao Yong, Li Zhi, Wang Fuzhi and Zhang Xuecheng. This vast interpretive body is compared with the main premises of Western philosophy of history in order to open new lines of inquiry and directions for comparative study. Clarifying key ideas in the Chinese tradition that have been misrepresented or shoehorned to fit Western definitions, Rogacz offers an important reconsideration of how Chinese philosophers have understood history.




A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought


Book Description

This ambitious book presents a new interpretation of Chinese thought guided both by a philosopher's sense of mystery and by a sound philosophical theory of meaning. That dual goal, Hansen argues, requires a unified translation theory. It must provide a single coherent account of the issues that motivated both the recently untangled Chinese linguistic analysis and the familiar moral-political disputes. Hansen's unified approach uncovers a philosophical sophistication in Daoism that traditional accounts have overlooked.




The Poetics of Early Chinese Thought


Book Description

The modern imagination of classical Chinese thought has long been dominated by Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, and other so-called "Masters" of the Warring States period. Michael Hunter argues that this approach neglects the far more central role of poetry, and the Shijing (Classic of Poetry) in particular, in the formation of the philosophical tradition. Through a new reading of its ideology and poetics, Hunter reestablishes the Shijing as a work of major intellectual-historical significance. The Poetics of Early Chinese Thought demonstrates how Shi poetry weaves a vision of society united at every level by the innate and universal impulse to come home. The Shi immersed early thinkers in a world of movement and flow in order to teach them that the most powerful current of all was the gravitational pull of a virtuous king, without whom people can never truly feel at home. Hunter traces the profound influence of the Shi ideology across numerous sources of classical Chinese thought, which he recasts as a network centered on the Shi. Reframing the tradition in this way reveals how poetry shaped ancient Chinese thinkers' conception of the world and their place within it. This book offers both a sweeping critique of how classical Chinese thought is commonly understood and a powerful new way of studying it.




The Art of Chinese Philosophy


Book Description

Goldin thus begins the book by asking the basic question "What are we reading?" while also considering why it has been so rarely asked. Yet far from denigrating Chinese philosophy, he argues that liberating these texts from the mythic idea that they are the product of a single great mind only improves our understanding and appreciation. By no means does a text require single and undisputed authorship to be meaningful; nor is historicism the only legitimate interpretive stance. The first chapter takes up a hallmark of Chinese philosophy that demands a Western reader's cognizance: its preference for non-deductive argumentation. Chinese philosophy is an art (hence the title) he demonstrates, more than it is a rigorous logical method. Then comes the core of the book, eight chapters devoted to the eight philosophical texts divided into three parts: Philosophy of Heaven, Philosophy of the Way, and Two Titans at the End of an Age. .




An Outline of the History of Chinese Thought by Hu Shih


Book Description

This book presents the syllabus of Hu Shih’s course on the History of Chinese Thought, which he taught at Harvard University from 1944 to 1945, and has been transcribed from his (more than 1500) hand-written notes. This book focuses on Hu Shih’s in-depth study and interpretation of Chinese intellectual history and philosophy, etc. It also distills the development of China’s long and complex intellectual history over the past 3,000 years into a clear and succinct outline. Transcribing, collating and publishing this valuable hand-written manuscript for the first time, the book represents a truly unique historical document.