On the Epistemology of the Senses in Early Chinese Thought

On the Epistemology of the Senses in Early Chinese Thought

Author: Jane Geaney

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2002-01-01

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780824825577

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By departing from traditional sinological approaches, this method uncovers a detailed picture of certain shared underlying views of sense perception in the Lun Yu, the Mozi (including the Neo Mohist Canons), the Xunzi, the Mencius, the Laozi and the Zhuangzi."--BOOK JACKET.


Emotions in Asian Thought

Emotions in Asian Thought

Author: Joel Marks

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1995-01-01

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780791422243

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Treats the nature and ethical significance of emotions from a comparative cultural perspective emphasizing Asian traditions.


Ritual and Religion in the Xunzi

Ritual and Religion in the Xunzi

Author: T. C. Kline III

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2014-06-12

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1438451962

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Xunzi, a founding figure in the Confucian tradition, is one of the world's great philosophers and theorists of religion. For much of the last century, his work has been seen largely as critical of religion, particularly the popular beliefs and invocations of supernatural forces that underpin so many religious rituals. Contributors to this volume challenge this view and offer a more sophisticated picture of Xunzi. He emerges not as critic, but rather as an adherent of religion who seeks to give religious practices meaning even though many religious beliefs are mistaken or self-serving. Each essay offers a powerful illustration of Xunzi as both a religious devotee and as a philosopher of religion, drawing on a wide array of disciplines and methodologies.


Different Beasts

Different Beasts

Author: Sonya N. Ã-zbey

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-11-26

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0197686389

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Different Beasts explores conceptions of animality and humanity as they emerge in the writings of Spinoza and in the ancient Chinese text known as the Zhuangzi. The project thus brings together works from distant and different pasts to bear on debates regarding the human-animal binary in its many constructions. It also investigates what is at stake in the formation of responsible comparison--one that is contextually grounded and refined in detail--to understand how the complex machinery behind the human-animal binary operates in different philosophical systems.


Ironies of Oneness and Difference

Ironies of Oneness and Difference

Author: Brook Ziporyn

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-09-20

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1438442904

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Providing a bracing expansion of horizons, this book displays the unsuspected range of human thinking on the most basic categories of experience. The way in which early Chinese thinkers approached concepts such as one and many, sameness and difference, self and other, and internal and external stand in stark contrast to the way parallel concepts entrenched in much of modern thinking developed in Greek and European thought. Brook Ziporyn traces the distinctive and surprising philosophical journeys found in the works of the formative Confucian and Daoist thinkers back to a prevailing set of assumptions that tends to see questions of identity, value, and knowledge—the subject matter of ontology, ethics, and epistemology in other traditions—as all ultimately relating to questions about coherence in one form or another. Mere awareness of how many different ways human beings can think and have thought about these categories is itself a game changer for our own attitudes toward what is thinkable for us. The actual inhabitation and mastery of these alternative modes of thinking is an even greater adventure in intellectual and experiential expansion.


Language as Bodily Practice in Early China

Language as Bodily Practice in Early China

Author: Jane Geaney

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2018-03-01

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1438468628

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Jane Geaney argues that early Chinese conceptions of speech and naming cannot be properly understood if viewed through the dominant Western philosophical tradition in which language is framed through dualisms that are based on hierarchies of speech and writing, such as reality/appearance and one/many. Instead, early Chinese texts repeatedly create pairings of sounds and various visible things. This aural/visual polarity suggests that texts from early China treat speech as a bodily practice that is not detachable from its use in everyday experience. Firmly grounded in ideas about bodies from the early texts themselves, Geaney's interpretation offers new insights into three key themes in these texts: the notion of speakers' intentions (yi), the physical process of emulating exemplary people, and Confucius's proposal to rectify names (zhengming).


Concepts of Philosophy in Asia and the Islamic World

Concepts of Philosophy in Asia and the Islamic World

Author: Raji C. Steineck

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-05-07

Total Pages: 760

ISBN-13: 9004360115

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The contributions to Concepts of Philosophy in Asia and the Islamic World reflect upon the problems implied in the received notions of philosophy in the respective scholarly literatures. They ask whether, and for what reasons, a text should be categorized as a philosophical text (or excluded from the canon of philosophy), and what this means for the concept of philosophy. The focus on texts and textual corpora is central because it makes authors expose their claims and arguments in direct relation to specific sources, and discourages generalized reflections on the characteristics of, for example, Japanese culture or the Indian mind. The volume demonstrates that close and historically informed readings are the sine qua non in discussing what philosophy is in Asia and the Islamic world, just as much as with regard to Western literature Contributors are Yoko Arisaka, Wolfgang Behr, Thomas Fröhlich, Lisa Indraccolo, Paulus Kaufmann, Iso Kern, Ralf Müller, Gregor Paul, Lisa Raphals, Fabian Schäfer, Ori Sela, Rafael Suter, Christian Uhl, Viatcheslav Vetrov, Yvonne Schulz Zinda, and Nicholas Zufferey.


Sensing the Past

Sensing the Past

Author: Mark Michael Smith

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9780520254954

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"Smith's history of the sensate is destined to precipitate a revolution in our understanding of the sensibilities that underpinned the mentalities of past epochs."--David Howes, author of Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory "Mark M. Smith presents a far-ranging essay on the history of the senses that serves simultaneously as a good introduction to the historiography. If one feels in danger of sensory overload from this growing body of scholarship, Smith's piece is a useful preventive."--Leigh E. Schmidt, author of Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality "This is a masterful overview. The history of the senses has been a frontier field for a while now. Mark Smith draws together what we know, with an impressive sensory range, and encourages further work. A really exciting survey."--Peter N. Stearns, author of American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety "Who would ever have guessed that a book on the history of the senses--seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling--could be informative, thought-provoking, and, at the same time, most entertaining? Ranging in both time and locale, Mark Smith's Sensing the Past makes even the philosophy about the senses from ancient times to now both learned and exciting. This work will draw scholars into under-recognized subjects and lay readers into a world we simply but unwisely take for granted."--Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South "Mark M. Smith has a good record of communicating his research to a broad constituency within and beyond the academy . . . This will be required reading for anyone addressing sensory history."--Penelope Gouk, author of Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth Century England "This is a fine cultural history of the body, which takes Western and Eastern traditions and their texts quite seriously. Smith views a history of the senses not only from 'below' but places it squarely in the historical imagination. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers."--Sander L. Gilman, author of Difference and Pathology


Empiricisms

Empiricisms

Author: Barry Allen

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-11-02

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 0197508944

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In this sweeping volume of comparative philosophy and intellectual history, Barry Allen reassesses the values of experience and experiment in European and world traditions. His work traces the history of empirical philosophy from its birth in Greek medicine to its emergence as a philosophy of modern science. He surveys medical empiricism, Aristotlean and Epicurean empiricism, the empiricism of Gassendi and Locke, logical empiricism, radical empiricism, transcendental empiricism, and varieties of anti-empiricism from Parmenides to Wilfrid Sellars. Throughout this extensive intellectual history, Allen builds an argument in three parts. A richly detailed account of history's empiricisms in Part One establishes a context in Part Two for reconsidering the work of the radical empiricists--William James, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Gilles Deleuze, each treated in a dedicated chapter. What is "radical" about them is their effort to return empiricism from epistemology to the ontology and natural philosophy where it began. In Part Three, Allen sets empirical philosophy in conversation with Chinese tradition, considering technological, scientific, medical, and alchemical sources, as well as selected Confucian, Daoist, and Mohist classics. The work shows how philosophical reflection on experience and a profound experimental practice coexist in traditional China with no interaction or even awareness of each other, slipping over each other instead of intertwining as they did in European history, a difference Allen attributes to a different understanding of the value of knowledge. Allen's book recovers empiricism's neglected, multi-textured contexts, and elucidates the enduring value of experience, to arrive at an idea of what is living and dead in philosophical empiricism.


Ethics in Early China

Ethics in Early China

Author: Chris Fraser

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press

Published: 2011-08-01

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 9888028936

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Early Chinese ethics has attracted increasing scholarly and social attention in recent years as the virtue ethics movement in Western philosophy has sparked renewed interest in Confucianism and Daoism. At the same time, intellectuals and social commentators throughout greater China have looked to the Chinese ethical tradition for resources to evaluate the role of traditional cultural values in the contemporary world. Publications on early Chinese ethics have tended to focus inordinate and uncritical attention toward Confucianism, while relatively neglecting Daoism, Mohism, and shared features of Chinese moral psychology. This book aims to rectify this imbalance by including essays on Daoism and Confucianism, early Chinese moral psychology including widely neglected views of the Mohists and newly reconstructed accounts of the "embodied virtue" tradition, which ties ethics to physical cultivation. The volume also includes essays addressing the broader question of the value of comparative philosophy generally and of studying early Chinese ethics in particular. The book should have a wide readership among professional scholars and graduate students in Chinese philosophy, specifically Confucian ethics, Daoist ethics, and comparative ethics. Chris Fraseris associate professor of philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. Dan Robins is assistant professor of Chinese philosophy at Stockton College of New Jersey.Timothy O'Learyis associate professor of philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. Contributors include Roger Ames, Stephen Angle, Sin yee Chan, Jiwei Ci, Chris Fraser, Jane Geaney, William Haines, Chad Hansen, Manyul Im, P.J. Ivanhoe, Franklin Perkins, Lisa Raphals, Dan Robins, Henry Rosemont, Jr., David Wong, and Lee Yearley.