Ironies of oneness and difference

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 development in Greek and European thought. Brook Ziporyn traces the distinctive and surprising philosophical journey found in the works of the formative Confucian and Daoist thinkers back to a prevailing set of as sumptions 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 towards what is thinkable for us. The actual inhabitation and mastery of these alternative modes of thinking is an even greater adventure in intellectual and experiental expansion.

Year

2012

Language

English

Series

SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture

Publisher

State University of New York Press

Editions

1

Pages

333

ISBN

9781438442891

Data source: Wikidata