Summary
Brook Ziporyn's "Ironies of Oneness and Difference" argues that early Chinese thinkers, particularly Confucians and Daoists, conceptualized identity, value, and knowledge through the lens of coherence, differing significantly from Western philosophical traditions rooted in Greek and European thought. The book traces these thinkers' approaches to fundamental categories like one and many, sameness and difference, self and other, and internal and external.
Readers will gain an understanding of the diverse ways humans have conceived of these basic categories of experience, contrasting them with entrenched modern Western assumptions. The book offers an intellectual and experiential expansion by presenting alternative modes of thinking about concepts central to ontology, ethics, and epistemology.
Key concepts
- Coherence — The prevailing set of assumptions through which early Chinese thinkers related questions of identity, value, and knowledge.
- Oneness and Difference — Basic categories of experience explored by early Chinese thinkers in contrast to Western philosophical traditions.
- Sameness and Difference — Basic categories of experience explored by early Chinese thinkers in contrast to Western philosophical traditions.
- Self and Other — Basic categories of experience explored by early Chinese thinkers in contrast to Western philosophical traditions.
- Internal and External — Basic categories of experience explored by early Chinese thinkers in contrast to Western philosophical traditions.
From the book
Description: 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…
Snippet: Providing a bracing expansion of horizons, this book displays the unsuspected range of human thinking on the most basic categories of experience.