Ironies of oneness and difference : coherence in early Chinese thought : prolegomena to the study of Li / Brook Ziporyn.

Format:

• Book

Author/Creator:

• Ziporyn, Brook, 1964-

Series:

• SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• Li.
• Philosophy, Chinese.
• Truth--Coherence theory.

Physical Description:

ix, 323 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, [2012]

Summary:

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. Book jacket.

Contents:

• Chapter 1 Essences, Universals, and Omnipresence: Absolute Sameness and Difference 19
• Essences, Universals, Categories, Ideas: Simple Location and the Disjunction of Same and Different in Mainstream Western Philosophy 23
• Same and Different in Form and Matter 37
• Two Opposite Derivations of the Omnipresent 39
• Chapter 2 What is Coherence?: Chinese Paradigms 49
• Coherence as Opposed to Law, Rule, Principle, Pattern: Harmony Versus Repeatability 63
• Is White Horse Horse? 71
• Qian Mu's Pendulum 77
• Ironic and Non-Ironic Coherence 84
• Chapter 3 Non-Ironic Coherence and Negotiable Continuity 89
• Coherence and Omniavailability of Value in Confucius and Mencius 89
• Coherence and Heaven in the Analects 94
• Ritual Versus Law: Cultural Grammar 103
• Rectification of Names: Negotiated Identity as a Function of Ritual 111
• Classes and Types in Mencius 114
• Omnipresence in Mencius 127
• Transition to Ironic Coherence: Qi-Omnipresence and the Empty Center in Pre-Ironic Proto-Daoism 131
• Chapter 4 Ironic Coherence and the Discovery of the "Yin" 139
• The Laozi Tradition: Desiring W/holes 139
• Overview of Ironic Coherence in the Laozi 142
• The Five Meanings of the Unhewn: Omnipresence and Ironic Coherence in the Laozi 146
• Zhuangzi's Wild Card: Thing as Perspective 162
• Using the Wild Card 183
• The Wild Card against Both Objective Truth and Subjective Solipsism 188
• Conclusion to Chapter Four: Ironic Coherence 195
• Chapter 5 Non-Ironic Responses to Ironic Coherence in Xunzi and the Record of Ritual 199
• Xunzi and the Regulation of Sameness and Difference 199
• Omnipresence and Coherence in Xunzi 215
• Two Texts from the Record of Ritual (Liji): "The Great Learning," and "The Doctrine of the Mean" 220
• Chapter 6 The Yin-Yang Compromise 229
• Yin-Yang Theism in Dong Zhongshu: The Metastasis of Harmony and Irony 250
• An Alternate Yin-Yang Divination System: Yang Xiong's Taixuanjing 255.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

• 9781438442891
• 1438442890

OCLC:

754908700