Download or read book Zhuangzi and Early Chinese Philosophy written by Steve Coutinho and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi (also known as Chuang Tzu), along with Confucius, Lao Tzu, and the Buddha, ranks among the most influential thinkers in the development of East Asian thought. His literary style is humorous and entertaining, yet the philosophical content is extraordinarily subtle and profound. This book introduces key topics in early Daoist philosophy. Drawing on several issues and methods in Western philosophy, from analytical philosophy to semiotics and hermeneutics, the author throws new light on the ancient Zhuangzi text. Engaging Daoism and contemporary Western philosophical logic, and drawing on new developments in our understanding of early Chinese culture, Coutinho challenges the interpretation of Zhuangzi as either a skeptic or a relativist, and instead seeks to explore his philosophy as emphasizing the ineradicable vagueness of language, thought and reality. This new interpretation of the Zhuangzi offers an important development in the understanding of Daoist philosophy, describing a world in flux in which things themselves are vague and inconsistent, and tries to show us a Way (a Dao) to negotiate through the shadows of a "chaotic" world.
Download or read book An Introduction to Daoist Philosophies written by Steve Coutinho and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steve Coutinho explores in detail the fundamental concepts of Daoist thought as represented in three early texts: the Laozi, the Zhuangzi, and the Liezi. Readers interested in philosophy yet unfamiliar with Daoism will gain a comprehensive understanding of these works from this analysis, and readers fascinated by ancient China who also wish to grasp its philosophical foundations will appreciate the clarity and depth of Coutinho’s explanations. Coutinho writes a volume for all readers, whether or not they have a background in philosophy or Chinese studies. A work of comparative philosophy, this volume also integrates the concepts and methods of contemporary philosophical discourse into a discussion of early Chinese thought. The resulting dialogue relates ancient Chinese thought to contemporary philosophical issues and uses modern Western ideas and approaches to throw new interpretive light on classical texts. Rather than function as historical curiosities, these works act as living philosophies in conversation with contemporary thought and experience. Coutinho respects the multiplicity of Daoist philosophies while also revealing a distinctive philosophical sensibility, and he provides clear explanations of these complex texts without resorting to oversimplification.
Download or read book Chuang Tzu Mystic Moralist and Social Reformer written by Zhuangzi and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-05-28 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chuang Tzu: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer is an ancient Chinese text from the late Warring States period. It contains anecdotes and tales that illustrate the relaxed nature of the perfect Taoist guru.
Download or read book Trying Not to Try written by Edward Slingerland and published by Crown. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deeply original exploration of the power of spontaneity—an ancient Chinese ideal that cognitive scientists are only now beginning to understand—and why it is so essential to our well-being Why is it always hard to fall asleep the night before an important meeting? Or be charming and relaxed on a first date? What is it about a politician who seems wooden or a comedian whose jokes fall flat or an athlete who chokes? In all of these cases, striving seems to backfire. In Trying Not To Try, Edward Slingerland explains why we find spontaneity so elusive, and shows how early Chinese thought points the way to happier, more authentic lives. We’ve long been told that the way to achieve our goals is through careful reasoning and conscious effort. But recent research suggests that many aspects of a satisfying life, like happiness and spontaneity, are best pursued indirectly. The early Chinese philosophers knew this, and they wrote extensively about an effortless way of being in the world, which they called wu-wei (ooo-way). They believed it was the source of all success in life, and they developed various strategies for getting it and hanging on to it. With clarity and wit, Slingerland introduces us to these thinkers and the marvelous characters in their texts, from the butcher whose blade glides effortlessly through an ox to the wood carver who sees his sculpture simply emerge from a solid block. Slingerland uncovers a direct line from wu-wei to the Force in Star Wars, explains why wu-wei is more powerful than flow, and tells us what it all means for getting a date. He also shows how new research reveals what’s happening in the brain when we’re in a state of wu-wei—why it makes us happy and effective and trustworthy, and how it might have even made civilization possible. Through stories of mythical creatures and drunken cart riders, jazz musicians and Japanese motorcycle gangs, Slingerland effortlessly blends Eastern thought and cutting-edge science to show us how we can live more fulfilling lives. Trying Not To Try is mind-expanding and deeply pleasurable, the perfect antidote to our striving modern culture.
Download or read book World Philosophies written by Ninian Smart and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World Philosophies presents in one volume a superb introduction to all the world’s major philosophical and religious traditions. Covering all corners of the globe, Ninian Smart’s work offers a comprehensive and global philosophical and religious picture. In this revised and expanded second edition, a team of distinguished scholars, assembled by the editor Oliver Leaman, have brought Ninian Smart’s masterpiece up to date for the twenty-first century. Chapters have been revised by experts in the field to include recent philosophical developments, and the book includes a new bibliographic guide to resources in world philosophies. A brand new introduction which celebrates the career and writings of Ninian Smart, and his contribution to the study of world religions, helps set the work in context.
Download or read book Beyond the Troubled Water of Shifei written by Lin Ma and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-06-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers the first focused study of the shifei debates of the Warring States period in ancient China and challenges the imposition of Western conceptual categories onto these debates. In recent decades, a growing concern in studies in Chinese intellectual history is that Chinese classics have been forced into systems of classification prevalent in Western philosophy and thus imperceptibly transformed into examples that echo Western philosophy. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel offer a methodology to counter this approach, and illustrate their method by carrying out a transcultural inquiry into the complexities involved in understanding shi and fei and their cognate phrases in the Warring States texts, the Zhuangzi in particular. The authors discuss important features of Zhuangzi’s stance with regard to language-meaning, knowledge-doubt, questioning, equalizing, and his well-known deconstruction of the discourse in ancient China on shifei. Ma and van Brakel suggest that shi and fei apply to both descriptive and prescriptive languages and do not presuppose any fact/value dichotomy, and thus cannot be translated as either true/false or right/wrong. Instead, shi and feican be grasped in terms of a pre-philosophical notion of fitting. Ma and van Brakel also highlight Zhuangzi’s idea of “walking-two-roads” as the most significant component of his stance. In addition, they argue that all of Zhuangzi’s positive recommendations are presented in a language whose meaning is not fixed and that every stance he is committed to remains subject to fundamental questioning as a way of life.
Download or read book The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy Methodologies written by Sor-hoon Tan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-08-25 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy Methodologies presents a new understanding of the changing methods used to study Chinese philosophy. By identifying the various different approaches and discussing the role, and significance of philosophical methods in the Chinese tradition, this collection identifies difficulties and exciting developments for scholars of Asian philosophy. Divided into four parts, the nature of Chinese philosophical thought is illuminated by discussing historical developments, current concerns and methodological challenges. Surveying recent methodological trends, this research companion explores and evaluates the methodologies that have been applied to Chinese philosophy. From these diverse angles, an international team of experts reflect on the considerations that enter their methodological choices and indicate new research directions. The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy Methodologies is an important contribution to the education of the next generation of Chinese philosophers.
Download or read book Ethics in the Zhuangzi written by Xiangnong Hu and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Skill and Mastery written by Karyn Lai and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-07-12 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Skill and Mastery: Philosophical Stories from the Zhuangzi presents an illuminating analysis of skill stories from the Zhuangzi, a 4th century BCE Daoist text. In this intriguing text that subverts conventional norms and pursuits, ordinary activities such as swimming, cicada-catching and wheelmaking are executed with such remarkable efficacy and spontaneity that they seem like magical feats. An international team of scholars explores these stories in their philosophical, historical and political contexts. Their analyses’ highlight the stories’underlying conceptions of agency, character and cultivation; and relevance to contemporary debates on human action and experience. The result is a valuable collection, opening up new lines of inquiry in comparative East-West philosophical debates on skill, cultivation and mastery, as well as cross-disciplinary debates in psychology, cognitive science and philosophy.
Download or read book Origins of Moral political Philosophy in Early China written by Tao Jiang and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new narrative and interpretative framework about the origins of moral-political philosophy that tracks how the three core normative values, humaneness, justice, and personal freedom, were formulated, reformulated, and contested by early Chinese philosophers in their effort to negotiate the relationship among three distinct domains, the personal, the familial, and the political. Such efforts took place as those thinkers were reimagining a new moral-political order, debating its guiding norms, and exploring possible sources within the context of an evolving understanding of He
Download or read book Genuine Pretending written by Hans-Georg Moeller and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genuine Pretending is an innovative and comprehensive new reading of the Zhuangzi that highlights the critical and therapeutic functions of satire and humor. Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio show how this Daoist classic, contrary to contemporary philosophical readings, distances itself from the pursuit of authenticity and subverts the dominant Confucianism of its time through satirical allegories and ironical reflections. With humor and parody, the Zhuangzi exposes the Confucian demand to commit to socially constructed norms as pretense and hypocrisy. The Confucian pursuit of sincerity establishes exemplary models that one is supposed to emulate. In contrast, the Zhuangzi parodies such venerated representations of wisdom and deconstructs the very notion of sagehood. Instead, it urges a playful, skillful, and unattached engagement with socially mandated duties and obligations. The Zhuangzi expounds the Daoist art of what Moeller and D’Ambrosio call “genuine pretending”: the paradoxical skill of not only surviving but thriving by enacting social roles without being tricked into submitting to them or letting them define one’s identity. A provocative rereading of a Chinese philosophical classic, Genuine Pretending also suggests the value of a Daoist outlook today as a way of seeking existential sanity in an age of mass media’s paradoxical quest for originality.
Download or read book Self Cultivation Philosophies in Ancient India Greece and China written by Christopher W. Gowans and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book defends the thesis that the concept of self-cultivation philosophy is an informative interpretive framework for comprehending and reflecting on several philosophical outlooks in India, the Greco-Roman world and China. On the basis of an understanding of human nature and the place of human beings in the world, self-cultivation philosophies maintain that our lives can and should be substantially transformed from what is judged to be a problematic, untutored condition of human beings, our existential starting-point, into what is put forward as an ideal state of being. We are to do this by undertaking a set of therapeutic or spiritual exercises guided by some philosophical analysis. The self-cultivation philosophies in India are expressed in: the Bhagavad Gītā; the Sāṃkhya and Yoga philosophies of Īśvarakṛṣṇa and Patañjali; and teaching of the Buddha and his followers Buddhaghosa and Śāntideva. The philosophies originating in Greece, with subsequent development in the Roman period, are the most prominent Hellenistic approaches: the Epicureanism of Epicurus, Lucretius and Philodemus; the Stoicism of Chrysippus, Epictetus and Seneca; and Pyrrho and the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus. The self-cultivation philosophies from China are the early Confucian outlooks of Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi; the classical Daoist perspectives of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi; and the Chan tradition of Bodhidharma, Huineng and Linji"--
Download or read book Fiction and Philosophy in the Zhuangzi written by Romain Graziani and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-14 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brimming with mythical imagination, poetic sallies, and often ferociously witty remarks, the Zhuangzi is one of China's greatest literary and philosophical masterpieces. Yet the complexities of this classical text can make it a challenging read. This English translation leads you confidently through the comic scenes and virtuoso writing style, introducing all the little stories Zhuangzi invented and unpicking its philosophical insights through close commentaries and helpful asides. Romain Graziani opens up the text as never before, showing how Zhuangzi uses the stories as an answer to Mencius's conception of sacrifice and self-cultivation, restoring the critical interplay with Confucius' Analects, and guiding you through the themes of the animal world, sacrifice, political violence, meditation, illness, and death. In Graziani's translation, the co-founder of Taoism emerges as a remarkable thinker: a dedicated disparager of moral virtues who stubbornly resists any form of allegiance to social norms and the only Warring States figure to improvise with the darkest irony on the weaknesses of men and their docile subservience to the unquestioned authority of language. For anyone coming to Chinese philosophy or the Zhuangzi for the first time, this introduction and translation is a must-read, one that reminds us of the importance of thinking beyond our limited, everyday perspectives.
Download or read book Chuang tzu written by and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The timeless wisdom of this classic Taoist text can become a companion on your own spiritual journey. The Chuang-tzu is the second major text of the Taoist tradition. It was compiled in the third century BCE and follows the lead of the best-known and oldest of all Taoist texts, the Tao-te-ching (Book of the Tao and Its Potency). Representing the philosophy of its main author, Chuang Chou, along with several other early Taoist strands, the text has inspired spiritual seekers for over two thousand years. Using parable, anecdote, allegory and paradox, the Chuang-tzu presents the central message of what was to become the Taoist school: a reverence for the Tao—the "Way" of the natural world—and the belief that you are not truly virtuous until you are free from the burden of circumstance, personal attachments, tradition and the desire to reform the world. In this special SkyLight Illuminations edition, leading Taoist scholar Livia Kohn, PhD, provides a fresh, modern translation of key selections from this timeless text to open up classic Taoist beliefs and practices. She provides insightful, accessible commentary that highlights the Chuang-tzu's call to reject artificially imposed boundaries and distinctions, and illustrates how you can live a more balanced, authentic and joyful life—at ease in perfect happiness—by following Taoist principles.
Download or read book Decoding Dao written by Lee Dian Rainey and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by a leading authority on Chinese philosophy, Decoding Dao uniquely focuses on the core texts in Daoist philosophy, providing readers with a user-friendly introduction that unravels the complexities of these seminal volumes. Offers a detailed introduction to the core texts in Daoist philosophy, the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi, two of the most widely read – and most challenging – texts in China’s long literary history Covers the three main ways the texts can be read: as religious, mystical, and philosophical works Explores their historical context, origins, authorship, and the reasons these seminal texts came into being, along with the key terms and approaches they take Examines the core philosophical arguments made in the texts, as well as the many ways in which they have been interpreted, both in China itself and in the West Provides readers with an unrivalled insight into the multifaceted philosophy of Daoism – and the principles underlying much of Chinese culture – informed by the very latest academic scholarship
Download or read book Daoism and Environmental Philosophy written by Eric S. Nelson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daoism and Environmental Philosophy explores ethics and the philosophy of nature in the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, and related texts to elucidate their potential significance in our contemporary environmental crisis. This book traces early Daoist depictions of practices of embodied emptying and forgetting and communicative strategies of undoing the fixations of words, things, and the embodied self. These are aspects of an ethics of embracing plainness and simplicity, nourishing the asymmetrically differentiated yet shared elemental body of life of the myriad things, and being responsively attuned in encountering and responding to things. These critical and transformative dimensions of early Daoism provide exemplary models and insights for cultivating a more expansive ecological ethos, environmental culture of nature, and progressive political ecology. This work will be of interest to students and scholars interested in philosophy, environmental ethics and philosophy, religious studies, and intellectual history.
