Category Archives: Books of Interest

New Book: Berger, Introducing Chinese Philosophy

Douglas L. Berger, Introducing Chinese Philosophy: From the Warring States to the 21st Century has been recently published through Routledge. The book presents an introductory survey of the major themes, thinkers and texts, philosophical genres and profound insights of the Chinese philosophical tradition. Its coverage ranges from the foundational history of Chinese thought in the 6th–5th centuries BCE up to the present day.

To access the book for further reading, please visit this site.

New Book: Ngo, Unlocking the Treasury: Elementary Learning for Boys in Qing China

Lever Press recently published Unlocking the Treasury: Elementary Learning for Boys in Qing China by Katherine Ngo. The publication is the first major European study of the Chinese children’s primer Youxue gushi qionglin 幼學故事瓊林 (Treasury of elementary learning) from the Qing dynasty. The study explores the intellectual trends of elementary education in Qing China and design of educational literature for basic literacy, moral development, cultural literary, and examination preparation.

To access the book for further reading, please visit here.

New Book: Greene, ed., Doing Metaphysics in a Diverse World

Stephen Greene, ed., Doing Metaphysics in a Diverse World: How We Make Sense of Things Across Cultures has been published by Bloomsbury.

In a world increasingly interconnected and fractious, cross-cultural dialogue about metaphysics matters more than ever. Drawing on theories and traditions from China, Japan, the Indic world, pre-colonial Africa, pre-Spanish Meso-America, as well as Islamic and European thought, a team of leading philosophers and historians bring case studies, texts, themes and thinkers of very different worlds into conversation. On the basis of this exceptionally rich and diverse canvas, they reflect on questions of enduring human significance: What is suchness? What do we mean by being, becoming and beyond? What is personhood? How do we name and order our world? How should we live?

For more information, please visit here.

New Book: Tiwald, The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Philosophy

May be a graphic of text that says 'THEOXFORD THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF Chinese Philosophy c editedby teo USTIN JUSTINTIWAL TIWALD'The Handbook of Chinese Philosophy has recently been released online by Oxford University Press, with paper copies set to release in August. The handbook collects new work on important texts and figures in the history of Chinese thought. The chapters cover both well-known texts such as the Analects and the Zhuangzi and many of the lesser-known thinkers in the classical and postclassical Chinese tradition. Most of the chapters focus on thinkers or texts in one of three important historical movements. These include classical (“pre-Qin”) Chinese philosophy, Chinese Buddhism, and the Confucian response to Buddhism (“neo-Confucianism” broadly construed). Each chapter presents cutting-edge work on important topics in the Chinese tradition and yet is written for a general philosophical audience. For more information, please see this site, and the Table of Contents follows.

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New Book: Rošker, Chinese Philosophy in Transcultural Contexts

Chinese Philosophy in Transcultural Contexts: Comparative Approaches and the Method of Sublation has just been published by Bloomsbury. In this book, Jana S. Rošker presents a novel dialectical method to our comprehension of diverse philosophical ideas. Analyzing philosophical discourses that have emerged in China and the Sinophone region, Rošker applies the method to examples from across the history of thought. From Ancient Chinese logicians to 20th-century intellectuals, she connects thinkers and offers fresh insights into key aspects of philosophy. The result is a series of vibrant dialogues among different intellectual traditions, providing new understandings of transcultural philosophical interactions. To find the full text, please see this site.

New Book: Marchal and Wang, eds., Subjectivity and Selfhood in Chinese Philosophy

The inaugural volume of Amsterdam University Press’s “East Asian Philosophy and Political Thought” series has just been published: Subjectivity and Selfhood in Chinese Philosophy: Phenomenological, Comparative and Historical Perspectives, eds. Kai Marchal and Ellie Hua Wang. Please click the link here for more information.

The series is generally interested in any work in East Asian philosophy, but also aims to promote East Asian political thought and political philosophy. Those working on a book project, including an edited volume, that engages with East Asian thought and philosophy broadly defined are welcomed to submit to the series through this link.

Book of Interest: The Gongsun Longzi and Other Neglected Texts

A book we missed here on the blog when it came out: Rafael Suter , Lisa Indraccolo, and Wolfgang Behr, The Gongsun Longzi and Other Neglected Texts: Aligning Philosophical and Philological Perspectives (De Gruyter 2020)

The Gongsun Longzi is often considered the only extant work of the Classical Chinese “School of Names”, an early intellectual tradition (trad. dated to the 4th cent. B.C.) mainly concerned with logic and the philosophy of language. The book is a heterogeneous collection of five chapters that include short treatises and largely fictive dialogues between an anonymous persuader and his opponent, which typically revolve around a paradoxical claim. Its value as a testimony to Early Chinese philosophy, however, is somewhat controversial due to the intricate textual history of the text and our limited knowledge about its intellectual backgrounds. This volume gathers contributions by leading specialists in the fields of Classical Chinese philosophy, philology, logic, and linguistics. Besides an overview of the scholarly literature on the topic and a detailed account of the reception of the text throughout time, it presents fresh insights into philological and philosophical problems raised by the Gongsun Longzi and other closely-related texts equally attributed to the “School of Names”.

To access the book for further reading, please visit this site.