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 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 toward what is thinkable for us. The actual inhabitation and mastery of these alternative modes of thinking is an even greater adventure in intellectual and experiential expansion.

Product Description: The Penumbra Unbound is the first English language book-length study of the Neo-Taoist thinker Guo Xiang (d. 312 C.E.), commentator on the classic Taoist text, the Zhuangzi. The author explores Guo s philosophy of freedom and spontaneity, explains its coherence and importance, and shows its influence on later Chinese philosophy, particularly Chan Buddhism...read more

Product Description: Omnipotence for the Millions is best described as a weeping man's bedroom farce, a tale of infuriatingly ineluctable agape and abortive misanthropy, of a love-hate triangle of rivalrous comrades and wives, of human intersubjectivity conceived as a world wherein everyone is constantly enacting exasperatingly ambiguous atrocities on everyone else and everyone's kind of pissed off about it probably but nobody's quite sure...read more

Product Description: "Other than the devil, there is no Buddha; other than the Buddha, there is no devil." The Chinese monk Siming Zhili (960-1028) uttered this remark as part of his justification for his self-immolation. An exposition of the intent, implications, and resonances of this one sentence, this book expands and unravels the context in which the seeming paradox of the ultimate identity of good and evil is to be understood...read more