This essay is devoted to calling global attention to body thinking neglected yet routinely practiced by us all, especially in China for millennia. This essay, one, responds to the feature, universality, of disembodyied thinking, by paralleling it with Chinese body thinking, two, shows how basic body thinking is to disembodied thinking, and three, shows how body thinking in China elucidates bodily matters, time, contingency, and bodily death, what Western disembodied cannot handle.

According to the universality thesis, the epistemic properties referred to by the English epistemic verb “know” contained in the expressions of the form “S knows that p” or “S knows how to φ‎” are shared by the translations of the epistemic verb in all other languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and so on. Some doubt that there is reason to think the universality thesis is true because little or nothing is shown about the meanings and uses of the (...) epistemic terms in languages other than English. Critics of the universality thesis find counterevidence to the thesis; that is, the evidence demonstrates that translations of the epistemic verb “know” are used differently in some languages from the way “know” is used in English. In this chapter, the authors examine the effectiveness of such counterevidence. (shrink)

After a brief introduction, “cultures: multi-culture, cross-culture, interculture”, this essay proceeds in two major sections, “China and the West in Contrast” on how China and the West inter-differ, and “China and the West in Interculture” on how China and the West interculture. First, three ac- tual examples are cited to show how the West is digital, analytical, in either-or, while China is concrete, subtle, in both-and. Next, logic, time, music, kids, etc., are cited to tell of how China and the (...) West inter-differ to inter-critique to inter-correct, to compose the hope of the world. The vast, exciting, and crucial theme of world interculture, concrete and general, is thus compressed in less than twenty pages. Global interculture is so vast that any essay on it risks playing with vague generality. This essay concretely details two extremely contrasting cultures, the West and China, even on general time, logic, and grammar, starkly how the centralities of eternity and time are reversed, how logic is all bare in the West but turned invisible as bone-structure in China, and how the West strictly enforces explicit grammar while China subtly slides from one word-category to another. Typically, elusive “no do” unintelligible in the West but constantly concrete is story-ex- plained to highlight the West-China contrast. Concrete elucidation of general “global interculture” makes this short essay significant. (shrink)