Globalization consists of global interculture strengthening local cultures as it depends on them. Globality and locality are interdependent, and “universal” must be replaced by “inter-versal” as existence inter-exists. Chinese thinking thus must be Chinese, not Western, as Western thinking must be Western, not “universal”; China must help the West be Western, as the West must help China be Chinese. As Mrs. Tu speaks English in Chinese syntax, so “sinologists” logicize in Chinese phrases. English speakers parse her to realize the distinctness (...) of English; Chinese thinkers parse Western “sinologists” to realize the distinctness of China. Inter-versal parsing toward cultural inter-enrichment occurs in three stages. This is intercultural globalization. (shrink)

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.

Fifteen years after the publication of my assessment of comparative philosophy in the inaugural issue of Dao, this article comments on some of the major changes that have taken place in the field since Dao began. One of the most significant is the improvement in the conditions for Chinese philosophy in mainland China and the return of many of the original participants in Dao’s audience to positions in East Asia from earlier careers in the West. The article also surveys advances (...) in various forms of objective and normative comparison and in the development of metaphysics based on Chinese models. (shrink)

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)