This is one of the most justly celebrated texts of the Chinese tradition - impressive for both its bold philosophical imagination and its striking literary style. Accepting the challenge of translating this captivating classic in its entirety, Burton Watson has expertly rendered into English both the profound thought and the literary brilliance of the text.

This a general account of the school of Mo-tzu, its social basis as a movement of craftsmen, its isolated place in the Chinese tradition, and the nature of its later contributions to logic, ethics, and science. It assesses the relation of Mohist thinking to the structure of the Chinese language, and grapples with the textual dynamics of later Mohist writings, particularly in regard to grammar and style, technical terminology, the use and significance of stock examples, and overall organization. Includes edited (...) and annotated Chinese text with an English translation and commentary, a glossary, and a photographic reproduction of the unemended text from the Taoist Patrology. (shrink)

This ambitious book presents a new interpretation of Chinese thought guided both by a philosopher's sense of mystery and by a sound philosophical theory of meaning. That dual goal, Hansen argues, requires a unified translation theory. It must provide a single coherent account of the issues that motivated both the recently untangled Chinese linguistic analysis and the familiar moral-political disputes. Hansen's unified approach uncovers a philosophical sophistication in Daoism that traditional accounts have overlooked. The Daoist theory treats the imperious intuitionism (...) that alienates critical thinkers as a feature of Confucianism alone. Freed from the view that Confucianism is the core of Chinese thought and from myopic Confucian interpretations, Chinese thinkers emerge as unmistakably philosophical. (shrink)

Ethical dimension and deconstruction of normative ethics in Asia traditions -- Similarities and differences between Derridean-Levinasian and Asian ethical thought.

The striking parallels between Derrida’s deconstruction and certain strategies eschewing oppositional hierarchies in Asian thought, especially in Buddhism and Daoism, have attracted much attention from scholars of both Western and Asian philosophy. This book contributes to this discussion by focusing on the ethical dimension and function of deconstruction in Asian thought. Examining different traditions and schools of Asian thought, including Indian Buddhism, Zen, other schools of East Asian Buddhism, the Kyoto School, and Daoism, the contributors explore the central theme from (...) different contexts and different angles. Insights and notions from the contemporary discussion of Derridean deconstruction and its ethic or Derridean-Levinasian ethic as a paradigm for comparison or interpretation are used as a framework. Furthering our understanding of the relationship between deconstruction and the ethical in Asian traditions, this book also enriches the contemporary ethical discourse from a global perspective by bridging Asia and the West. (shrink)

In a wholesale destructive or deconstructive critique of Western philosophical tradition, it is precisely this ethnocentric-phonocentric view of language that Jacques Derrida has chosen for his target. In Derrida’s critique, Hegel appears as one of the powerful enactors of that tradition yet peculiarly on the verge of turning away from it as “the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing.”13 As Derrida sees it, phonocentrism in its philosophical dimension is also “logocentrism: the metaphysics of phonetic writing” (...) . Derrida makes it quite clear that such logocentrism is related to Western thinking and to Western thinking alone. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points this out in the translator’s preface to Of Grammatology: “Almost by a reverse ethnocentrism, Derrida insists that logocentrism is a property of the West…. Although something of the Chinese prejudice of the West is discussed in Part I, the East is never seriously studied or deconstructed in the Derridean text” . As a matter of fact, not only is the East never seriously deconstructed but Derrida even sees in the nonphonetic Chinese writing “the testimony of a powerful movement of civilization developing outside of all logocentrism” . When he looks within the Western tradition for a breakthrough, he finds it in nothing other than the poetics of Ezra Pound and his mentor, Ernest Fenollosa, who built a graphic poetics on what is certainly a peculiar reading of Chinese ideograms:This is the meaning of the work of Fenellosa [sic] whose influence upon Ezra Pound and his poetics is well-known: this irreducibly graphic poetics was, with that of Mallarmé, the first break in the most entrenched Western tradition. The fascination that the Chinese ideogram exercised on Pound’s writing may thus be given all its historical significance. [P. 92]Since Chinese is a living language with a system of nonphonetic script that functions very differently from that of any Western language, it naturally holds a fascination for those in the West who, weary of the Western tradition, try to find an alternative model on the other side of the world, in the Orient. This is how the so-called Chinese prejudice came into being at the end of the seventeenth and during the eighteenth centuries, when some philosophers in the West, notably Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, saw “in the recently discovered Chinese script a model of the philosophical language thus removed from history” and believed that “what liberates Chinese script from the voice is also that which, arbitrarily and by the artifice of invention, wrenches it from history and gives it to philosophy” . In other words, what Leibniz and others saw in the Chinese language was what they desired and projected there, “a sort of European hallucination,” as Derrida rightly terms it. “And the hallucination translated less an ignorance than a misunderstanding. It was not disturbed by the knowledge of Chinese script, limited but real, which was then available” . Zhang Longxi is on the faculty of the Department of English Language and Literature at Peking University. He is the author of A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century Theories of Literature and is currently studying comparative literature at Harvard University. (shrink)

A cornerstone of modern western philosophy, addressing the role of man in government, society and religion In 1651, Hobbes published his work about the relationship between the government and the individual. More than four centuries old, this brilliant yet ruthless book analyzes not only the bases of government but also physical nature and the roles of man. Comparable to Plato's Republic in depth and insight, Leviathan includes two society-changing phenomena that Plato didn't dare to dream of -- the rise of (...) great nation-states with their claims to absolute sovereignty, and modern science, with its unprecedented analytic power. To Hobbes, the leviathan -- a mythical sea creature described in the Old Testament -- represented his central thesis: that the state must be strong in order to control and protect its citizens. Even today, Hobbes's thesis in Leviathan is debated among scholars and philosophy aficionados around the globe. One of the earliest attempts at a genuinely scientific understanding of politics and society in their modern form, this book also remains one of the most stimulating. In his timeless work, Hobbes outlines his ideas about the passions and the conduct of man, and how his theories are realized in every individual. Addressing free will and religion, Hobbes constructs an intelligent argument for the basis of religion within government and how to organize a peaceful and successful Christian commonwealth. Like Plato's Republic, this book contains ideas on psychology, ethics, law, language, and religion that continue to challenge modern thinkers and exercise a profound influence on Western thought. A classic treatise of philosophy, Leviathan is critical reading for anyone who wishes to examine the human mind through the prisms of government and society. (shrink)