Ironies of Oneness and Difference

Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li

Brook Ziporyn

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781438442884, 9781438442891
• eBook ISBN: 9781438442907
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

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.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE: ESSENCES, UNIVERSALS, AND OMNIPRESENCE: ABSOLUTE SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE
• CHAPTER TWO: WHAT IS COHERENCE?: CHINESE PARADIGMS
• CHAPTER THREE: NON-IRONIC COHERENCE AND NEGOTIABLE CONTINUITY
• CHAPTER FOUR: IRONIC COHERENCE AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE “YIN”
• CHAPTER FIVE: NON-IRONIC RESPONSES TO IRONIC COHERENCE IN XUNZI AND THE RECORD OF RITUAL
• CHAPTER SIX: THE YIN-YANG COMPROMISE
• CONCLUSION AND SUMMARY: TOWARD LI
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY