Early China/Ancient Greece

Thinking through Comparisons

Steven Shankman, Stephen W. Durrant, Steven Shankman, Stephen W. Durrant

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780791453148, 9780791453131
• eBook ISBN: 9780791488942
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

The first edited volume in Sino-Hellenic studies, this book compares early Chinese and ancient Greek thought and culture.

This pioneering book compares Chinese and Western thought to offer a bracing and unpredictable cross-cultural conversation. The work contributes to the emerging field of Sino-Hellenic studies, which links two great and influential cultures that, in fact, had virtually no contact during the ancient period. The patterns of thought and the cultural productions of early China and ancient Greece represent two significantly different responses to the myriad problems that human beings confront. Throughout this volume the comparisons between these cultures evince two critical ideas. First, that thinking is itself an inherently comparative activity. Through making comparisons, the familiar becomes strange, and the strange somewhat more familiar. Second, since we think through comparisons, we should think them all the way through. How valid and productive are the comparisons and contrasts made between particular works and different styles of thought that emerged from two different, although contemporaneous, cultural contexts?

Table of contents

• Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking through Comparisons
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. What Has Athens to Do with Alexandria? or Why Sinoloists Can’t Get Along with(out) Philosophers
• 2. No Time Like the Present: The Category of Contemporaneity in Chinese Studies
• 3. Humans and Gods: The Theme of Self-Divinization in Early China and Early Greece
• 4. “These Three Come Forth Together,But are Differently Named”: Laozi, Zhuangzi, Plato
• 5. Thinking through Comparisons: Analytical and Narrative Methods for Cultural Understanding
• 6. Alluding to the Text, or the Context
• 7. Epistemology in Cultural Context: Disguise and Deception in Early China and Early Greece
• 8. The Logic of Signs in Early Chinese Rhetoric
• 9. Means and Means: A Comparative Reading of Aristotle’s Ethics and the Zhongyong
• 10. Fatalism, Fate, and Stratagem in China and Greece
• 11. Cratylus and Xunzi on Names
• 12. Golden Spindles and Axes: Elite Women inthe Achaemenid and Han Empires
• 13. Creating Tradition: Sima Qian Agonistes?
• Contributors
• Index