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Shows that failure to assess the significant cultural differences between China and the West has seriously affected our understanding of both classical and contemporary China, and makes the translation of attitudes, concepts, and issues extremely problematic.
By providing parallel accounts of the contrasting developments of classical Chinese and Western traditions, Anticipating China offers a means of avoiding the implicit cultural biases which so often distort Western understanding of Chinese intellectual culture. The book shows that failure to assess the significant cultural differences between China and the West has seriously affected our understanding of both classical and contemporary China, and makes the translation of attitudes, concepts, and issues extremely problematic.
"The extensive and masterful command of Western philosophy, including the contemporary period, makes the book truly exciting instead of just another competent scholarly study. The bold insight of the authors is mountain air. The pure artistry of the writing rushes readers along until they are stopped by the shock of finding Hall and Ames saying exactly the right thing to illuminate important areas of cultural concern in at least four areas. The treatment of pre-Socratic philosophy is not just a rehash, but offers new insights (so much so that I thought of using it as a text in Ancient Philosophy class). The material on ancient China enriches what the authors began to do in Thinking Through Confucius. The assessments of differences between China and the West often render contemporary Western philosophers in new, illuminating perspective. Finally, the book contributes fundamentally, instead of anecdotally, to the enterprise of seeking to understand contemporary Asia.
"I have been looking for this book for twenty years. In reading postmodern philosophers, I have often written in the margins the observation that 'this labored and over-wrought point is plain in Asian thinking.' I generally wondered how it was that scholars of the stature and imagination of Paul Tillich or Richard Rorty could be so scintillating and intelligent and yet be embarrassingly ignorant of anything Asian. Hall and Ames are leaders in systematically articulating the connections that many of us have vaguely felt, and looked for, and thought obvious in one or another instance."—John Rothfork
(Abridged)
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Anticipating the Argument
1. Clearing a Path to China1. Squaring the Circle
2. Circles and Squares
1. From Chaos to Cosmos2. The Contingency of Culture
2. Rest and Permanence
3. The Watershed: Zeno and the Power of Paradox
4. Counterdiscourse: Heraclitus and Anaxagors
5. From Theoria to Theory
6. Counterdiscourse: The Sophists
7. Socrates and Plato: Eros and Its Ironies
8. Aristotle: Four Beginnings of Thought
9. Humanitas and the Imago Dei
10. The Persistence of the Rational Ethos
11. Counterdiscourse: Challenges to the Rational Ethos
1. The First and Second Problematics3. Extending the Circle
2. China and the First Problematic
3. Comparing Comparative Methods
4. Intercultural Vagueness
1. Acosmotic "Beginnings"Notes
2. Analogical Discource in the Confucian Analects
3. Experiments in Rationalism
4. The Emergence of Han Thinking
5. The Dominance of Han Thinking
6. A Closing Anticipation
Bibliography of Works Cited
Index