Ancient Chinese Philosophy and the formation of Modern Chinese Piano Art

Reviewed by: Himmel—Erde—Mensch: Das Verhältnis des Menschen zur Wirklichkeit in der antiken chinesischen Philosophie by Philippe Brunozzi Rafael Suter Himmel—Erde—Mensch: Das Verhältnis des Menschen zur Wirklichkeit in der antiken chinesischen Philosophie (Heaven—Earth—Man: The relation of the human being to reality in ancient Chinese philosophy). By Philippe Brunozzi. Welten der Philosophie 8. Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Alber, 2011. Pp. 236. €29, isbn 978-3-495-48489-0. It is somewhat daring that Philippe Brunozzi’s Himmel—Erde—Mensch: Das Verhältnis des Menschen zur Wirklichkeit in der antiken chinesischen Philosophie mentions in its title the triad of heaven, earth, and man, the harmonious unity of which has become a popular characterization in nuce of Chinese philosophy, however meaningless it may be. And it is apparently in an immediate attempt to outweigh this appeal to cliché that, already in the subtitle, the author specifies that it is the human being on whom his book concentrates. Indeed, Brunozzi probes if not a cliché then a view on classical Chinese philosophy that has become rather commonplace: What [End Page 610] is the textual basis of the widespread conviction that ancient Chinese thought is mainly interested in practical matters of everyday life? It is this preconception that Brunozzi intends to evaluate in a close reading of three classical Chinese works: the Analects, the Mozi, and the Laozi. Brunozzi’s book is a revised version of his Ph.D. thesis, consisting of three parts. The first is dedicated to challenging the above-mentioned preconception of Chinese philosophy and to the question of what I tentatively translate as the “actualization of man’s relation to reality” (Ein problematisches Grundverständnis und die Frage nach dem Vollzug des menschlichen Wirklichkeitsverhältnisses) (pp. 17–48). Part 2, by far the largest, promises to test, in a close reading of the selected texts, the questionable premises presented in part 1 (“Die Überprüfung,” pp. 49–209). The third part offers a summarizing assessment (“Die Auswertung,” pp. 215–222). The view of Chinese philosophy that Brunozzi puts to the test is the one advanced by interpretations such as those by Roger T. Ames or François Jullien. Brunozzi deserves credit for attempting, against fashionable trends, a philosophical reading of the mentioned works as texts. To this end, he employs Ricoeur’s hermeneutical approach and his concept of the “world of the text,” thus elegantly circumventing delicate issues of authorship and textual genesis. Another valuable contribution of Brunozzi’s work is his innovative and sometimes highly appealing translations of the primary sources. Clearly tailored to the author’s conceptual investigations, they nonetheless remain sufficiently faithful to the Chinese original. If there is a motif pervading the score of Brunozzi’s work, it is his emphasis on the central role of the lived body (Leib) for reconstructing the relation of man to his environment in the works he analyzes. Despite all the originality of Brunozzi’s approach, there are problems with the study, some of which are perhaps due precisely to the approach. For one thing, the overall argumentative structure of Brunozzi’s study could be more convincing. Given that it is explicitly designed to test the widespread view that ancient Chinese philosophy is focused on issues of practical life, it is astonishing that in his analyses the author at times readily endorses the validity of this claim himself. If Brunozzi is convinced that this view is correct in case a detailed investigation of the sources yields a more multifaceted picture of the human way of interacting with the environment (p. 217), he is probably too optimistic. If one sets out to test this view, why not try to read certain passages explicitly against it? To be fair, Brunozzi readily admits the limited scope of his own approach: “If Chinese philosophy was truly interested in concerns of the human relation to reality, one has to ask why the recommended approaches were not more explicitly and more systematically presented” (p. 221). He remains vague, however, when he proposes that complementing our “one-sided” philological approach to the texts by “overall practically oriented forms and ways of text interpretation” could lead to additional precision (p. 224...

Metalepsis and Stevens’ Abstraction

Reviewed by: Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings trans by Brook Ziporyn Guo Chen (bio) Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings. Translated by Brook Ziporyn. Cambridge: Ha ckett Publishing Company, Inc., 2020. Pp. xxxvii + 302. Paperback $28.00, ISBN 978-1-62466-855-5. The Zhuangzi is perhaps the one and only work in classical Chinese philosophy that never fails to blow one's mind with its exquisite intertwining of high frivolousness, literary power, ambiguity, ambivalence, profundity and provocativeness all at once. There is urgent need of a translation able to transmit this paradoxical reading experiences as it is. Happily, all of these qualities, with the possible exception of ambiguity, are revealed in Brook Ziporyn's Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings, with both poetry and precision. Through a hermeneutical approach that inter-contextualizes each line and each word of the thirty-three chapters, especially many controversial places, he makes the chaotic and unsystematic text more complexly harmonious--a many in one and one in many harmony--through his undoubtedly unique, innovative, perspectival and very "Ziporyn" interpretation. It's always dangerous for a translation to say more than the original text, but I'm glad that Ziporyn expresses his own interpretation more explicitly and boldly, and with such precision. It's not a mere translation, but a monumental scholarly achievement, an expression of the translator's painstaking efforts of many years' working on Zhuangzian philosophy. I personally believe it will be another classic in history after Burton Watson's elegance and A. C. Graham's philosophical precision, especially a classical reader-friendly textbook for those interested in ancient Chinese philosophy, or at least a phenomenal matrix for future philosophical discussions in academia. The present volume contains, besides a complete translation of the Inner, Outer and Miscellaneous chapters, an "Introduction," "Notes on the Translation," a "Glossary of Essential Terms," a "Bibliography" that includes modern and contemporary works on Zhuangzi from Chinese and English-speaking countries and an "Index." Ziporyn compares translation to "an art like architecture," and writes that the translator must make sure "a thousand aesthetic and compositional decisions cohere around its substructure of precision in a way that brings into focus the life, style, and rhythm of the source text" (p. xxix), which is the principle he implements throughout his translation. He makes full use of the endnotes after each chapter both to provide other possible ways of understanding and to explain explicitly and extensively why and how he made his [End Page 1] own choice (e.g. six and a half pages, nearly 5,000 words, just for Chapter 2). Ziporyn does not simply expand on his 2009 selective translation, but has revised carefully and thoroughly, sometimes opening a whole new dimension of interpretation based on textual studies. Structurally speaking, in the earlier translation Ziporyn seems to have aimed more at reconstructing an authentic and textually coherent Zhuangzian philosophy in its cultural matrix and reception history by including selected passages even if regarded as merely "attributed to Zhuangzi" (Zhuangzi Essential Writings1, p. viii) as well as abundant traditional commentaries with varying opinions. He thus provided readers with numerous alternate ways of connecting unrelated passages; the commentaries are essential to this vision. In the 2020 version, Ziporyn aims at a bigger picture. He's not merely reconstructing a historically authentic picture of the many alternate Zhuangzian philosophies available in the cultural record, but also the Zhuangzi as a living and changing body discoverable through textual hermeneutics, thus also opening the possibility, among others, of viewing all the controversies identified with different strains of thought "as wildly contradictory and unresolved aspect of one man's thinking," like "Nietzsche's middle-period hodgepodge aphoristic style" (p. x). Instead of the traditional commentaries, Ziporyn focuses on the whole book as a densely interwoven symphony or concerto. Textually speaking, Ziporyn drills down into details, and takes extreme care in his treatment of key terms, lines, and passages to reduce ambiguity, thus making it a good textbook for students of Chinese philosophy. "Wuhua 物化," an essential term in the famous butterfly story, is usually translated as "the transformation of things," Ziporyn previously translated it as "transformation of one thing into another" (Zhuangzi Essential Writings, p. 21). That concretizes "wu...

This chapter discusses nondeductive argumentation in classical Chinese philosophy. There are three kinds: paradox, analogy, and appeal to example. Many of the paradoxes of the so-called disputers can be made to seem veridical, or at least veridical in spirit, if interpreted sympathetically. In addition, reasoning by analogy was a crucial mode of deliberation in traditional China. It was one of the hallmarks of Chinese jurisprudence and also figures prominently in early Chinese poetics. Finally, appeals to example are nearly ubiquitous in ancient Chinese philosophy (the most prominent text not to resort to them is Laozi), and this chapter divides the technique into a number of subtypes.

This article offers a study of the early formation and development of the ideal of harmony in ancient Chinese philosophy and ancient Greek philosophy. It shows that, unlike the Pythagorean notion of harmony, which is primarily based on a linear progressive model with a pre-set order, the ancient Chinese concept of harmony is best understood as a comprehensive process of harmonization. It encompasses spatial as well as temporal dimensions, metaphysical as well as moral and aesthetical dimensions. It is a fundamentally open notion in the sense that it does not aim to conform to any pre-set order. This broader, richer, and more liberal understanding of harmony has had a profound influence on Chinese culture as whole in its long history.

This article examined into three Chinese composers’ compositional method based on the ancient Chinese philosophy I Ching. Transcoding the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching in the piano solo works of Chou Wen Chung, Zhao Xiao Sheng and Chung Yiu Kwong display new representative of Chinese New Music. The analysis shows Chou and Chung’s creations that emphasize the use of the 64 hexagrams within a Westernized context, while Zhao brought out a new and individual compositional method based on the Chinese ancient philosophy that shows a complete departure from the West.

The theory of ‘Confucianization of law’ put forward by T’ung-tsu Ch’ü in his book titled Law and Society in Traditional China has a great academic influence in the world. However, ‘Confucianization of law’ is like ‘flowers in a mirror’ because its concept is too one-sided and ambiguous to describe ancient Chinese legal philosophy. Although it once has helped non-Chinese understand ancient Chinese legal philosophy, it is essentially a hypothesis of Ch’ü after reading limited historical materials and easily leading to a simple understanding of the dichotomy of Confucianism and Legalism in ancient Chinese legal philosophy. To distinguish the origin, concept, and related disputes of ‘Confucianization of law’ is helpful to discover the multicultural background of ancient Chinese legal philosophy and find the fact that Confucianism itself is alienated by politics. From the perspective of political pragmatism, there is no difference between Confucianism and Legalism in essence, but in means.

A fundamental question of the 21st century centers around the role and place of humans in their environment. Given the great acceleration of consumptive practices engaged in the 20th century, humans stand on the brink of a 6th extinction event. In order to determine our place and role in our global environment, we need to reflect on where we are and what the future will be—we need to focus on the habits of our “co-inhabitation” of the planet. Given the positive and negative impacts of international and global activities, intercultural dialogues are necessary for the care of the ecology of the planet, and one of the most prescient dialogues is between Eastern and Western world views. While much comparative research has been conducted regarding the connection between American Transcendentalism and Chinese ancient philosophy, relatively little philosophical work has been conducted to demonstrate the connectivity between Henry David Thoreau and Taoism. Yet there are, in fact, profound similarities between the American naturalist and Chinese philosophy, in particular Taoism. This paper aimed to discover and manifest the connection and similarities between the philosophy of Thoreau and the ancient worldview of Taoism. Through this comparative study and intercultural dialogue, we seek to trace historical precedents and intercultural dialogue between American Transcendentalism and ancient Chinese philosophy in order to explore the groundwork for a new vision of environmental awareness in order to promote a better future with a community of co-inhabitants and emphasis on the well-being of all.

This book introduces some central ideas and themes in ancient Chinese philosophy through a detailed analysis of one famous passage – the happy fish dialogue – in the Zhuangzi , one of the two founding texts of Daoism. The Zhuangzi is the most exhilarating and intellectually challenging of all the texts of ancient Chinese literature, and appreciating its spirit is as important as understanding its ideas. Methodologically, this book shows how we can approach Chinese philosophy analytically, an approach that is needed if Chinese philosophy is to be recognized in Western (analytic) philosophy today. At the same time, it seeks to broaden our conceptions and practices of analysis and our methods and styles of philosophizing in learning from Chinese philosophy. Throughout the book the emphasis is on engaging the reader in thinking through the issues for themselves.

Reviewed by: A Critical History of Classical Chinese Philosophy Franklin J. Woo (bio) He Zhaowu and Peng Gang. A Critical History of Classical Chinese Philosophy. Translated by Ricky Jeffrey. Beijing: New World Press, 2009. 309 pp. Paperback rmb 38, isbn 978-7-5104-0537-2. Beginning with antiquity in the pre-Qin period before the warring states were unified by Emperor Qin Shihuang (221–210 c.e.), this book gives an excellent historical overview of the different strands of contending Chinese thought of what is best for Chinese society from a Chinese perspective. The author is He Zhaowu (何兆武), professor emeritus in the Department of History at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is assisted by Peng Gang (彭刚), an assistant professor in that same department. Ricky Jeffrey provides a reader-friendly translation in English. The author's yardstick for measuring the different strands is modernization—driven by modern science, technology, critical thinking, and creativity. As an integral member of a Marxist tradition, the author is a firm believer in the myth of progress, as opposed to a predominant Chinese view of cyclical history supported by yin/yang dynamics. For him, the long course of Chinese history did resemble a pendulum, swaying forever between peace and tumult, flourishing and decay, order and disorder, prosperity and decline, unlike the [nineteenth] century positivist historians' image of history as forever progressing headlong from worse to better. A genuine progressive outlook of history never found a proper place in the Chinese philosophy of history. (p. 159) In the intellectual history of China, He finds the beginnings of thinkers suitable for the modern age in people like Liang Qichao 梁启超 (1873–1929), whose thinking influenced nearly all scholars in China in the twentieth century; Hu Shih 胡适 (1891–1962), a leader of the new culture and May Fourth Movement; and Song Yingxing, 宋应星 (1587–1666), one of China's foremost technical experts in the seventeenth century. However, the dead weight of a history of entrenched pragmatism and preoccupation with the ethical-political-centric concerns of Confucianism, he claims, were so deeply rooted that China's progress into any new age, let alone entering the scientific revolution that occurred in Europe, could not happen. It has been said that dialogue between Chinese and Western philosophy "has yet to begin" because the assumption held by many philosophers in the West (and also in China) is that philosophy is "exclusively an Anglo-European enterprise."1 He Zhaowu seems to share this assumption as shown in his statement in distinguishing "Chinese philosophy" from "Philosophy in China": For the inquiry into its object, philosophy has to employ certain ways of thinking, i.e. its methodology. To meet such needs, people are in the habit of using some sort of manipulation, such as the metaphysical method, the dialectical method, the analytic method, the intuitive method and so on. So far as the object of [End Page 511] inquiry and their relevant method are by nature universal, the term "Chinese philosophy" can imply nothing more than "philosophy in China." (p. 9, emphasis added) However, in this work He Zhaowu does provide an important historical picture in the contours of Chinese thought and how they have contested, influenced, and been influenced by one another. His account is, therefore, a necessary and important prerequisite for (if only the beginning of) an East-West philosophical dialogue. While not entirely sharing a Eurocentric bias on philosophy, He, nevertheless, holds a secular modern mindset that is grounded in modern science and critical thought that originated in the West and that has been the predominant mode of thinking in the world and its academies for centuries. While holding firmly on to the essentially Western paradigm of modernity and modern science, He does offer a cautionary though half-hearted critique of modern science. He mentions the tendency in modern civilization that with the unprecedented success in reforming nature, people readily embraced a scientistic inclination and took science as the sole criterion of everything or reduced all values into the channel of science. (p. 201) He sees this absolutist tendency embodied in the Legalist school, undergirded by Xun Zi, who viewed human nature as basically self-seeking, and, therefore, essentially antisocial, if not, in fact, evil. Moreover...

After Confucius is a collection of eight studies of Chinese philosophy from the time of Confucius to the formation of the empire in the second and third centuries B.C.E. As detailed in a masterful introduction, each essay serves as a concrete example of “thick description”—an approach invented by philosopher Gilbert Ryle—which aims to reveal the logic that informs an observable exchange among members of a community or society. To grasp the significance of such exchanges, it is necessary to investigate the networks of meaning on which they rely. Paul R. Goldin argues that the character of ancient Chinese philosophy can be appreciated only if we recognize the cultural codes underlying the circulation of ideas in that world. Thick description is the best preliminary method to determine how Chinese thinkers conceived of their own enterprise. Who were the ancient Chinese philosophers? What was their intended audience? What were they arguing about? How did they respond to earlier thinkers, and to each other? Why did those in power wish to hear from them, and what did they claim to offer in return for patronage? Goldin addresses these questions as he looks at several topics, including rhetorical conventions of Chinese philosophical literature; the value of recently excavated manuscripts for the interpretation of the more familiar, received literature; and the duty of translators to convey the world of concerns of the original texts. Each of the cases investigated in this wide-ranging volume exemplifies the central conviction behind Goldin’s plea for thick description: We do not do justice to classical Chinese philosophy unless we engage squarely the complex and ancient culture that engendered it. An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched, a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher.

Unlike traditional Western philosophy, which places no special emphasis on the importance of family structure, traditional Chinese philosophy represented by Confucianism is a set of theories that give family a primary position. With family as the foundation, a complete framework of “human body → two genders → family and clan” is formed. Therefore, family in Chinese philosophy is existent, gender-interactive and diachronic. It should also be noted that family also plays a fundamental role in Chinese theories on cosmology, religion, and many other subjects. In other words, Chinese culture as a whole is imprinted with reflections on family. Nowadays, as the value of family becomes less prominent, re-examining ancient Chinese philosophy will undoubtedly bear theoretical significance. Meanwhile, traditional Chinese philosophy can also offer an ideological framework for the re-construction of family values in the contemporary world.

Many scholars argue that there is no epistemology in Chinese philosophy, or that an epistemological sensibility was not fully developed in Chinese thinking. This leads western audiences to mistakenly think that Chinese philosophy is not properly ‘philosophical’. This paper argues that there is a great deal of discourse about understanding the world as a whole in ancient Chinese philosophy. Taking Song-ming Neo-Confucianism as an example, the author shows that most researchers do not uncover its philosophical advancement as it developed throughout history. The author reconstructs a real philosophical breakthrough in Neo-Confucianism and argues that Chinese philosophy should be recognized as fully ‘philosophical’—not just ethical, but also epistemological. Through the clarification about epistemological progress in Song-ming Neo-Confucianism, the author argues that there is a coherent development of epistemology in Chinese philosophical history. In short, this article formalizes a systematic view of Chinese Neo-Confucian epistemology by demonstrating that epistemological theory developed step by step in Song-ming Neo-Confucianism.

Remix in writing has very different expressions, and is grounded in very different legal, philosophical and creative materialisms, in Western and Chinese cultures. The infringement of authors’ Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) in China is not only an irritant for Chinese-Western commercial and legal relations. It also points to different formations of the creative and legal domains across global space, and serves to introduce notions of creativity and originality that are largely unfamiliar in the West. Calligraphy, as a pictorial and material mode of writing, comprises a practice of Chinese remix in which the apprentice traces the lines of the master’s work: repetition of Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’) stimulates the expression of Qing 情 (‘feelings’). What appears from a distance to be slavish imitation actually involves a philosophy of learning (or more precisely, of ‘unlearnt learning’) that, bypassing plagiarism’s traps, effectively ‘remixes remix’ as a creative model no longer dependent on the familiar Western rationales for the legitimacy of remix as appropriation, homage and/or pastiche. To see this though, one has to deploy a Taoist rather than a Confucian framework in the analysis of calligraphic practices. The case of Kathy Acker, allied with the work of Gilles Deleuze, reveals a largely invisible lineage of Taoist-influenced remix in Western creative writing. In this way, calligraphy emerges as a model of remix relevant to all forms of writing—for all writing is material, whether calligraphic or not. Further, as Acker shows, the materiality of writing constantly replenishes its remixing with cultural elements that may not be otherwise visible.

China’s unprecedented urbanization has fueled technological innovation while simultaneously intensifying environmental degradation, cultural erosion, and social inequality. Amid this tension, traditional philosophies such as Feng Shui – long embedded in Chinese spatial planning – remain underutilized in the context of smart city development. This study explores the integration of classical Chinese feng shui philosophy with advanced smart city technologies to develop a culturally sustainable approach to urbanization in modern China. While traditional Chinese feng shui philosophy, rooted in the principle of harmony between humanity and nature, has informed urban planning for centuries, it remains under-researched as a framework for applying modern smart city technologies. By combining cultural heritage with cutting-edge technologies such as the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and green infrastructure, this research addresses the growing tension between urbanization and cultural preservation. Using a mixed-methods approach – including case studies of Chinese cities such as Beijing and Hangzhou, spatial analysis through geographic information system mapping, and interviews with cultural experts and urban planners – the study identifies key synergies and challenges in aligning feng shui principles (e.g., energy flow [Qi] and natural balance) with smart city objectives such as energy efficiency and sustainable resource use. The proposed model not only advances environmental and social sustainability but also reinforces Chinese cultural heritage in urban development. The findings demonstrate that it is possible to design cities that are both technologically advanced and culturally meaningful – a model potentially replicable by other nations experiencing similar dilemmas. The study concludes with policy implications for urban planners and identifies areas for future research, such as the scalability of the framework and its adaptability across diverse cultural and geographic contexts.