Ordering The Myriad Things

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Ordering the Myriad Things

Nicholas Menzies
Ordering the Myriad Things Book PDF

Author : Nicholas Menzies
Publisher : University of Washington Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2021-09-29
Category : History
ISBN : 9780295749471

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Ordering the Myriad Things by Nicholas Menzies Pdf

China’s vast and ancient body of documented knowledge about plants includes horticultural manuals and monographs, comprehensive encyclopedias, geographies, and specialized anthologies of verse and prose written by keen observers of nature. Until the late nineteenth century, however, standard practice did not include deploying a set of diagnostic tools using a common terminology and methodology to identify and describe new and unknown species or properties. Ordering the Myriad Things relates how traditional knowledge of plants in China gave way to scientific botany between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, when plants came to be understood in a hierarchy of taxonomic relationships to other plants and within a broader ecological context. This shift not only expanded the universe of plants beyond the familiar to encompass unknown species and geographies but fueled a new knowledge of China itself. Nicholas K. Menzies highlights the importance of botanical illustration as a tool for recording nature—contrasting how images of plants were used in the past to the conventions of scientific drawing and investigating the transition of “traditional” systems of organization, classification, observation, and description to “modern” ones.

The Promise and Peril of Things

Wai-yee Li
The Promise and Peril of Things Book PDF

Author : Wai-yee Li
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 213 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2022-05-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780231553896

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The Promise and Peril of Things by Wai-yee Li Pdf

Winner, 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Our relationship with things abounds with paradoxes. People assign value to objects in ways that are often deeply personal or idiosyncratic yet at the same time rooted in specific cultural and historical contexts. How do things become meaningful? How do our connections with the world of things define us? In Ming and Qing China, inquiry into things and their contradictions flourished, and its depth and complexity belie the notion that material culture simply reflects status anxiety or class conflict. Wai-yee Li traces notions of the pleasures and dangers of things in the literature and thought of late imperial China. She explores how aesthetic claims and political power intersect, probes the objective and subjective dimensions of value, and questions what determines authenticity and aesthetic appeal. Li considers core oppositions—people and things, elegance and vulgarity, real and fake, lost and found—to tease out the ambiguities of material culture. With examples spanning the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, she shows how relations with things can both encode and resist social change, political crisis, and personal loss. The Promise and Peril of Things reconsiders major works such as The Plum in the Golden Vase, The Story of the Stone, Li Yu’s writings, and Wu Weiye’s poetry and drama, as well as a host of less familiar texts. It offers new insights into Ming and Qing literary and aesthetic sensibilities, as well as the intersections of material culture with literature, intellectual history, and art history.

The Imperial Guide to Feng-Shui & Chinese Astrology

Thomas F Aylward
The Imperial Guide to Feng Shui Chinese Astrology Book PDF

Author : Thomas F Aylward
Publisher : Watkins Media Limited
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2012-01-01
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 9781780283319

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The Imperial Guide to Feng-Shui & Chinese Astrology by Thomas F Aylward Pdf

Translated from classical Chinese texts for the first time comes this authoritative guide to two of China's most enduring ancient arts.

Overcoming Our Evil

Aaron Stalnaker
Overcoming Our Evil Book PDF

Author : Aaron Stalnaker
Publisher : Georgetown University Press
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2006-07-26
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1589013840

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Overcoming Our Evil by Aaron Stalnaker Pdf

Can people ever really change? Do they ever become more ethical, and if so, how? Overcoming Our Evil focuses on the way ethical and religious commitments are conceived and nurtured through the methodical practices that Pierre Hadot has called "spiritual exercises." These practices engage thought, imagination, and sensibility, and have a significant ethical component, yet aim for a broader transformation of the whole personality. Going beyond recent philosophical and historical work that has focused on ancient Greco-Roman philosophy, Stalnaker broadens ethical inquiry into spiritual exercises by examining East Asian as well as classical Christian sources, and taking religious and seemingly "aesthetic" practices such as prayer, ritual, and music more seriously as objects of study. More specifically, Overcoming Our Evil examines and compares the thought and practice of the early Christian Augustine of Hippo, and the early Confucian Xunzi. Both have sophisticated and insightful accounts of spiritual exercises, and both make such ethical work central to their religious thought and practice. Yet to understand the two thinkers' recommendations for cultivating virtue we must first understand some important differences. Here Stalnaker disentangles the competing aspects of Augustine and Xunxi's ideas of "human nature." His groundbreaking comparison of their ethical vocabularies also drives a substantive analysis of fundamental issues in moral psychology, especially regarding emotion and the complex idea of "the will," to examine how our dispositions to feel, think, and act might be slowly transformed over time. The comparison meticulously constructs vivid portraits of both thinkers demonstrating where they connect and where they diverge, making the case that both have been misunderstood and misinterpreted. In throwing light on these seemingly disparate ancient figures in unexpected ways, Stalnaker redirects recent debate regarding practices of personal formation, and more clearly exposes the intellectual and political issues involved in the retrieval of "classic" ethical sources in diverse contemporary societies, illuminating a path toward a contemporary understanding of difference.

Reconstructing the Confucian Dao

Joseph A. Adler
Reconstructing the Confucian Dao Book PDF

Author : Joseph A. Adler
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2014-03-27
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781438451589

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Reconstructing the Confucian Dao by Joseph A. Adler Pdf

Zhu Xi, the twelfth-century architect of the neo-Confucian canon, declared Zhou Dunyi to be the first true sage since Mencius. This was controversial, as many of Zhu Xi's contemporaries were critical of Zhou Dunyi's Daoist leanings, and other figures had clearly been more significant to the Song dynasty Confucian resurgence. Why was Zhou Dunyi accorded such importance? Joseph A. Adler finds that the earlier thinker provided an underpinning for Zhu Xi's religious practice. Zhou Dunyi's theory of the interpenetration of activity and stillness allowed Zhu Xi to proclaim that his own theory of mental and spiritual cultivation mirrored the fundamental principle immanent in the natural world. This book revives Zhu Xi as a religious thinker, challenging longstanding characterizations of him. Readers will appreciate the inclusion of complete translations of Zhou Dunyi's major texts, Zhu Xi's published commentaries, and other primary source material.

The Constitution of Ancient China

Su Li
The Constitution of Ancient China Book PDF

Author : Su Li
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2018-08-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9780691171593

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The Constitution of Ancient China by Su Li Pdf

How was the vast ancient Chinese empire brought together and effectively ruled? What are the historical origins of the resilience of contemporary China's political system? In The Constitution of Ancient China, Su Li, China's most influential legal theorist, examines the ways in which a series of fundamental institutions, rather than a supreme legal code upholding the laws of the land, evolved and coalesced into an effective constitution. Arguing that a constitution is an institutional response to a set of issues particular to a specific society, Su Li demonstrates how China unified a vast territory, diverse cultures, and elites from different backgrounds into a whole. He delves into such areas as uniform weights and measurements, the standardization of Chinese characters, and the building of the Great Wall. The book includes commentaries by four leading Chinese scholars in law, philosophy, and intellectual history—Wang Hui, Liu Han, Wu Fei, and Zhao Xiaoli—who share Su Li's ambition to explain the resilience of ancient China's political system but who contend that he overstates functionalist dimensions while downplaying the symbolic. Exploring why China has endured as one political entity for over two thousand years, The Constitution of Ancient China will be essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the institutional legacy of the Chinese empire.

Culture and Modernity

Eliot Deutsch
Culture and Modernity Book PDF

Author : Eliot Deutsch
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 686 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 1991-01-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0824813707

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Culture and Modernity by Eliot Deutsch Pdf

The crisis of modernity -- Incommensurability -- Relativism -- Language and non-Western cultural traditions -- Culture and the ethical -- Culture and the aesthetic -- Culture and the religious -- Culture and the political -- Cultural identity -- Scientific progress.

The Confucian Philosophy of Harmony

Chenyang Li
The Confucian Philosophy of Harmony Book PDF

Author : Chenyang Li
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2013-10-30
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781134600489

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The Confucian Philosophy of Harmony by Chenyang Li Pdf

Harmony is a concept essential to Confucianism and to the way of life of past and present people in East Asia. Integrating methods of textual exegesis, historical investigation, comparative analysis, and philosophical argumentation, this book presents a comprehensive treatment of the Confucian philosophy of harmony. The book traces the roots of the concept to antiquity, examines its subsequent development, and explicates its theoretical and practical significance for the contemporary world. It argues that, contrary to a common view in the West, Confucian harmony is not mere agreement but has to be achieved and maintained with creative tension. Under the influence of a Weberian reading of Confucianism as "adjustment" to a world with an underlying fixed cosmic order, Confucian harmony has been systematically misinterpreted in the West as presupposing an invariable grand scheme of things that pre-exists in the world to which humanity has to conform. The book shows that Confucian harmony is a dynamic, generative process, which seeks to balance and reconcile differences and conflicts through creativity. Illuminating one of the most important concepts in Chinese philosophy and intellectual history, this book is of interest to students of Chinese studies, history and philosophy in general and eastern philosophy in particular.

A History of Chinese Political Thought

Youngmin Kim
A History of Chinese Political Thought Book PDF

Author : Youngmin Kim
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2017-12-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781509523184

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A History of Chinese Political Thought by Youngmin Kim Pdf

China's rapid rise as a regional and global power is one of the most important political developments of the twenty-first century. Yet the West still largely overlooks or oversimplifies the complex ideas and ideals that have shaped the country’s national and international transformation from antiquity to the present day. In this beautifully written introductory text, Youngmin Kim offers a uniquely incisive survey of the major themes in Chinese political thought from customary community to empire, exploring their theoretical importance and the different historical contexts in which they arose. Challenging traditional assumptions about Chinese nationalism and Marxist history, Kim shows that "China" does not have a fixed, single identity, but rather is a constantly moving target. His probing, interdisciplinary approach traces the long and nuanced history of Chinese thought as a true tradition anchored in certain key themes, many of which began in the early dynasties and still resonate in China today. Only by appreciating this rich history, he argues, can we begin to understand the intricacies and contradictions of contemporary Chinese politics, economy, and society.

Envisioning Eternal Empire

Yuri Pines
Envisioning Eternal Empire Book PDF

Author : Yuri Pines
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2009-01-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780824832759

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Envisioning Eternal Empire by Yuri Pines Pdf

This ambitious book looks into the reasons for the exceptional durability of the Chinese empire, which lasted for more than two millennia (221 B.C.E.-1911 C.E.). Yuri Pines identifies the roots of the empire's longevity in the activities of thinkers of the Warring States period (453-221 B.C.E.), who, in their search for solutions to an ongoing political crisis, developed ideals, values, and perceptions that would become essential for the future imperial polity. In marked distinction to similar empires worldwide, the Chinese empire was envisioned and to a certain extent "preplanned" long before it came into being. As a result, it was not only a military and administrative construct, but also an intellectual one. Pines makes the argument that it was precisely its ideological appeal that allowed the survival and regeneration of the empire after repeated periods of turmoil. Envisioning Eternal Empire presents a panoptic survey of philosophical and social conflicts in Warring States political culture. By examining the extant corpus of preimperial literature, including transmitted texts and manuscripts uncovered at archaeological sites, Pines locates the common ideas of competing thinkers that underlie their ideological controversies. This bold approach allows him to transcend the once fashionable perspective of competing "schools of thought" and show that beneath the immense pluralism of Warring States thought one may identify common ideological choices that eventually shaped traditional Chinese political culture

The Great Synthesis of Wang Yangming Neo-Confucianism in Korea

Anonim
The Great Synthesis of Wang Yangming Neo Confucianism in Korea Book PDF

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2020-09-24
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781793614704

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The Great Synthesis of Wang Yangming Neo-Confucianism in Korea by Anonim Pdf

Translated, edited, and introduced by Edward Y. J. Chung, The Great Synthesis of Wang Yangming Neo-Confucianism in Korea: The Chonŏn (Testament) by Chŏng Chedu (Hagok), is the first study in a Western language of Chŏng Chedu (Hagok, 1649–1736) and Korean Wang Yangming Neo-Confucianism. Hagok was an eminent philosopher who established the unorthodox Yangming school (Yangmyŏnghak) in Korea. This book includes an annotated scholarly translation of the Chonŏn 存言 (Testament), Hagok’s most important and interesting work on Confucian self-cultivation. Chung also provides a comprehensive introduction to Hagok’s life, scholarship, and thought, especially his great synthesis of Wang’s philosophy of mind cultivation and moral practice in relation to the classical teaching of Confucius and Mencius and his critical analysis of Zhu Xi Neo-Confucianism and its Sŏngnihak tradition. Chung concludes that Hagok was an original scholar in the Sŏngnihak school, a great transmitter and interpreter of Yangming Neo-Confucianism in Korea, and a creative thinker whose integration of these two traditions inaugurated a distinctively Korean system of ethics and spirituality. This book sheds new light on the breadth and depth of Korean Neo-Confucianism and serves as a primary source for philosophy and East Asian studies in general and Confucian studies and Korean religion and philosophy in particular.

Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi

Roger T. Ames
Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi Book PDF

Author : Roger T. Ames
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 1998-01-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0791439216

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Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi by Roger T. Ames Pdf

A diverse collection of interpretive essays on the third-century B.C.E. Daoist classic, the Zhuangzi, which continues the long commentarial tradition on this work and underscores its relevance to our own time and place.

House Beautiful, Designed to Order

C. J. Petersen
House Beautiful Designed to Order Book PDF

Author : C. J. Petersen
Publisher : Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1588164446

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House Beautiful, Designed to Order by C. J. Petersen Pdf

This helpful guide to clutter control explains how to provide common-sense storage and organisation solutions to help keep the mess from coming back, offering an array of ingenious ideas for the bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, kid's playrooms, wardrobes, and more.

Confucian Propriety and Ritual Learning

Geir Sigurðsson
Confucian Propriety and Ritual Learning Book PDF

Author : Geir Sigurðsson
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2015-01-08
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781438454429

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Confucian Propriety and Ritual Learning by Geir Sigurðsson Pdf

A reconsideration of the Confucian concept li (ritual or ritual propriety), one that references Western philosophers as well as the Chinese context. Honorable Mention, 2018 Outstanding Book Award presented by the Society of Professors of Education Geir Sigurðsson offers a reconsideration of li, often translated as “ritual” or “ritual propriety,” one of the most controversial concepts in Confucian philosophy. Strong associations with the Zhou period during which Confucius lived have put this concept at odds with modernity’s emphasis on progressive rationality and liberation from the yoke of tradition. Sigurðsson notes how the Confucian perspective on learning provides a more balanced understanding of li. He goes on to discuss the limitations of the critique of tradition and of rationality’s claim to authority, referencing several Western sources, notably Hans-Georg Gadamer, John Dewey, and Pierre Bourdieu. An exposition of the ancient Chinese worldview of time and continuous change further points to the inevitability of li’s adaptable and flexible nature. Sigurðsson argues that Confucius and his immediate followers did not endorse a program of returning to the Zhou tradition, but rather of reviving the spirit of Zhou culture, involving active and personalized participation in tradition’s sustention and evolution. Geir Sigurðsson is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Iceland.

Genealogies of Mah?y?na Buddhism

Joseph G Walser
Genealogies of Mah y na Buddhism Book PDF

Author : Joseph G Walser
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2018-07-05
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781317354581

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Genealogies of Mah?y?na Buddhism by Joseph G Walser Pdf

Genealogies of Mahāyāna Buddhism offers a solution to the monumental problem that some have called the "holy grail" of Buddhist studies: the problem of the “origins” of Mahāyāna Buddhism. As much as it contributes to a theory of origins for religious studies and Buddhist Studies, the book argues that that it is the neglect of political power in the scholarly imagination of Buddhism in history that has made the origins of Mahāyāna an intractable problem. Walser challenges commonly-held assumptions, offering a fascinating new take on the genealogy of Mahāyāna that traces its doctrines of emptiness and mind-only from the present day back to the time before Mahāyāna was “Mahāyāna.” In situating such concepts in their political and social history across diverse regimes of power in Tibet, China and India, the book shows that what was at stake in the Mahāyāna championing of the doctrine of emptiness was the articulation and dissemination of court authority across the rural landscapes of Asia. This text will be will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars of Buddhism, religious studies, history, and philosophy.