Overview
Chinese philosophy
Any attempt to survey an intellectual tradition which encompasses more than four thousand years would be a daunting task even if it could be presumed that the reader ...
Search Results 1 - 15 of 15. Results contain 58 matches
Overview
East Asian philosophy
Sinitic civilization, which includes the Chinese-influenced cultures of Japan and Korea, established an early lead over the rest of the world in the development of its material culture ...
Thematic
Dao
Dao, conventionally translated ‘the Way’, is probably the most pervasive and widely recognized idea in Chinese philosophy. The specific character of Chinese philosophy arises because a dominant cultural ...
Thematic
Daoist philosophy
Early Daoist philosophy has had an incalculable influence on the development of Chinese philosophy and culture. Philosophical Daoism is often called ‘Lao–Zhuang’ philosophy, referring directly to the two ...
Thematic
De
Across the corpus of pre-Qin philosophical literature, de, conventionally translated as ‘potency’ or ‘virtue’, seems to have a fundamental cosmological significance from which its other connotations are ...
Thematic
Qi
A difficult term to contextualize within Western conceptual frameworks, qi is variously rendered as ‘hylozoistic vapours’, ‘psychophysical stuff’, ‘the activating fluids in the atmosphere and body’, and, ...
Thematic
Sunzi
Sunzi: The Art of Warfare (or Sunzi bingfa), a text traditionally ascribed to Sun Wu, a contemporary of Confucius, is the most widely read military classic in human ...
Thematic
Tian
Tian, conventionally translated as ‘Heaven’, is both what our world is and how it is. The myriad things are not the creatures of tian or disciplined by ...
Thematic
Xin (heart-and-mind)
In the West, questions of the distinguishability of mind and matter and of rationality and emotion or sentiment are central issues within the philosophy of mind. Neither of ...
Thematic
Xing is conventionally translated as ‘nature’ or ‘human nature’. Some read xing as meaning a heavenly endowed tendency, directionality, or potentiality of growth in the individual. On ...
Thematic
Yin–yang
Yin and yang always describe the relationships that obtain among unique particulars. Originally these terms designated the shady side and the sunny side of a hill, and ...
Thematic
You–wu
In the Western metaphysical tradition, ‘being’ has most generally been thought to denote either a common property of things or a container which relates things by placing them ...
Thematic
Zhi
In classical Chinese philosophy, zhi, conventionally translated as ‘knowing’, is not so much a knowing ‘what’, which provides some understanding of the natural world, as it is ...
Thematic
Zhuangzi
The Zhuangzi is a Daoist text usually associated with ‘Master Zhuang’ (fourth century bc), also known as Zhuang Zhou. Scholarly consensus regards the thirty-three chapters of this ...
Biographical
Confucius (551–479 BC)
Confucius is arguably the most influential philosopher in human history – ‘is’ because, taking Chinese philosophy on its own terms, he is still very much alive. Recognized as ...