Anticipating China : Thinking Through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture

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. Anticipating China: Thinking through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Anticipating the Argument 1. Squaring the Circle 1. From Chaos to Cosmos 2. Rest and Permanence 3. The Watershed: Zeno and the Power of Paradox 4. Counterdiscourse: Heraclitus and Anaxagoras 5. From Theoria to Theory 5.2 Philosophy Discovers Its Past 6. Counterdiscourse: The Sophists 7. Socrates and Plato: Eros and Its Ironies 8. Aristotle: Four Beginnings of Thought 9. Humanitas and the Imago Del 10. The Persistence of the Rational Ethos 11. Counterdiscourse: Challenges to the Rational Ethos 2. The Contingency of Culture 1. The First and Second Problematics 2. China and the First Problematic 2.1 New Approaches to China 2.2. Analogical or "Correlative" Thinking 2.3. Causality and Correlativity 3. Comparing Comparative Methods 3.1. Transcendental and Pragmatic Approaches 3.2. Transcendental Monism 3.3. Transcendental Pluralism 4. Intercultural Vagueness 4.1. The Value of Vagueness 4.2. Reason, Rhyme, and Relativity 4.3. Is There More Than One Culture? 3. Extending the Circle 1. Acosmotic "Beginnings" 2. Analogical Discourse in the Confucian Analects 3. Experiments in Rationalism 4. The Emergence of Han Thinking 4.1. Li and Xiang: "Pattern" and "Image" 4.2. Daoism, Confucianism, and the Language of Deference 5. The Dominance of Han Thinking 5.1. History and Historiography 5.2. The Correlative Circle of the "Leishu" 5.3. Han "Cosmologies" 5.4. Ritual, Role, and Family: The Confucian Synthesis 6. A Closing Anticipation Notes Bibliography of Works Cited Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z This clearly written book, intended for both specialists and nonspecialists, focuses on Nietzsche's later writings, where he appears unsystematic and indifferent to questions of truth. "This book undertakes three important and related tasks. The first is a comprehensive analysis of Nietzsche's notoriously slippery writings; the second is a critique of several major positions in Nietzsche interpretation; and the third is a proposal for a kind of philosophizing 'beyond the truth standard,' a philosophy without nostalgia for the lost grounds of truth. These topics are important today, and form the basis for a considerable debate about the significance of Nietzsche in particular and his role in shaping the twentieth century in general. "Winchester's interpretation of Nietzsche is convincing, his analysis of the French tradition is very strong, and his suggestions for an alternative virtue are very interesting." --Steven Taubeneck, University of British Columbia "[The author] is quite erudite....He is an informed reader of Nietzsche, and along the way he makes numerous insightful comments about both Nietzsche and the wide range of Nietzsche interpretations discussed in this book. The attention to recent German scholarship (Muller-Lauter and Abel, in particular) and to Deleuze distinguishes this book from most English discussions of Nietzsche." -- Alan Schrift, Grinnell College David L. Hall And Roger T. Ames. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 311-322) And Index.