The Book of Beginnings
1st Edition
Published on 26. May 2015
152 pages
978-0-300-21360-7 (ISBN)
Available for download
Description
How can a person from a Western culture enter into a way of thinking as different as that of the Chinese? Can a person truly escape from his or her own cultural perspectives and assumptions? French philosopher Francois Jullien has throughout his career explored the distances between European and Chinese thought. In this fascinating summation of his work, he takes an original approach to the conundrum of cross-cultural understanding. Jullien considers just three sentences in their original languages. Each is the first sentence of a seminal text: the Bible in Hebrew, Hesiod's Theogony in Greek, and the I Ching in Chinese. By dismantling these sentences, the author reveals the workings of each language and the ways of thought in which they are inscribed. He traces the hidden choices made by European reason and assumptions, discovering among other things what is not thought about. Through the lens of the Chinese language, Jullien offers, as always, a new and surprising view of our own Western culture.
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Francois Jullien
The Book of Beginnings
Book
06/2015
Yale University Press
€21.03
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Persons
François Jullien is an internationally recognized philosopher and sinologist. He has published more than thirty books and holds several academic posts in France. He lives in Paris. Jody Gladding is a poet and teacher in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Content
- Cover
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 What Is It to Enter (a Way of Thought)?
- 2 The Elsewhere of China
- 3 Thinking Before or Beside?
- 4 The First Sentence
- 5 A First Chinese Sentence
- 6 Commentary
- 7 Hebraic Entry
- 8 Hellenic Entry
- 9 Undoing Our Alternatives
- 10 Where Would the Beginning Begin?
- 11 Neither God nor Myth: What Other Possibility?
- 12 When Myth Holds No Interest, When God Holds No Monopoly
- 13 Greek Tool / Chinese Formulation
- 14 Translation
- 15 Is There Still "Tradition"?
- Finale: A Shift of the Truth
- Reference Note
