Bruya, Brian, ed., The Philosophical Challenge from China
- PDF / 170,927 Bytes
- 5 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 105 Downloads / 184 Views
Bruya, Brian, ed., The Philosophical Challenge from China Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2015, xxxi + 393 pages Kathleen Wright 1 Accepted: 1 September 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
This edited volume consists of thirteen original essays in Chinese philosophy written in English by “Chinese philosophers” who need not be ethnically Chinese or associated with a university in Asia. The title and specifically the words “challenge from China” signal to the reader that Bruya, the editor, intends to reverse the “tendency” he finds “in modern [Anglophone] scholarship on Chinese philosophy to view Chinese philosophy through the lens of Western philosophy” (xxv). His volume of essays will use the “lens” of Chinese philosophy not only to reverse this orientation and thereby view Western philosophy through the lens of Chinese philosophy; the lens of Chinese philosophy will also enhance or magnify our picture of current [Western] analytic philosophy “comparatively.” “[T]he intention [of The Philosophical Challenge from China],” he announces, “is not to demonstrate that Chinese philosophy is superior to current analytic philosophy; rather it is to demonstrate that, without insights from Chinese philosophy, analytic philosophy is significantly impoverished” (xvi). As a Gadamerian-trained reader who works with and against Western philosophy’s Eurocentric biases, I think it is salutary and enriching to see a reversed orientation from the East to the West that “provincializes Europe” (Dipesh Chakrabarty) without being tacitly Sinocentric. There is, however, something concerning about the particular comparative philosophical method—Bruya’s concept of Chinese philosophy and his model of a “challenging Chinese philosophical essay”—that Bruya as editor dictates to the Chinese philosophers contributing to his volume. Their essays are to reveal the impoverished significance of current analytic philosophy. However, Bruya’s “model” for Chinese philosophy impoverishes instead the “art of Chinese philosophy” (Paul R. Goldin) by decontextualizing Chinese philosophy. But for the intellectual richness of the essays in this volume which keeps them from fitting Bruya’s Procrustean model, one might fear
* Kathleen Wright [email protected]
1
Philosophy Department, Haverford College, Haverford, PA 19041, USA
Kathleen Wright
that The Philosophical Challenge from China would fail to promote greater interest in and respect for Chinese philosophy. What is Bruya’s comparative philosophical method and why is his model for “a challenging Chinese philosophical essay” Procrustean? In The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy Methodologies, Sor-hoon TAN distinguishes four types of methodologies in Chinese philosophy: (1) Philosophizing with Traditional Chinese Texts, (2) Methods from Practice, (3) Adapting Borrowed Methodologies, and (4) Critiques and Future Possibilities. Bruya’s is one example of Tan’s third type of “methodology” in Chinese philosophy because he adapts Chinese philosophy to the borrowed methodology of current
Data Loading...
