Comparative philosophy: Its aims and methods

Journal of Chinese Philosophy

Volumn 30, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 259-270

  Fleming, Jesse ^a  

^a TAMKANG UNIVERSITY   (Taiwan)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34250815281     PISSN: 03018121     EISSN: 15406253     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1540-6253.00118     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. I Ching Philosophy (Taipei: Yeong Dah Publishing Co., 1999)
2. See Hegel's Logic, translated by William Wallace with a foreword by J. N. Findlay, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975)
3. See Heidegeer's Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1962)
4. see also George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)
5. See Archie Bahm, Comparative Philosophy (Albuquerque, NM: World Books, 1977)
6. See Daya Krisna, "Comparative Philosophy: What It Is and What It Ought to Be," and Raimundo Panikkar, "What Is Comparative Philosophy Comparing?"-both in Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988)
7. In my book, I Ching Philosophy and in my Ph.D. dissertation on Chuang Tzu (Chuang Tzu and the Problem of Personal Identity, Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1988), I dissect the philosophies of the I Ching and Chuang Tzu along the lines of traditional divisions of philosophy in the West, for example, with chapters on "Aesthetics in the I Ching" and "Taoist Metaphysics." Whether I am offering an orderly and systematic exegesis of these two classics of Chinese philosophy or doing violence to their spirit and intent by such pigeonholing is not for me to say
8. See the Appendix, "On Translating Certain Chinese Philosophical Terms," in Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966)
9. For eccentric and misleading translations, such as "authoritative person" for chun-tzu, see Roger Ames and David Hall, Thinking Through Confucius (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1987)
10. For my own views regarding translation of Taoist philosophical works, see my "On Translation of Taoist Philosophical Texts: Preservation of Ambiguity and Contradiction," Journal of Chinese Philosophy 25, no. 1 (March 1998)
11. Op cit., Panikkar, p. 122
12. Or, as Ben-Ami Scharfstein states in his Philosophy East and West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) ". . . The effort we make to understand the others, who are so different from us, may help us to understand ourselves more clearly" (p. 47). Scharfstein also states that "contrast increases visibility" (p. 29), and ". . . whenever we perceive or think, we compare, that is, respond to similarities and differences" (p. 28); he makes the same point I do, but more concisely when he says: ". . . comparison is essential to perception and thought" (p. 29)