Confucian Pragmatism as the Art of Contextualizing Personal Experience and World
Haiming Wen

 

 

 

List Price: $85.00
Cloth 0-7391-3644-5 / 978-0-7391-3644-7
Apr 2009 430pp

 

"Haiming Wen has provided a lucid and perceptive discussion of the creative dimension of the Confucian tradition by correlating American pragmatism and Chinese thinking. The book is an outstanding contribuiton to comparative philosophy."
—Jiyuan Yu, State University of New York at Buffalo

 

This engaging work of comparative philosophy brings together American pragmatism and Chinese philosophy in a way that generates new interpretations of Chinese philosophy and a fresh perspective on issues in process philosophy. Through an analysis of key terms, Haiming Wen argues that Chinese philosophical terminology is not simply a retrospective language that through a process of stipulation promises us knowledge of an existing world, but is also an open, prospective vocabulary that through productive associations allows philosophers to realize a desired world. Relying on this productive power of Chinese terminology, Wen introduces a new term: "Confucian pragmatism." Wen convincingly shows that although there is much that distinguishes American pragmatism from Confucian philosophy, there is enough conceptual overlap to make Confucian pragmatism a viable and exciting field of study.

 

About the Author
Haiming Wen is assistant professor of philosophy at Renmin University of China

 

 

Table of Contents for Confucian Pragmatism as the Art of Contextualizing Personal Experience and World

• • 1. The Crisis of Creativity
     

• • 2. Getting Past the Eclipse of Creativity: Acknowledging the Philosophical Fallacy
     

• • 3. Intentionality/Meaning (yi) and Confucian Contextual Creativity
     

• • 4. Feelings (qing) and the Importance of History, Particularity, and Emergence in Context
     

• • 5. The Contextual Creativity of Key Philosophical Terms
     

• • 6. Chinese Philosophical Sensibility
     

• • 7. Chinese Metaphysical Creativity
     

• • 8. Chinese Epistemological Creativity: Thinking-and-Feeling (Mind) and Experience
     

• • 9. Confucian Pragmatism as a Post-Modern Comparative Philosophy