Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking Through Comparisons

The first edited volume in Sino-Hellenic studies, this book compares early Chinese and ancient Greek thought and culture.

This pioneering book compares Chinese and Western thought to offer a bracing and unpredictable cross-cultural conversation. The work contributes to the emerging field of Sino-Hellenic studies, which links two great and influential cultures that, in fact, had virtually no contact during the ancient period. The patterns of thought and the cultural productions of early China and ancient Greece represent two significantly different responses to the myriad problems that human beings confront. Throughout this volume the comparisons between these cultures evince two critical ideas. First, that thinking is itself an inherently comparative activity. Through making comparisons, the familiar becomes strange, and the strange somewhat more familiar. Second, since we think through comparisons, we should think them all the way through. How valid and productive are the comparisons and contrasts made between particular works and different styles of thought that emerged from two different, although contemporaneous, cultural contexts?

Contributors include Roger T. Ames, Stephen W. Durrant, David L. Hall, David N. Keightley, Michael Nylan, Andrew Plaks, Michael Puett, Lisa Raphals, Haun Saussy, David Schaberg, Steven Shankman, C. H. Wang, and Anthony C. Yu.

“The subject matter is timely, exciting—broadening two important traditional fields of inquiry.” — Robert C. Solomon, author of From Rationalism to Existentialism: The Existentialists and Their Nineteenth-Century Backgrounds

“This book helps to create and define an important new field: informed, disciplined, and insightful comparative cultural studies for the Greek and Chinese worlds. There is a steadily growing cohort of scholars who work on these types of problems, and they are attracting an increasing audience.” — Willard J. Peterson, Princeton University