Confucian Pragmatism as the Art of Contextualizing Personal Experience and World

Download or read book Confucian Pragmatism as the Art of Contextualizing Personal Experience and World written by Haiming Wen and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2009-04-16 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.