Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond

Religion & Spirituality

Ziporyn, Brook

Other Eastern Religions & Sacred Texts

University of Chicago Press

Omnipotence for the Millions is best described as a weeping man's bedroom farce, a tale of infuriatingly ineluctable agape and abortive misanthropy, of a love-hate triangle of rivalrous comrades and wives, of human intersubjectivity conceived as a world wherein everyone is constantly enacting exasperatingly ambiguous atrocities on everyone else and everyone's kind of pissed off about it probably but nobody's quite sure. It is the story of a certain Mr. Smithers and his close associate and rival Mr. Smith, and their unfortunate intertwining in the fast-paced back-slappingly fulfilling industry of late night self-help infomercial production. Smithers mercy-begging detestation of his putative buddy is, it would seem, no match for the latter's obliviously cheerful ability to just not get it. At various points Smithers is called upon to serve not only as Smith's best friend, his employer, his wifes lover, his business partner and his archrival, but also as his teacher (in a formal classroom setting) and as his valet. The two men, like all two men, are tacitly struggling for the same quantum of virtual space--job, money, status, women, existential authenticity, all of which are in limited supply. And yet, by dint of some sadistically neutral cosmic conspiracy, they're forced to stand around talking to each other all the time. The subject of this book, broadly speaking, is that old-time sideshow favorite formerly known as The Human Condition, in this case construed as an elaboration of what's so bad about ever having to be in the same room with anyone else.

Omnipotence For The Millions

Literature & Fiction

Humor & Satire

iUniverse

"Other than the devil, there is no Buddha; other than the Buddha, there is no devil." The Chinese monk Siming Zhili (960-1028) uttered this remark as part of his justification for his self-immolation. An exposition of the intent, implications, and resonances of this one sentence, this book expands and unravels the context in which the seeming paradox of the ultimate identity of good and evil is to be understood. In analyzing this idea, Brook Ziporyn provides an overview of the development of Tiantai thought from the fifth through the eleventh centuries in China and contributes to our understanding of Chinese intellectual culture and Chinese Buddhism, as well as to basic ontological, epistemological, and axiological issues of interest in modern philosophy.

Evil and/or/as the Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity, and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought

Buddhism

Harvard University Asia Center

Being and Ambiguity is a brilliant work of philosophy, filled with insights, jokes, and topical examples. Professor Ziporyn draws on the works of such Western thinkers as Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, and Hegel, but develops his main argument from Tiantai school of Chinese Buddhism. This important work introduces Tiantai Buddhism to the reader and demonstrates its relevance to profound philosophical issues. Ziporyn argues that we can make both of the claims below simultaneously: This book is about everything. It contains the answers to all philosophical problems which ever shall exist. This book is all claptrap. It is completely devoid of objective validity of any kind. These claims are not contradictory. Rather, they state the same thing in two different ways. To be objective truth is to be subjective claptrap, and vise versa. All interchanges of any kind - conversations, daydreams, sensations - are not only about something but also about everything. Thus, this book concerns itself with no less than the nature of what is and what it means for something to be what it is. It provides a new approach to the basic Western philosophical and psychological issues of identity, determinacy, being, desire, boredom, addiction, love and truth.

Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments with Tiantai Buddhism

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Open Court

Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li (Chinese Philosophy Culture)

Explores the development of Chinese thought, highlighting its concern with questions of coherence. Providing a bracing expansion of horizons, this book displays the unsuspected range of human thinking on the most basic categories of experience. The way in which early Chinese thinkers approached concepts such as one and many, sameness and difference, self and other, and internal and external stand in stark contrast to the way parallel concepts entrenched in much of modern thinking developed in Greek and European thought. Brook Ziporyn traces the distinctive and surprising philosophical journeys found in the works of the formative Confucian and Daoist thinkers back to a prevailing set of assumptions that tends to see questions of identity, value, and knowledge—the subject matter of ontology, ethics, and epistemology in other traditions—as all ultimately relating to questions about coherence in one form or another. Mere awareness of how many different ways human beings can think and have thought about these categories is itself a game changer for our own attitudes toward what is thinkable for us. The actual inhabitation and mastery of these alternative modes of thinking is an even greater adventure in intellectual and experiential expansion.

State University of New York Press

Explores the development of Chinese thought, highlighting its concern with questions of coherence.

Beyond Oneness and Difference: Li and Coherence in Chinese Buddhist Thought and Its Antecedents (Chinese Philosophy Culture)

Beyond Oneness and Difference considers the development of one of the key concepts of Chinese intellectual history, Li. A grasp of the strange history of this term and its seemingly conflicting implications as oneness and differentiation, as the knowable and as what transcends knowledge, as the good and as the transcendence of good and bad, as order and as omnipresence raises questions about the most basic building blocks of our thinking. This exploration began in the book s companion volume,  Ironies of Oneness and Difference, which detailed how formative Confucian and Daoist thinkers approached and demarcated concepts of coherence, order, and value, identifying both ironic and non-ironic trends in the elaboration of these core ideas. In the present volume, Brook Ziporyn goes on to examine the implications of Li as they develop in Neo-Daoist metaphysics and in Chinese Buddhism, ultimately becoming foundational to Song and Ming dynasty Neo-Confucianism, the orthodox ideology of late imperial China. Ziporyn s interrogation goes beyond analysis to reveal the unsuspected range of human thinking on these most fundamental categories of ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics."

Continues the author’s inquiry into the development of the Chinese philosophical concept Li, concluding in Song and Ming dynasty Neo-Confucianism. Beyond Oneness and Difference considers the development of one of the key concepts of Chinese intellectual history, Li. A grasp of the strange history of this term and its seemingly conflicting implications―as oneness and differentiation, as the knowable and as what transcends knowledge, as the good and as the transcendence of good and bad, as order and as omnipresence―raises questions about the most basic building blocks of our thinking. This exploration began in the book’s companion volume, Ironies of Oneness and Difference, which detailed how formative Confucian and Daoist thinkers approached and demarcated concepts of coherence, order, and value, identifying both ironic and non-ironic trends in the elaboration of these core ideas. In the present volume, Brook Ziporyn goes on to examine the implications of Li as they develop in Neo-Daoist metaphysics and in Chinese Buddhism, ultimately becoming foundational to Song and Ming dynasty Neo-Confucianism, the orthodox ideology of late imperial China. Ziporyn’s interrogation goes beyond analysis to reveal the unsuspected range of human thinking on these most fundamental categories of ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ziporyn, Brook. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ziporyn, Brook

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ziporyn, Brook. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond

Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond

Omnipotence For The Millions

Evil and/or/as the Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity, and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought

Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments with Tiantai Buddhism

Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li (Chinese Philosophy Culture)

Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li (Chinese Philosophy Culture)

Beyond Oneness and Difference: Li and Coherence in Chinese Buddhist Thought and Its Antecedents (Chinese Philosophy Culture)

Beyond Oneness and Difference: Li and Coherence in Chinese Buddhist Thought and Its Antecedents (Chinese Philosophy Culture)