Lexington Books
Pages: 132
Trim: 6⅜ x 9⅜
978-0-7391-9236-8 • Hardback • March 2015 • $107.00 • (£82.00)
978-0-7391-9237-5 • eBook • March 2015 • $101.50 • (£78.00)
Jung-Yeup Kim is assistant professor of philosophy at Kent State University.
Chapter One: Introducing the Notion Qi, the Philosopher Zhang Zai, and the Text Zhengmeng (Rectifying the Ignorant)
Chapter Two: Zhang Zai’s Critique of the Buddhist
Chapter Three: Zhang Zai’s Vertical Development of Qi and His Critique of the Buddhist
Chapter Four: Zhang Zai’s Critique of the Ordinary Person
Chapter Five: Zhang Zai’s Horizontal Development of Qi and His Critique of the Ordinary Person
Chapter Six: Zhang Zai and John Dewey on Realizing Vital Harmony
Chapter Seven: Zhang Zai and Sŏ Kyŏngdŏk’s Philosophy of Qi
The book offers some fresh interpretative (and translational) perspectives on the Zhèngmeng and Zhang’s thought.
— Religious Studies Review
Kim Jung-Yeup’s book (based on the author’s Ph.D. thesis) brings a refreshing and innovative understanding of Zhang Zai’s philosophy of qi as a dynamic pluralism of the human experience. This new interpretation challenges the accepted substance-monistic and materialistic understandings. Kim’s new voice is a longed-for necessity. . . . Kim brings back to the front the significance of morality, too often neglected with regard to Neo-Confucianism.
— Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy
There is no concept more fundamental to Chinese cosmology generally than qi, and yet there is no term more persistently misunderstood. In Zhang Zai's Philosophy of Qi: A Practical Understanding, Jung-Yeup Kim uses a close revisonist reading of Zhang Zai to challenge the standard monistic interpretations of a putative homogenous ontology with a dynamic organic pluralism that not only accounts for both the continuity and complexity of the content of the human experience, but also for the capacity of human beings to optimize the creative possibilities of this experience to live significant lives.
— Roger T. Ames, University of Hawai'i
This illuminating and creative work builds upon current scholarships of Zhang Zai's philosophy and the variety study of qi, and arrives with refreshing and innovative ways to construct Zhang Zai’s vertical and horizontal development of qi, rigorously unfolding a few debatable philosophical issues in a Neo-Confucian period. This book will offer a new impulse for fruitfully navigating Chinese and comparative philosophy and a deeper understanding of polarity, correlativity, and organic unity of qi. It is a timely and valuable contribution to the field.
— Robin R. Wang, Loyola Marymount University