Ancient China's World of Thought

Author: Benjamin Schwartz
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-01-01
Features: Overseas Chinese Studies Series. The pre-Qin period was a brilliant era in the history of Chinese thought, laying down the fundamental character of culture and the basic framework for its subsequent development, thus becoming a timeless focal point of global research. Professor Schwartz, a master of Chinese studies in the West and East, is both erudite, perceptive, and agile, never following the crowd in pursuit of any prejudice or trend, earning him the title of a "counter-trend" figure in academia, known as the Berlin-style "anti-establishment" figure. In this magnum opus, the author reconstructs the intellectual world of the pre-Qin period from a comparative perspective of Chinese and Western studies. He firmly believes that human thought can be communicated and exchanged through cultural symbolic systems, and challenges the relativism tendencies and related assumptions of contemporary cultural anthropology with this research. The book was awarded the Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award and the American Historical Association's James Henry Breasted Award.