History of Chinese Thought

Catalog description

A study of the dynamic historical development of Chinese thought with its diverse expressions from antiquity to the present. ASIA (HIST) 484Y History of Chinese Thought (3) (IL)(BA) This course meets the Bachelor of Arts degree requirements. This course examines the historical developments of Chinese thought and its multifarious expressions from ancient times to the eighteenth century. It explores the unique Chinese ways and means of making sense of the world and the human condition by probing China’s philosophical and religious traditions. It reveals the conscious life of the Chinese in matters moral, ethical, aesthetic and metaphysical. Moreover, by showing the unity, diversity, continuity and discontinuity in Chinese thought throughout the ages, this course debunks the popular “Orientalist” myth that Chinese culture had been a hermetically sealed and stagnant monolith until the modern era when Western influences became dominant.