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Francois Jullien is a philosopher with a specialist knowledge of China and Chinese thought. He uses Chinese thought as a mirror to reflect on the West and as an invitation to think about difference and otherness. This book focuses on the idea of the universal and analyses different ways of thinking about it.
About the author
François Jullien is professor at the Universit Paris-Diderot and a member of the Institut universitaire de France.
Summary
* Francois Jullien is a philosopher with a specialist knowledge of China and Chinese thought. He uses Chinese thought as a mirror to reflect on the West and as an invitation to think about difference and otherness. * This book focuses on the idea of the universal and analyses different ways of thinking about it.
Report
""A valuable contribution to the field. The controversies he identifies are only going to become more deep-set in our increasingly multi-polar world, and given the current geo-political climate we need more than ever to agree on the role that universal Human Rights may play in an increasingly globalised world."
LSE Review of Books
"François Jullien poses the question of dialogue between cultures in a way altogether different from the loose talk that tends to surround this topic, re-examining, in an insightful and rigorous fashion, the problem of the universal - an ambition hardly surprising in an author who is both a philosopher and a sinologist. If there is a problem, explains Jullien, it is because the universal - that emblematic category of Western civilization, the source of its vitality for centuries - continues to be challenged and to find itself in opposition to the rights linked to the irreducible singularity of cultures ... Here we find a rich and agile thought, harvesting new ideas from philosophical tradition, drawing on a detailed knowledge of cultures and clearly interrogating the founding ideological moments of European civilization."
Etudes: Revue de culture contemporaine
