This pioneering book compares Chinese and Western thought to offer a bracing and unpredictable cross-cultural conversation. The work contributes to the emerging field of Sino-Hellenic studies, which links two great and influential cultures that, in fact, had virtually no contact during the ancient period. The patterns of thought and the cultural productions of early China and ancient Greece represent two significantly different responses to the myriad problems that human beings confront. Throughout this volume the comparisons between these cultures evince two critical ideas. First, that thinking is itself an inherently comparative activity. Through making comparisons, the familiar becomes strange, and the strange somewhat more familiar. Second, since we think through comparisons, we should think them all the way through. How valid and productive are the comparisons and contrasts made between particular works and different styles of thought that emerged from two different, although contemporaneous, cultural contexts?

A comparative study of the ancient Mediterranean and Han China, seen through the lens of political culture.

Ancient Greece and China Compared is a pioneering, methodologically sophisticated set of studies, bringing together scholars who all share the conviction that the sustained critical comparison and contrast between ancient societies can bring to light significant aspects of each that would be missed by focusing on just one of them. The topics tackled include key issues in philosophy and religion, in art and literature, in mathematics and the life sciences (including gender studies), in agriculture, city planning and institutions. The volume also analyses how to go about the task of comparing, including finding viable comparanda and avoiding the trap of interpreting one culture in terms appropriate only to another. The book is set to provide a model for future collaborative and interdisciplinary work exploring what is common between ancient civilisations, what is distinctive of particular ones, and what may help to account for the latter.

Argues that Greece was an integral part of the wider Eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern civilization and that this had a major impact on the ways in which the Greeks chose to represent foreigners in their literature.

This book compares the intellectual and social history and past and present contexts of mantic practices (divination) in Chinese and Greek antiquity.

Publisher Description

The rich civilizations of ancient China and Greece built sciences of comparable sophistication-each based on different foundations of concept, method, and organization. In this engrossing book, two world-renowned scholars compare the cosmology, science, and medicine of China and Greece between 400 B.C. and A.D. 200, casting new light not only on the two civilizations but also on the evolving character of science. Sir Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin investigate the differences between the thinkers in the two civilizations: what motivated them, how they understood the cosmos and the human body, how they were educated, how they made a living, and whom they argued with and why. The authors' new method integrally compares social, political, and intellectual patterns and connections, demonstrating how all affected and were affected by ideas about cosmology and the physical world. They relate conceptual differences in China and Greece to the diverse ways that intellectuals in the two civilizations earned their living, interacted with fellow inquirers, and were involved with structures of authority. By A.D. 200 the distinctive scientific strengths of both China and Greece showed equal potential for theory and practice. Lloyd and Sivin argue that modern science evolved not out of the Greek tradition alone but from the strengths of China, Greece, India, Islam, and other civilizations, which converged first in the Muslim world and then in Renaissance Europe.

When Richard Nisbett showed an animated underwater scene to his American students, they zeroed in on a big fish swimming among smaller fish. Japanese subjects, on the other hand, made observations about the background environment...and the different "seeings" are a clue to profound underlying cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians. As Professor Nisbett shows in The Geography of Thought people actually think - and even see - the world differently, because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China, and that have survived into the modern world. As a result, East Asian thought is "holistic" - drawn to the perceptual field as a whole, and to relations among objects and events within that field. By comparison to Western modes of reasoning, East Asian thought relies far less on categories, or on formal logic; it is fundamentally dialectic, seeking a "middle way" between opposing thoughts. By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to categories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behaviour.

Even today the economic powerhouse of modern China takes strength and nourishment from its legacy of antiquity. Ancient China illuminates this venerable heritage with unprecedented scholarship and vividness.

This pivot compares mourning rituals in Archaic & Classical Greece and Pre-Qin China to illustrate some of the principles and methods used in comparative studies. It focuses on three main aspects of mourning of the dead before burial -- lamentation, mourners' gestures and behaviors, and mourning apparel -- to demonstrate the cultural function, purpose, and social influence of mourning. A key comparative study of rituals at the heart of both Western and Chinese culture, this text highlights the cultural function and social influence of rituals of two ancient peoples and will be of interest to all scholars of comparative religion, sociology and anthropology.