Book Review

For hundreds of years, the world has been dominated by the westerners, and the mainstream of the world philosophy is also about western philosophy. However, with the development of the globe, the limitation of the fact that the world is dominated by only one kind of thought is becoming more and more obvious, and people are now thirsty for another kind of thought and seeking for another perspective to see the fast developing world.

If you are one of those people, I would like to recommend you this book. The book "A Short History of Chinese History", which is written by the widely acknowledged master of Chinese culture and philosophy Feng Youlan, briefly but also vividly talks about the major schools of Chinese philosophy and their development in the history. Mr.Feng also compared chinese philosophy with the western philosophy and discussed their differences and the reasons that lead to them. I like this book, not only because Mr.Feng used vivid ways, just like analogy, metaphor and simile, to explain the philosophical thoughts of ancient Chinese philosophors, but also the interesting and appealing hisotry stories he told the readers. In my point of view, these stories make the book seem more amusing while at the same time help the readers understand the deep thoughts of the ancient great thinkers better.

I just realized after reading this book that Chinese traditional attitude toward different things is actually very open. You can see from the developing history of Chinese philosophy that the later theories always combined the advantages and balanced the conflicts of the ealier theories, some schools even took in some of their opponents' views and thoughts. One of the very examples, is the Confucian school, the philosophors of which absorbed the views of nature from the Taoist school and took in the concept of the order and laws from the Legalists. However, if you ask me "Which chapters do you think is the most impressive and unforgettable one in the book?", then I would say it is the chapter about Ch'ANISM. As far as I'm concerned, the author, Mr.Feng, revealed the core of chinese culture and explained why China is so different from other countries---We all know that the religion is an important part of civilization for other countries around the world, however, China is an exception. When Buddhism and other religions were introduced to China, Chinese were not becoming crazy about them like people living in other parts of the world. On the contrary, Chinese philosophors tried to explain them in their own ways, and some of their theories really have became the core of new schools then. That face shocked me a lot, and I realized how wise our ancient ancestors were. This book really teaches me a lot, and it is really a great book to start if you want to learn more about Chinese culture and philosophy. Wish you also can enjoy this book.

2020-06-22

分享

喜欢(0)