Breaks through the cultural barriers between Western, Indian, and Chinese philosophy and demonstrates that despite considerable differences between these three great philosophical traditions, there are fundamental resemblances in their abstract principles.

A Comparative History of World Philosophy presents a personal yet balanced guide through what the author argues to be the three great philosophical traditions: Chinese, European, and Indian. The book breaks through the cultural barriers between these traditions, proving that despite their considerable differences, fundamental resemblances exist in their abstract principles. Ben-Ami Scharfstein argues that Western students of philosophy will profit considerably if they study Indian and Chinese philosophy from the very beginning, along with their own. Written with clarity and infused with an engaging narrative voice, this book is organized thematically, presenting in virtually every chapter characteristic views from each tradition that represent similar positions in the core areas of metaphysics and epistemology. At the same time, Scharfstein develops each tradition historically as the chapters unfold. He presents a great variety of philosophical positions fairly, avoiding the relativism and ethnocentrism that could easily plague a comparative presentation of Western and non-Western philosophies.

This classic comparative study of the world's three great philosophies-Western (including Jewish), Indian, and Chinese-surveys the three philosophical traditions from their beginnings to the present time. However, in examining the traditions, Professor Raju has been less occupied with separate doctrines and individual thinkers than with essential characteristics and general trends. He has analyzed and compared these features within the traditions and explored the parallels and divergences among them. For the general interested reader, the interchange among the philosophies will be especially valuable. For the students of religion and of philosophy, the work is a standard guide and reference work.

This unique introduction to comparative philosophy brings together Chinese, Indian, and Western philosophers of roughly the same sort, of comparable stature, on the same philosophical topics and issues. Discussions are arranged in traditional clusters -- logic, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and social and political philosophy. Compares equals to equals -- logicians with logicians, metaphysicians with metaphysicians, ethicists with ethicists -- e.g., compares Indian, Chinese and Western empiricists, utilitarians, hedonists, egoists, atheists, theists, monists, pluralists, idealists, materialists, dualists, skeptics, relativists, political realists, etc. Treats the strictly philosophical arguments as roughly similar across cultures, but presents the larger cultural contexts in which they occur as considerably different. For anyone interested in comparative philosophy.

This book—the first of a three-volume overview of comparative and transnational historiography in Europe—focuses on the complex engagement of various comparative methodological approaches with different transnational and supranational frameworks. It considers scales from universal history to meso-regional (i.e. Balkans, Central Europe, etc.) perspectives. In the form of a reader, it displays 18 historical studies written between 1900 and 1943. The collection starts with the French and German methodological discussions around the turn of the twentieth century, stemming from the effort to integrate history with other emerging social sciences on a comparative methodological basis. The volume then turns to the question of structural and institutional comparisons, revisiting various historiographical ventures that tried to sketch out a broader (regional or European-level) interpretative framework to assess the legal systems, patterns of agrarian production, and the common ethnographic and sociocultural features. In the third part, a number of texts are presented, which put forward a supra-national research framework as an antidote to national exclusivism. While in Western Europe the most obvious such framework was pan-European, in East Central Europe the agenda of comparison was linked usually to a meso-regional framework. The studies are accompanied by short contextual introductions including biographical information on the respective authors.

AUTHORITATIVE AND ACCESSIBLE, THIS LANDMARK WORK IS THE FIRST SINGLE-VOLUME HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY SHARED FOR DECADES 'A cerebrally enjoyable survey, written with great clarity and touches of wit' Sunday Times The story of philosophy is an epic tale: an exploration of the ideas, views and teachings of some of the most creative minds known to humanity. But there has been no comprehensive history of this great intellectual journey since 1945. Intelligible for students and eye-opening for philosophy readers, A. C. Grayling covers with characteristic clarity and elegance subjects like epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, logic, and the philosophy of mind, as well as the history of debates in these areas, through the ideas of celebrated philosophers as well as less well-known influential thinkers. The History of Philosophy takes the reader on a journey from the age of the Buddha, Confucius and Socrates. Through Christianity's dominance of the European mind to the Renaissance and Enlightenment. On to Mill, Nietzsche, Sartre, then the philosophical traditions of India, China and the Persian-Arabic world. And finally, into philosophy today.

The man or woman of faith living in today's pluralist world must have a theology that will do justice to his or her own faith, and also to the neighbours' - and to the differences between them. Similarly, humanists must have a theory that does justice to their own vision and also to the fact that for most of their fellows on earth the proper way of being human has been one or another of various `religious' ways. Any interpretation of human history, both past and present, must take into serious account the self-consciousness of each major part, as well as the diversity and the dynamic of the whole. This exciting book, first published in 1981 and now also available in paperback, is perhaps our world's first serious endeavour towards a theology in global perspective. Here is a wrestling with the demands of an authentic theology of the comparative history of religion.