Tan (National Univ. of Singapore) has put together an exemplary resource, one of what will be many titles in the "Bloomsbury Research Handbooks in Asian Philosophy" series. Tan's thorough introduction is worth a careful read, because it identifies major questions, offers advice, and sheds light on what is at stake in bringing Chinese and Western philosophy together … Many of the contributors have published major works that bring Chinese philosophy to a Western audience, so they have many insights to offer, not only about the limitations and potential of various methodologies but also about important historical details that could be lost in Western methodologies. The advice about translations is excellent, as are the pedagogical lessons and the comparative opportunities. This is an indispensable guide for researchers, and it would make a fantastic text for a graduate course. Summing Up: Essential.

CHOICE

In my experience, some philosophers and other scholars who have no familiarity with the Chinese tradition are hesitant to study or even discuss it, because they worry that the subject requires some methodology so different from their own that anything they might say would be horribly misguided, and the "entry costs" for acquiring the appropriate methodology are so high in terms of the time and effort required that it is not practically feasible for them to achieve even a rudimentary conversational competence in the area. One strength of Sor-hoon Tan's anthology is that it can help assuage such worries, for it conveniently collects such a wide variety of approaches that, almost regardless of your own orientation, you can find someone in the volume advocating or applying a kindred methodology to the Chinese materials.

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews