Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2019 - Humanities — Performing Arts — Women's & Gender Studies

Westerhoff (Univ. of Oxford, UK) is a well-known scholar of both general and Buddhist notions of truth and reality, and this book contextualizes his previous work on Nagarjuna (Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka, 2009) in the context of Indian Buddhism in the entire first millennium CE, which is here aptly identified as the Golden Age of Indian Buddhist philosophy. This book may be transformational for Western scholars, because in it Westerhoff stresses the overemphasis on Indian Buddhist philosophy of the classical era and settles Nagarjuna into a richer philosophical community in the Golden Age. The overall journey of this rigorous study is noteworthy: it flows well throughout, thanks in part to the organization of the ideas. The analogy of the game, with its four essential parts--arguments, texts, meditative practices, and historical background--works well: it does each school's "game" a great service, and gives more priority to the "players" providing commentaries to major texts. The detailed table of contents and main idea phrases in the margins aid both reference and focus. This reviewer anticipates that this book will be much cited in future scholarship and teaching.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Li (philosophy, Peking Univ., China, and Univ. of Colorado, Boulder) is a prolific and masterful, if controversial and unorthodox, scholar of Chinese thought. Much of the controversy surrounding his work is due to his pushback against neo- and new-Confucian thought--specifically, to his insistence on rooting his understanding of Confucius and schools of Chinese thought (e.g., Daoism) in the details of Confucianism's early development. This volume, which brings together for the first time translations of Li's essays and interviews (both recent and older), focuses on the shamanistic origins of Confucianism and how shamanistic ritual and concerns gave rise to Confucius's work. Li's approach is to lay bare the shamanistic origins and interconnections between Chinese pragmatic reason and a one-world metaphysics. His engagement with the Confucian tradition is in-depth, detailed, and varied, but the volume's audience will extend beyond those invested in Confucianism or Chinese thought. Li's work is informed by an idiosyncratic reading of Kant, and the book includes numerous expressions of his long-standing ideas on, for example, the nature of emotion, reason, and rational decision-making--all in the context of a one-world metaphysics. Rich in cultural, historical, and philosophical detail, this book offers a great deal.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.