François Jullien

This volume asks poignant questions about what it means to be alive and inhabit the present. Living holds us between two places. It expresses what is most elementary—to be alive—and the absoluteness of our aspiration—finally living! But could we desire anything other than to live? In The Philosophy of Living, François Jullien meditates on Far Eastern thought and philosophy to...

An exploration of what it means when we say something is beautiful. Bringing together ideas of beauty from both Eastern and Western philosophy, François Jullien challenges the assumptions underlying our commonly agreed-upon definition of what is beautiful and offers a new way of beholding art. Jullien argues that the Western concept of beauty was established by Greek philosophy and became...

Christianity is bound up with the very idea of the West: we cannot evade it even if we would like to. While many people no longer believe in Christianity, we cannot deny that it has left a deep imprint on Western thought. But how might we develop a philosophy of Christianity that is not a Christian philosophy? How can we...

In premodern China, elite painters used imagery not to mirror the world around them, but to evoke unfathomable experience. Considering their art alongside the philosophical traditions that inform it, The Great Image Has No Form explores the "nonobject"—a notion exemplified by paintings that do not seek to represent observable surroundings. François Jullien argues that this nonobjectifying approach stems from the...

In this book, his first to appear in English, French sinologist François Jullien uses the Chinese concept of shi—meaning disposition or circumstance, power or potential—as a touchstone to explore Chinese culture and to uncover the intricate structure underlying Chinese modes of thinking. In this strikingly original contribution to our understanding of Chinese philosophy, François Jullien uses the Chinese concept of...