With the history of Chinese philosophy, the effort of the author Dimitris K. Velissaropoulos is completed, aimed at providing Greek readers with a systematic picture of the genesis and evolution of Eastern thought from ancient times to the present day.
Six years ago, the History of Indian Philosophy was published, which met with great interest from the reading public and has already been released in a second edition. India and China are considered the cradle of Eastern thought, just as Greece is the cradle of Roman, and subsequently European, culture.
All philosophical movements that arose in the other Asian countries have their foundations either in Indian or Chinese philosophy, except for a few much less significant exceptions. The author D.K. Velissaropoulos aims to fill the serious gap in Greek literature regarding Eastern thought. He believes that this new acquaintance will broaden the horizons of the Greek and non-Greek-speaking reader, who will now be able to ascertain specifically and in comparison the real meaning of the contribution of ancient Greek philosophy to the liberation of the human spirit.
The first volume of the History of Chinese Philosophy deals with the genesis of Chinese thought in the 11th century BC and its evolutionary path up to the 2nd century BC. This is a very long period during which all the central philosophical ideas were created and the unique, and perhaps exotic for Europeans, way of formulating philosophical truth in China was definitively established.
The division of the work into the smallest possible sections within the larger ones and the effort to simplify the language—something difficult when it comes to philosophical concepts—were chosen to facilitate the study of the work.
