Brook Ziporyn

Professor of Religion and Philosophy
Department of Religious Studies
Office: Crowe Hall, 1860 Campus Drive, 5-159
Phone: (847) 467-4170
Email: b-ziporyn@northwestern.edu

Brook Ziporyn specializes in Chinese Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. He earned the Ph.D. in Chinese philosophy at the University of Michigan and has taught Buddhism and Chinese thought at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, the Chung-hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies, Taiwan, and Northwestern University (since 1998). Ziporyn's research focuses on metaphysical, axiological and epistemological developments in Chinese thought and religion, and on comparative philosophical issues emerging from the encounter between Indo-European and Sinitic thinking as evidenced in Chinese Buddhism, especially Tiantai, and the implications of this encounter for contemporary thought.

Ziporyn's courses include Zen Buddhism, Contemporary Buddhist Philosophy, Confucianism, Taoism, Comparative Idealisms, Comparative Trinitarianisms, and Buddhist Omnicentrism. He has also taught Freshman Seminars on Zen in the Western Imagination and Reading the Tao.

Ziporyn is currently working on an extended intellectual history of the concept of Li (principle, coherence) in Chinese thought from the classical period to the early Song Dynasty, and its implications for understanding the handling of concepts of universality, class-inclusion, and omnipresence in Chinese thought, a tradition that evolved in isolation from either philosophical theism or any Platonic conception of eternal forms, and lacked any two-tiered metaphysic that would underwrite a notion of substantial essences ontologically distinct from the empirical realm.

His published books in intellectual history, religion and philosophy are Evil and/or/as the Good: Intersubjectivity and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought (Harvard University Press, 2000); The Penumbra Unbound, the Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang (State University of New York Press, 2003); Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments with Tiantai Buddhism (Open Court Press, 2004); and Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings, With Selections from Traditional Commentaries (Hackett, 2009). He has also published several novels.

Selected Works

Books

Evil and/or/as the Good: Intersubjectivity and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought. Harvard University Press, 2000.

The Penumbra Unbound, the Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang. State University of New York Press, 2003.

Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings With Selections from Traditional Commentarie. Hackett Publishing Company, 2009.

Curriculum Vitae