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Best renowned for his ground-breaking work as a British sinologist in classical Chinese thought, A. C. Graham (1919-1991) wrote a number of non-historical philosophical works. The Problem of Value (Quirin Press 2019), initially published in 1961, was his first foray in this fruitful vain. As such it can be said that it both represented and was a precursor to his wide-ranging exploration on the nature of thought itself. Through linguistic analysis Graham clarifies the various approaches and types of reasoning by which each of us seeks his own answers. Along the way he takes up the challenge first raised by linguistic philosophers such as Wittgenstein and explores such essential human themes as the nature of egoism; morals; poetry; myth; cosmology; mysticism; and Zen.
As the editors Carine Defoort and Roger T. Ames point out in their introduction to Having a Word with Angus Graham: At Twenty-Five Years into His Immortality (a volume of critical reflections on the work of Graham published by the SUNY Press, 2018):
One of Graham’s self-declared hobby horses was the topic of spontaneity in Chinese philosophy in which he saw a novel solution to the Western fact/value dichotomy. Graham began to elaborate on spontaneity in an early monograph, The Problem of Value (1961), gave it a full reconsideration in his Reason and Spontaneity (1985), and ended up bumping into this topic wherever he looked…
In Reason and Spontaneity: A New Solution to the Problem of Fact and Value
Graham rejects both Kantian rationalism and romantic irrationalism in favor of a notion of self in which awareness integrates reason and spontaneity
Lisa Raphals Reason and Spontaneity Reconsidered in Defoort & Ames, Eds., 2018
Quirin Press is proud to announce that as part of our commitment to A.C. Graham’s hobby horse, following the publication of this second monograph, we plan to re-publish Graham’s remaining title in the series of works on his own thinking about thinking:
Unreason Within Reason: Essays on the Outskirts of Rationality (mid 2021)
