The University of Chicago
- Spring 2020. University of California, Berkeley
Brook A. Ziporyn is a scholar of ancient and medieval Chinese religion and philosophy. Professor Ziporyn received his B.A. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the Divinity School faculty, he has taught Chinese philosophy and religion at the University of Michigan (Department of East Asian Literature and Cultures), Northwestern University (Department of Religion and Department of Philosophy), Harvard University (Department of East Asian Literature and Civilization) and the National University of Singapore (Department of Philosophy).
Ziporyn is the author of Evil And/Or/As the Good: Omnicentric Holism, Intersubjectivity and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought (Harvard, 2000), The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang (SUNY Press, 2003), Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments With Tiantai Buddhism(Open Court, 2004); Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings with Selections from Traditional Commentaries (Hackett, 2009); Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li (SUNY Press, 2012); and Beyond Oneness and Difference: Li and Coherence in Chinese Buddhist Thought and its Antecedents (SUNY Press, 2013). His seventh book, Emptiness and Omnipresence: The Lotus Sutra and Tiantai Buddhism, was published by Indiana University Press in 2016. He is currently working on a cross-cultural inquiry into the themes of death, time and perception, tentatively entitled Against Being Here Now, as well as a book-length exposition of atheism as a form of religious and mystical experience in the intellectual histories of Europe, India and China.
In Spring 2020 he will be teaching an intensive two-week seminar on intra-sectarian Tiantai debates during the Song and Yuan periods.
Biography from University of Chicago, Divinity School Faculty profiles. Image source: University of Michigan.