The Problem of Value

Best renewed 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, 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 aimed to clarify the various approached 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 themes as the nature of egoism, morals, poetry, myth, cosmology, mysticism and Zen

As the editors Carine Defoort and Roager 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 Angus Charles Graham published by the State University of New York 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 and 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...

Quirin Press is proud to announce that as part of our commitment to A.C. Graham's "hobby horse" following the publication of this first monograph, we plan to re-publish Graham's other two tiles in the series

Reason and Spontaneity of 1985 (planned for 2020), and the posthumous volume of essays of 1991 Unreason Within Reason: Essays on the Outskirts of Rationality (2020/21)

Keywords: Values. Knowledge, Theory of. Language and languages -- Philosophy.

A. C. Graham (1919 - 1991) was Professor of classical Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, a noted sinologist who specialized in Chinese philosophical thought and the textual and linguistic problems of Chinese philosophical literature.