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Abstract

Language and cultural barriers pose major obstacles to teaching Chinese philosophy to Western philosophy students. Without a cultural and linguistic background, students often struggle to read the original Chinese philosophical texts. Translation also involves issues of interpretation that are difficult to be settled in undergraduate-level courses. To address this situation, this paper introduces a question-oriented pedagogy called “intercultural questioning”. Instead of aiming at a comprehensive understanding of the entire Chinese philosophical tradition, the question-oriented pedagogy reveals the implicit assumptions in one’s conceptual frameworks and unexamined questions in Western philosophy through the East-West dialogue. Students can obtain philosophical insights from Chinese thoughts even with partial understanding of the tradition. This paper is divided into four sections. Section 1 introduces the gravity of linguistic barriers in teaching Chinese philosophy and the limitations of two mainstream approaches in teaching Chinese philosophy – textual analysis and comparative philosophy. Section 2 introduces the method of intercultural questioning and defines it as a question-oriented pedagogy of teaching Chinese philosophy. Section 3 evaluates the practice of the pedagogy of intercultural questioning in two courses conducted at Nanyang Technological University by the author of this paper. Section 4 proposes further improvements of the pedagogy in a new syllabus. 

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