Contemporary Western Concepts – a Step toward Eastern Mentality

Abstract

Empirical evidence shows that people in the East and the West differ in their attitudes toward the world. The East, unlike the West, tends to perceive reality as a dynamic and complex whole, and not as a set of isolated, static parts; it emphasizes relations over features; community over individuality; harmony over polemics; concreteness over abstraction; metaphor over literalism; practical efficiency over theoretical explanations. In spite of those differences, some concepts in contemporary Western philosophy are more akin to Eastern mentality. The most important include holism, contextualism, instrumentalism, embodied embedded cognition, extended mind theory, enactivism, non-classical logic, family resemblance, and implicature