Contrasts classical Greek ontology ('the science of being in itself') with Confucian 'zoetology' ('the art of living'). In Living Chinese Philosophy, Roger T. Ames uses comparative cultural hermeneutics as a method for contrasting classical Greek ontology ('the science of being in itself') with classical Chinese 'zoetology' ('the art of living'), which is made explicit in the Yijing??or Book of Changes. Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle give us a substance ontology grounded in 'being qua being' or 'being per se' (to on he on) that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for the human experience. This substratum or essence includes its purpose for being (telos) and defines the 'what-it-means-to-be-a-thing-of-this-kind' (eidos) of any particular thing, thus setting a closed, exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for a particular thing to be 'this' and not 'that.' In the Book of Changes, we find a vocabulary that makes explicit cosmological
