Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category
Friday, July 9th, 2021
La logique a été découverte par Aristote, ou peut-être il l’a inventé. Selon la version traditionnelle, il avait remarqué que parmi certains arguments les raisons garantissent la conclusion. Il n’est pas possible que les raisons soient vraies et la conclusion fausse. Un argument de cette sorte nous appelons maintenant ‘valide’. ...
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Friday, July 9th, 2021
Qu’est-ce qu’un athée ? Quelqu’un qui croit qu’il n’y a pas de Dieu. Pourquoi croit-il cela ? Dans la littérature il y a pas mal de raisons et d’arguments données, mais pour un philosophe il n’y a qu’un seul argument significatif : qu’il n’y a aucune raison suffisante à justifier la croyance en ...
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Wednesday, May 12th, 2021
The idea that phenomena and noumena are the same thing also featured in the doctrines of the Huáyán (??) school, in which it appears as a consequence of a more general claim concerning the interpenetration of all levels of reality. This school is another of those Chinese schools which made ...
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Wednesday, May 12th, 2021
Nagarjuna’s (2nd-3rd C) doctrine of Two Truths is accepted by all Mahayanists. It refers to a method of instruction in which statements were open to alternative possible interpretations depending on the level of sophistication of the audience; a method that Buddha used in order to make his doctrines accessible. The ...
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Sunday, July 12th, 2020
We are familiar, I suppose, with the general arguments for skepticism in the Western tradition – if only from our memories of the Cartesian argument. There are traces of something like that same skeptical procedure in the Zhuangzi, with the notable exception of the very first step in which we ...
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Thursday, July 2nd, 2020
The Dialectician Hui Shi (Huizi) (??, 370-310 BC) is mentioned in several ancient works, like the Hanfeizi and the Xunzi that have been mentioned before, but especially in the Zhuangzi. In that work he is presented as a friend of Zhuang Zhou and a foil for his jests. In c. ...
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Monday, November 4th, 2019
This morning I listened to a Philosopher’s Zone podcast (our ABC) 'Philosophy in the Wake of Empire: The White Way to Think' featuring B W van Norden (a famous student of Chinese philosophy – I’m currently reading his ‘Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy’) talking about the failure of Western Philosophy ...
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Thursday, October 31st, 2019
Introduction
The Mencian claim that human nature is good eventually became the accepted position in Confucianism, but for over twelve hundred years the question was disputed with the followers of Xunzi (??) who argued the opposite: that human nature was essentially bad. Xunzi, whose name was actually Xún Kuàng (??,) is ...
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Monday, May 8th, 2017
I asked Sam Crane at Useless Tree:
Are there, in fact, any arguments against torture in Chinese philosophy that aren't basically utilitarian? If there aren't, then could there have been? In Western philosophy our arguments are usually from appeal to various notions of 'human rights', but that wouldn't be possible for ...
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Monday, May 8th, 2017
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