Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category
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 ...
Posted in Philosophy, Religion | No Comments »
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 ...
Posted in Philosophy, Religion | No Comments »
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 ...
Posted in Arguments, Philosophy | No Comments »
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. ...
Posted in Arguments, Language, Philosophy | No Comments »
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 ...
Posted in Philosophy | No Comments »
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 ...
Posted in Philosophy | No Comments »
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 ...
Posted in Philosophy, Politics | No Comments »
Monday, May 8th, 2017
Posted in History, Philosophy | No Comments »
Monday, May 8th, 2017
Colin McGinn had a comment on the human tendency to irrationality, partly wondering why people are so irrational given that "human irrationality can seem the oddest and least adaptive trait of the species," and accepting that "we need to know what causes irrationality and what we can do to fix ...
Posted in Cognitive Science, Philosophy | No Comments »
Monday, May 8th, 2017
Christopher Hitchens has followed in the footsteps of Steve Harrigan and subjected himself to the process known as 'waterboarding' in order to be able to report more insightfully on just what it is that is the focus of so much controversy. He reports that it is clearly torture and that ...
Posted in Philosophy, Politics | No Comments »