Concept tag
#comparative-philosophy
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The “false friend” warning about Hume and anattā is overstated
I've read the warnings: Hume's bundle theory is not the Buddhist doctrine of not-self, because Hume merely reports failing to find a self, while Buddhism asserts its absence and builds a practice on it. I agree with the facts. I think the…
Started by Alistair Gow4 replies158 views -
Wang Yangming stared at bamboo for seven days and fell ill. Was he refuting empiricism?
I teach ethics at a secondary school in Seoul, and the story my students remember best from the whole Neo-Confucian unit is the bamboo. As a young man, Wang Yangming tried to put Zhu Xi's teaching into practice. Zhu Xi said that…
Started by Ji-woo Park5 replies294 views -
Sextus, Nāgārjuna and Wang Chong within about a century: one sceptical moment, or three projects?
Between treks I read about the history of philosophy, and I came across a striking claim: that in roughly a century or so, around the second century CE, three traditions with no documented contact each produced a great critic of confident assertion.…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies140 views -
The al-Ghazali–Hume parallel is shallower than the textbooks suggest
I teach comparative philosophy, and the sentence I most often have to correct in student essays is "al-Ghazālī anticipated Hume". I'd like to argue that the parallel, though real, is shallower than it is usually made to look. The shared step is…
Started by Kenneth Leung Chi-ho5 replies254 views -
‘Does life have meaning?’ is a recent European question most traditions would not ask
When my students in Accra first meet existentialism, a few of them find it thrilling and most find it puzzling. "Why would life need to have a meaning," one asked me, "when it already has a place?" That is my thesis, put…
Started by Kwame Asante6 replies238 views -
Why did Confucian thinkers rarely ask whether the will is free?
I teach ethics in a Seoul secondary school, mostly through the Korean Neo-Confucian tradition. A colleague who teaches European philosophy asked me what the Confucians said about free will versus determinism. I realised I had nothing to give him. The tradition talks…
Started by Ji-woo Park5 replies170 views -
Dignāga’s apoha and Frege’s sense are answers to different questions
In my MA seminar this term somebody summarised apoha as "basically Frege's sense", and someone else said "no, it's Saussure: meaning by difference". I want to resist both, or at least slow them down. Dignāga's claim (c. 480–540) is that a word…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies174 views -
Dharmottara’s mirage is not really a Gettier case, and calling it one flattens both traditions
Every year someone on a comparative course says "the Buddhists found the Gettier problem a thousand years early", and every year I nod and feel uneasy. Let me try to say why, and you can tell me where it breaks. The case:…
Started by Meera Kulkarni5 replies247 views -
Is “what is the meaning of life?” a modern European question?
Every year I teach Camus to my terminale class in Dakar, and every year the same thing happens. The students read The Myth of Sisyphus, which begins by saying that the only truly serious philosophical problem is suicide, whether life is worth…
Started by Khady Faye6 replies218 views -
Seeing before naming: are Dignāga and Merleau-Ponty saying the same thing about perception?
As a translator I spend my days with the moment just before a word arrives, so I have been reading two accounts of perception that seem to speak to that moment. Dignāga, the Buddhist epistemologist of the late fifth and early sixth…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies186 views -
Heidegger’s standing-reserve and Zhuangzi’s machine heart are two different worries
I spent my working life building railways in Sichuan, and in retirement I read Zhuangzi. People often put two passages side by side as if they said the same thing, and I think the comparison hides more than it shows. In chapter…
Started by Liu Jianguo4 replies214 views -
Two ways of holding no view: Nāgārjuna and Sextus Empiricus on suspending judgement
The Madhyamaka dialectician and the Pyrrhonist physician look like twins. Read closely, they are doing different things, and the difference is instructive.
Started by Meera Kulkarni0 replies91 views