Concept tag
#comparative-philosophy
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‘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 replies -
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 Sène6 replies -
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 Ryu5 replies -
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 replies -
The al-Ghazali–Hume parallel is shallower than the textbooks suggest
The sentence I most often find myself correcting in discussions 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 this: we observe one event accompanying…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho5 replies -
Why did Confucian thinkers rarely ask whether the will is free?
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 constantly about effort and cultivation. Xunzi says goodness is the product of deliberate effort.…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
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 replies -
Seeing before naming: are Dignāga and Merleau-Ponty saying the same thing about perception?
Two accounts of perception seem to me to speak to the moment just before a word arrives, which is where a translator spends her days. Dignāga, the Buddhist epistemologist of the late fifth and early sixth centuries, defines perception as cognition free…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies -
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 replies -
Dignāga’s apoha and Frege’s sense are answers to different questions
In a 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 like…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies -
Heidegger’s standing-reserve and Zhuangzi’s machine heart are two different worries
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 12, Confucius's disciple Zigong meets an old man watering his garden by carrying jars from…
Started by Liu Mingqiao4 replies -
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 KulkarniReply first (no replies yet)