Concept tag
#false-friends
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Translating śūnyatā into Vietnamese: why “không” keeps sliding into “nothing”
I translate philosophy into Vietnamese, and I have run into a problem that the English-language warnings about emptiness don't quite cover. The Sino-Vietnamese word for emptiness is không (空). In the Heart Sutra, which many Vietnamese Buddhists chant, form is emptiness and…
Started by Phạm Quốc Bảo0 replies140 views -
When Aristotle calls humans political animals, does he mean we need a government?
I coach high school debate, and at least once a tournament some student cites Aristotle: "man is a political animal." It always gets used to mean that people need government, or that humans are naturally into politics, like campaigning and voting. I…
Started by Sam Ellery4 replies114 views -
Is the “flow state” players reach in a good game the same thing as wu wei, or a false friend?
I design puzzle games for a small studio in Tainan. Our whole craft is building challenges that match a player's skill closely enough that they lose track of time. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this "flow": deep absorption, loss of self-consciousness, action…
Started by Huang Wei-ting6 replies284 views -
Why do scholars keep saying “duty” is a bad translation of dharma?
I am a poet and a literature student, new to philosophy, and I am working on translating some Malayalam devotional poems into English. The word dharma comes up constantly, and every English version I look at uses “duty” or “righteousness”. Then a…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies230 views -
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 -
Hume’s bundle and the Buddha’s no-self sound identical to me. What is the real difference?
I'm a poet and a literature postgraduate in Kochi, new to formal philosophy. I've just read two things in the same week and they seemed to say the same thing. Hume, in the Treatise, looks inward for his self and reports that…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies196 views -
Is Nāgārjuna’s conventional truth a kind of instrumentalism about science?
In the tea houses on the Annapurna circuit I have been reading Nāgārjuna's Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way with a commentary a monk in Manang gave me. Last season a client of mine, a physicist, explained over dal bhat that some…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung5 replies143 views -
Why do some translators refuse to render ren as ‘benevolence’?
I translate French philosophy and fiction into Vietnamese. A French colleague asked me why English translations of the Analects disagree so much about the word 仁, ren: Legge often has "perfect virtue", D. C. Lau "benevolence", Waley and Slingerland "Goodness", others "humaneness",…
Started by Phạm Quốc Bảo5 replies296 views -
Translating wu wei as “effortless action” does more harm than good; better to leave it untranslated
I translate French philosophy and fiction into Vietnamese, and I spend my working life with words that will not cross borders. Wu wei is a strange case for me, because in Vietnamese it already exists as a Sino-Vietnamese word, vô vi, and…
Started by Phạm Quốc Bảo6 replies148 views -
Was Laozi the first laissez-faire economist? Why wu wei is not the invisible hand
I lecture in economics in Valencia, and every few years a student brings me a quotation from the Laozi with great excitement. "The more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people." "Governing a large state is like cooking a small fish": don't…
Started by Javier Morales6 replies318 views -
Kalam atomism did not anticipate quantum theory, however tempting the comparison
I am a reservoir engineer in Dhahran, and I read kalam for pleasure. Twice this year I have sat through talks claiming that the Ash'ari theologians "anticipated quantum mechanics": the world made of discrete atoms, accidents re-created at each instant, no necessary…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Qahtani4 replies182 views -
Is Yogācāra “consciousness-only” idealism? Three readings and a false friend
I teach comparative philosophy in Hong Kong, and every year a student writes "Yogācāra is Buddhist idealism, like Berkeley". It's one of the more interesting mistakes, because it's partly right. The Yogācāra school, systematised by Asaṅga and Vasubandhu in the fourth and…
Started by Kenneth Leung Chi-ho6 replies268 views -
Does every culture have a word for ‘art’? Technē, kalā and the Japanese ‘ways’
I teach comparative philosophy in Hong Kong and spend most of my time warning students about false friends. One of the biggest sits under the whole debate about defining art. Greek technē is usually translated "art", but it means skilled making of…
Started by Kenneth Leung Chi-ho5 replies159 views -
‘Illa, kāraṇa, gù: what each tradition’s word for ’cause’ lets it ask
I research classical Arabic philosophy in Beirut, and I've been thinking about how the translators of the ninth and tenth centuries handled Aristotle's aitia. They used 'illa and sabab, and here is the interesting part: 'illa already had, or soon acquired, a…
Started by Layla Haddad6 replies246 views -
The chariot and the bundle: why anattā is not Hume’s theory of the self
Hume looked for a self and could not find one. The Buddha's teaching of not-self is often called the same discovery. It is a different kind of claim, made for a different reason.
Started by Ayya Kusalañāṇī0 replies72 views