Tradition
Chinese
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‘Existence precedes essence’ is an empirical claim, and the evidence is against it
I want to argue that existentialism's founding premise is not a metaphysical axiom but an empirical claim, and a shaky one. In his 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre puts it plainly: for human beings, existence precedes essence. There is no…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies -
Langar, the Shabbat table and Confucius’s sauce: what does eating together do?
The langar, where I help out at our gurdwara in Surrey, goes back to Guru Nanak and was made central by the gurus who followed: a free kitchen where everyone, whatever their caste, faith or status, sits on the floor in the…
Started by Harpreet Kaur Grewal6 replies -
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 Hsieh Wei-ting6 replies -
Nineteen years with one blade: Cook Ding and the discipline that wu wei is usually sold without
A customer from Europe, watching me cut a joint in my workshop, told me it looked effortless and that I must be practising wu wei. She had read a book about it on holiday. I asked her what it meant and she…
Started by Hicham Ouazzani6 replies -
Teaching non-European philosophy as live positions, not museum pieces
I teach the terminale philosophy class at a lycée in Dakar, where Descartes and Senghor sit on the same exam paper. One of the clearest changes in philosophy since 1990 is that traditions outside Europe have begun entering curricula and journals as…
Started by Khady Sène6 replies -
How do you choose a translation when you can’t read the original?
Speaking Irish as well as English, I know how much changes between languages. I've been reading Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy on the train, and I recently noticed that the two translations I own feel like different books. One is stately and archaic,…
Started by Siobhán Keane6 replies -
The crane logs were falsified and reporting them might shut the terminal: what each theory told me
Last spring, as union delegate, I found out that maintenance records for one of the older gantry cranes at our terminal had been filled in for inspections that never happened. The crane was probably fine. The risk was small but real: a…
Started by Hugo Marchetti6 replies -
Can you be a good person in a role that sometimes requires you to do bad things?
I am thinking of my years in the army, and I am not talking about atrocities. I mean ordinary things the role required: enforcing a punishment I thought was disproportionate because the regulation was clear, sending a capable young private on a…
Started by Choi Byeong-hun6 replies -
Translating wu wei as “effortless action” does more harm than good; better to leave it untranslated
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 it carries baggage that English translators rarely notice. Consider…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo6 replies -
“The best ruler is barely noticed” is compatible with abandonment, and the Legalists exploited exactly that
Chapter 17 of the Daodejing ranks rulers. The best are those whose people barely know they exist. Next come those the people love and praise; then those they fear; then those they despise. And when the work is done, the people all…
Started by Chen Yuting6 replies -
‘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 -
Confucian ethics is a role ethics, and filing it under virtue ethics hides its best idea
In the national ethics curriculum I teach in Seoul, Confucius sits on the same page as Aristotle under the heading "virtue ethics". I used to accept that. I now think it is a mistake, or at least a costly simplification. Here is…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu6 replies -
Did classical Chinese philosophers have a concept of truth, or only of the “admissible”?
This question sits at the centre of my reading of the Later Mohist canons, and I would welcome other views. In 1985 Chad Hansen published an influential paper arguing, roughly, that classical Chinese philosophy did not use a semantic concept of truth,…
Started by Chen Yuting6 replies -
Was Laozi the first laissez-faire economist? Why wu wei is not the invisible hand
Every few years a younger colleague at work 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 keep poking it. And…
Started by Javier Ferrandis6 replies -
The four-principles framework is too individualist for family-centred medicine
I first read Beauchamp and Childress as a student, and I admired it. But my work interpreting at the hospital keeps showing me where it doesn't fit. A typical case: an older man with a serious diagnosis. By the book, the doctor…
Started by Tsion Bekele6 replies -
The Axial Age is defined by its exclusions, and that makes the thesis unfalsifiable
Every survey of world philosophy I've read includes the Axial Age: between about 800 and 200 BCE, in Greece, India, China and Israel, with no documented contact between them, something similar happened. People began defending claims against stated objections, named individuals disagreed…
Started by Mateo Quispe6 replies -
Knowing without doing is not knowing: Wang Yangming’s strong internalism is simply correct
Every year I teach my students Wang Yangming's slogan that knowledge and action are one, and every year they treat it as an inspirational poster. I want to defend it as a serious thesis about moral motivation. The usual view, in China…
Started by Lin Pei-shan6 replies -
A role-based ethics gives too little protection to the person the roles are failing
I study constitutional law in Delhi, and Ambedkar is my lodestar. In Annihilation of Caste (1936) he attacked a social order in which a person's duties are fixed by the position they are born into, and argued that such an order leaves…
Started by Deepa Kartha6 replies -
Confucius refused to talk about death. Is declining a question a kind of answer?
In Book 11 of the Analects, the disciple Zilu asks how to serve ghosts and spirits. Confucius says: you are not yet able to serve people, how could you serve spirits? Zilu asks about death. Confucius replies: you do not yet understand…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu6 replies -
Nishida’s pure experience dissolves the hard problem rather than solving it
I came to Nishida late, through zazen at a small temple near my house in Kyoto, after a career designing structures. Here is my thesis, stated as sharply as I can. The hard problem assumes a split. On one side, a physical…
Started by Aiko Tanabe6 replies -
Hume was right: reason can choose the means, never the ends
Hume lived down the road from where I worked for thirty-four years, so I am biased. But I think his account of practical reason has never been bettered. In the Treatise, Book 2, Hume says that reason is, and ought only to…
Started by Alistair Gow6 replies -
Reading group: the Mozi’s three chapters on impartial caring (jian’ai), one a week
The later Mohist canons get most of my attention, but I keep returning to the core chapters, the three on jian'ai, usually translated as “universal love” or, better, “impartial caring”. They are short, vigorous and argumentative, and they make the case that…
Started by Chen Yuting6 replies -
Han Feizi was right that good government cannot wait for good rulers
I spend most of my time with the Mohists, but I read Han Feizi to understand why the Confucian picture of government lost so many arguments in the Warring States period, and I want to defend one of his central claims. The…
Started by Chen Yuting6 replies -
Ross was right: there is no master principle of morality, only several duties weighed by judgement
Every sentence I heard passed in Lahore's courts involved weighing things that do not reduce to one another: the harm done, the offender's history, his family, remorse, deterrence, mercy. There was never a formula. The sentencing guidelines that tried to be formulas…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan6 replies -
Reading group: aboutness from Brentano to Husserl, with Xuanzang alongside
Yogācāra and Husserl are two traditions that share more vocabulary than either admits and differ more than enthusiasts claim. I propose a three-week reading on intentionality, the property of mental states of being about something, with one Buddhist text set beside the…
Started by Kenneth Lam Chi-ho6 replies -
‘Illa, kāraṇa, gù: what each tradition’s word for ’cause’ lets it ask
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 second life in law. In Islamic jurisprudence, the…
Started by Layla Sfeir6 replies -
Deflationism is right: “true” is a useful device, not the name of a property
Here is the view I want to defend, as plainly as I can. Take the schema: "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. Every reasonable theory of truth accepts instances of this. Deflationists say these instances are…
Started by Oskar Nyberg6 replies -
Traditions that disagree about the self agree about how to live, so ethics can do without metaphysics
There is one comparison that always woke my students up. Put the great traditions side by side on what a person is, and they disagree completely: an immortal soul, an eternal self identical with the absolute, no abiding self at all, a…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies -
Political meritocracy is better than electoral democracy
I'll argue this to test it, not because I hold it. Daniel Bell's The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (2015) draws on Confucian ideas to argue that political leaders should be selected and promoted on the basis of…
Started by Javier Ferrandis5 replies -
Mozi was a consequentialist two thousand years before Bentham, and lost the argument the same way
I read the later Mohist canons closely, so I live with this comparison. Here's the case. Mozi, writing in the fifth century BCE, argued that the test of any doctrine or policy is whether it promotes benefit and removes harm for the…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies