Tradition
Chinese
Chinese philosophy is the thought of China, from Confucius, Laozi and Mozi to the Neo-Confucians, centred on ethics, government and the way of nature.
It took shape in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, when Confucians, Daoists, Mohists, Legalists and the School of Names, among them Mencius, Xunzi, Zhuangzi, Han Feizi and Hui Shi, debated human nature, government and language. Buddhism entered China and was transformed there, and from the eleventh century Neo-Confucians such as Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming built new systems, carried on by Wang Fuzhi, Dai Zhen and, in the twentieth century, Mou Zongsan. It answers questions on how to live, human nature, character, government and nature.
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Where do I start if I want philosophy beyond the European canon, not just Plato?
My students find it obvious that a river can be a person, and I'm trying to understand why so much of Western philosophy finds it strange, and what tikanga might say to philosophy in return. But when I look for a place…
Started by Aroha Tipene5 replies -
Han Feizi’s case for clear law, read in Lahore
I've been reading Han Feizi with more sympathy than I expected. His central insight about law is one I see confirmed every week in our courts. Where the rules are unclear, or applied differently depending on who you are, the powerful win…
Started by Hamza Qureshi5 replies -
Camus and the Buddhists: two ways of refusing the question of life’s meaning
I translate French philosophy into Vietnamese, and I'm finishing a new translation of The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). It opens with the famous sentence that there is only one really serious philosophical problem, suicide: judging whether life is worth living. And it…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
Why did al-Jahiz insist on mixing jest with earnest in serious books?
My shop is off Mutanabbi Street and the most stolen book on my shelves, I'm sorry to say, is al-Jāḥiẓ's Kitāb al-Bukhalāʾ, the Book of Misers. People pick it up, start laughing, and somehow forget to pay. It is a collection of…
Started by Zainab Kadhim5 replies -
I design systems that steer behaviour. Where does my responsibility end?
My job is to shape what players want to do next: rewards spaced so that the next one is always just ahead, social features that make leaving feel like letting friends down, events that expire so you return tomorrow. Some of it…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
What exactly is Wang Yangming’s liangzhi, and is it just the Chinese word for conscience?
I grew up in Tainan and met Wang Yangming in high school, where he was something to memorise: “unity of knowledge and action”, “extend liangzhi”, three marks on the exam. Now I design puzzle games and suddenly find him interesting, because liangzhi…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
Can I keep Stoic advice and leave Stoic determinism behind?
The first line of Epictetus's Handbook changed how I work: some things are up to us and some are not, and suffering comes from confusing the two. But I've just learned that Stoic ethics isn't separable from Stoic physics in the way…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
Teaching ethics to fifteen-year-olds: do I water sprouts or straighten warped wood?
Our school is arguing about a new behaviour policy, and I realised the argument is the old one between Mencius and Xunzi. Mencius says anyone who sees a child about to fall into a well feels alarm and compassion, before any calculation.…
Started by Ji-woo Ryu5 replies -
Guo Xiang said things are ‘self-so’. Does that mean uncaused, or caused by everything?
After my question about non-being, a friend at the park told me to read Guo Xiang, who wrote the commentary on the Zhuangzi that shaped every later edition. (There is an old story that he took much of it from an earlier…
Started by Liu Mingqiao5 replies -
Reading group: Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, starting with ‘Nature and Significance of Play’
Huizinga has sat unread on my shelf for too long, and I'd like company to finally read him. Homo Ludens (1938) argues that play is older than culture, since animals play without anyone teaching them, and that law, war, poetry, philosophy and…
Started by Liu Mingqiao5 replies -
“It’s just a tool” is false: instrumentalism cannot survive the smartphone
Whenever my class discusses phones, someone says, "A phone is just a tool. It depends how you use it." Everyone nods, and the discussion ends. I want to argue that this sentence is false, at least about the devices my students carry.…
Started by Rowena Abellana5 replies -
If striving can never be satisfied, can any life be meaningful? A cellist reads Schopenhauer
I came to philosophy through Schopenhauer on music, and stayed out of a kind of dread. His picture is that we are expressions of a blind will that strives without end. Every satisfied desire gives way to a new one, and in…
Started by Moon Ha-eun5 replies -
One night at the delivery bed, tested against five traditions’ answers to what makes an act right
Three weeks ago a mother I was sitting with delivered a baby who was clearly unwell. The doctor had been called and was twenty minutes away. The mother, exhausted, held my hand and asked: “Is my baby all right?” I did not…
Started by Farhana Akter5 replies -
When sovereignty belongs to God, are rulers more limited or less?
Hebrew and Arabic, the two languages I work between, carry traditions that both, at various points, said that sovereignty ultimately belongs to God. I've noticed that the same premise has been used to reach opposite conclusions. In 1 Samuel 8 the people…
Started by Tal Rosen5 replies -
What does ziran, “self-so”, actually mean, and why do people call it the centre of Daoism?
Maturana and Varela described living things as autopoietic, self-making: a cell produces the very components that produce it. A friend in Santiago told me that Daoism had a word for something similar, ziran, which she translated as “self-so” or “of itself so”.…
Started by Ignacio Cárcamo5 replies -
On the Confucian view there is no self behind your roles, and that is a strength
My students meet Confucius as a list of duties to memorise. I want them to meet the boldest reading of him instead, and I'd like to test it here first. The reading, associated especially with Henry Rosemont and Roger Ames, goes like…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
How did Buddhist ideas first get into Chinese, and why did Daoist words matter so much?
I'm a poet and translator in Kochi, mostly between Malayalam and English. I've been reading about how Buddhist texts were first translated into Chinese, and I keep seeing the claim that Buddhist concepts "entered through Daoist vocabulary". Apparently in the early centuries…
Started by Kavya Menon5 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 -
In the five Confucian relationships, friendship is the odd one out. Why is it there?
My students memorise Mencius's list of the five relationships for exams: affection between father and son, rightness between ruler and minister, distinction between husband and wife, proper order between elder and younger, and trust (xin) between friends. They memorise it and never…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Watsuji’s betweenness, Akan personhood and Confucian roles: is the relation more basic than the person?
When I retired after forty years designing bridges, I was surprised by how much of “me” went with the job. I did not lose a role; I seemed to lose a person. A friend at the temple handed me Watsuji's Ethics and…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
Why do some translators refuse to render ren as ‘benevolence’?
This question came to me through my work. 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 Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
If virtue ethics says ‘do what the virtuous person would do’, how does a beginner use that?
Reading Aristotle slowly, with a pencil, I have hit something that bothers me. I suspect it is a beginner's worry, so forgive me. The summaries I have read say virtue ethics tells you to act as a virtuous person would act in…
Started by Gerrit Venter5 replies -
Translating “being” into Vietnamese: are some metaphysical disputes artefacts of grammar?
I translate French philosophy into Vietnamese, and the hardest word is être. French uses one verb for three jobs: "the sky is blue" (predication), "God is" (existence), and "Paris is the capital" (identity). Vietnamese splits them. For identity and classification we use…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 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 -
Calling Wang Fuzhi a materialist hides more than it reveals
Some older textbooks my students find online still call Wang Fuzhi (Chuanshan) a "materialist". The label comes mostly from twentieth-century scholarship that wanted ancestors for a materialist philosophy, and it has a respectable basis: Wang made qi the sole reality and treated…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Neither filling nor drawing out: what the Analects and Xunzi think a learner is
My students in Taipei memorise the Analects for exams, which means they experience Confucian learning as the most extreme form of filling-up imaginable. I keep trying to show them that the texts themselves say something else. The Analects opens with learning and…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
Do exams measure anything worth measuring? A view from the bac philo
Exam season is coming round again in Dakar. In June my students sit four hours to write a dissertation on a subject of the kind "Is it reasonable to fear death?", "Can one be free without laws?", and so on. The exam…
Started by Khady Sène5 replies -
Dai Zhen was right: moral principle used to crush desire is itself a cruelty
My students memorise Zhu Xi for their exams, and one slogan of the Cheng–Zhu school always sticks: preserve heavenly principle, eliminate human desires. They write it down without blinking. Dai Zhen (1724–1777) blinked. A Qing scholar trained in the philological methods of…
Started by Lin Pei-shan5 replies -
What does Fazang mean when he says the rafter simply is the building?
I was a structural engineer for forty years, so I came to Fazang's writings expecting to find something about parts and wholes I could recognise. Instead I found the dialogue about the rafter and the building, in which the claim is made…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
The deepest split in metaphysics is substance versus process, not matter versus mind
I want to defend a claim I came across in a comparative table of answers to "what is real?" across traditions. Most introductions organise metaphysics around matter versus mind: materialism, idealism, dualism. That division is real, but it's largely a European early-modern…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies