“The timelessness and broad appeal of the teachings of Confucius begins from the insight that the life of almost every human being, regardless of where or when, is played out within the context of his or her own particular family, for better or worse. For Confucius and for generations of Chinese that have followed after […]
“The principle of individuation in this cosmology is not a ready-made and replicable essential identity that constitutes us as natural kinds––a soul, a heavenly-endowed human nature, a rational mind, a virtuous character, a self-conscious self, an independent agency. Rather, it is a qualitatively achieved distinctiveness in the configuring of one’s relations within family and community. […]
“Restated in the cosmological language of focus and field, Mencius is saying that, when properly nurtured and cultivated, his ‘flood-like qi‘ achieves the greatest ‘extensive’ (most vast) and ‘intensive’ (most firm) magnitudes in his relations with his environs. This language of extensive field and intensive focus suggests that when one nourishes one’s qi most successfully, […]
“This Great Tradition in telling the story of its own origins explains how a human responsiveness to context has in the past, and continues now, to enchant the cosmos. The remote ancestors Fu Xi and Shen Nong established a rhythm in the human experience, enabling them to chime in with the cadence of the ‘flux […]
“While translation is always pursued at real risk to both rhyme and reason, surely what can be found in translation is also an additional measure of meaning and elegance. Try as we might, we cannot avoid to some degree ‘making up’ our interpretation and ‘making over’ the text with it. But at the same time, […]
“Simply put, the philosophical fallacy is committed whenever the outcome of a process is presumed to be antecedent to that process––whenever some ostensive ‘principle’ is identified, isolated, and abstracted from the flow of experience and is then used anachronistically and reduplicatively to rationalize an always-emergent history. Dewey from early on saw as ‘the most pervasive […]
“When we turn to the art of being most fully human, disclosure in our relationships is what makes this family and this community meaningful, or said more dynamically, is what makes these radically embedded relationships a situated case of ‘meaning making.’ Any understanding of harmony that demands conformity at the expense of a disclosing particularity […]
“We need to wrap our minds around the fact that as human beings we are inherently limited in our ability to reason and to discover things about the world. These limitations do not give us a license to arbitrarily ‘go beyond’ reason and evidence into religion or mysticism. On the contrary, they are reminders that […]
“The main difference between human beings and other animals when it comes to superstition is that other species abandon the silly behavior almost immediately once they figure out that it doesn’t actually work.” ––Answers for Aristotle, by Massimo Pigliucci, pg. 244 “He got home and looked though the mail, and he had driven past […]
“We have finally arrived at Rawls’s crucial thought experiment, his version of a social contract, and the answer to the question of what sort of society we should agree to have, given all of these considerations. Rawls’s approach here is ingenious and can be appreciated even if one does not happen to agree with his […]