Collected Final Exam Essay Questions for the Modern Western Philosophy Course (Combined)

A Compilation of Final Exam Reflection Questions for the Course on Modern Western Philosophy: 0. Introduction

EPR posted on 2005-12-15 19:35:11

A Compilation of Final Exam Reflection Questions for the Course on Modern Western Philosophy:

0. Introduction

Initial intention: Study the major course well!

Purpose: Copy the material from the book and then type it into the computer; this is a way of sorting through and consolidating knowledge. At the same time, posting the organized material online can also provide a reference for classmates.

Method: This is not an outline, nor is it my own subjective reflections, nor is it an answer written according to the questions. I have simply selected one or several books among the relevant multiple histories of Western philosophy or some introductory books on special topics that are written more clearly, and excerpted and copied down the related material worth referring to. I myself have only slightly added or removed some auxiliary words and phrases (extra personal views will only appear in parentheses). In general, it is completely copied from those books. It can serve as a reference to help me and my classmates read and understand; as for actually answering the questions, one still needs to sort things out through one’s own understanding.

Statement: For all the related material I excerpt, I will list the source books. I do not guarantee that there will not be any major mistakes in the typing or organization. I hope that when you review, you will definitely rely mainly on reading the books yourselves; others’ notes or compilations are only for reference and comparison. Of course, if you find problems or shortcomings in my organization, please also let me know.

Note: I wish my classmates a smooth exam~

Qifenghuang
2005-12-16 10:02:29 [reply]
As expected, handsome

Pear
2005-12-16 19:40:24 [reply]
Give a thumbs-up

 

A Compilation of Final Exam Reflection Questions for the Course on Modern Western Philosophy: 1, 2, 3. Schopenhauer

EPR posted on 2005-12-15 22:15:06

1. Schopenhauer: The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason 

The principle of sufficient reason is that “without a reason, nothing would exist.”
　　The four basic forms of the principle of sufficient reason correspond to four different kinds of thought, and these thoughts encompass the entire field of human thinking.
Physical objects: Schopenhauer follows Kant’s basic theory, namely, that knowledge begins with experience; but unlike what Hume imagined, it is not confined to what is empirically given or presented to us. On the contrary, the elements of experience are organized by our minds. The mind brings a priori categories such as space, time, and causality to experience. In this domain, the principle of sufficient reason explains becoming and change.
Abstract concepts: The relation between concepts and the conclusions of their inferences is governed by the cause of sufficient reason. This is the domain of logic, and here the principle of sufficient reason is applied in the mode of cognition. 
Objects of mathematics: arithmetic and geometry, related to time and space. Schopenhauer said: “The parts of time and space determine one another according to a law; I call this law the principle of sufficient reason of being.”
The self: Schopenhauer says that the self is the subject of will, is “the object of the cognizing subject,” and may be called “self-consciousness.” The principle governing knowledge of the relation between the self and its volitional acts is “the principle of sufficient reason of action, or more simply, the law of motivation.”
　　From these four forms, Schopenhauer concludes that necessity or determinism is everywhere.
　　By emphasizing necessity throughout the entire realm of objects, Schopenhauer believed that human behavior in everyday life is governed by necessity. This led to a deeply pessimistic outlook.

 2. Schopenhauer: “The world is my representation,” “The world is my will.” 

　　Schopenhauer believed that a person who has carefully thought through his experience of the world will discover that “what he recognizes is never the sun or the earth, but always only the hand; it is the hand that feels the earth; he will find that the world around him exists as representation in knowledge.” This means that “everything that exists for cognition, and therefore the entire world, is only an object related to the subject, the intuition of the intuiter; in a word, it is only representation.”
“Representation,” literally speaking, refers to something “placed before” one, to anything presented before our consciousness or understanding; apart from what we perceive, there are no other objects internal to us. Schopenhauer: “The entire real world is determined by the understanding; apart from this nothing exists.” And the value of abstract concepts depends on whether they are grounded in original perception (actual experience). Schopenhauer: “The original materials of knowledge are more easily grasped, examined, and organized with the help of these abstract concepts.”
Schopenhauer regarded “will” as the inner nature of all things; the whole natural world is permeated by “a blind and continuous impulse.” This impulse acts “unconsciously” upon the whole of nature, and ultimately it is the “will to live.”
Schopenhauer’s concept of will expresses his chief objection to Kant’s theory of the thing-in-itself. Schopenhauer believed he had found “the only narrow gate leading to truth.” He said that there is one exception to the idea that we are forever outside things. This exception is our own experience or knowledge: “Everyone has his own will.” For Schopenhauer, will and action are one and the same; “we are not only cognizing subjects; from another perspective, we ourselves also belong to the inner nature that needs to be known.” Although we are forever outside things, we ourselves belong to the inner essence that can be known.

3. Schopenhauer: Why is the world suffering? How can suffering be overcome?

Because the entire natural world is like a puppet “whose movements are set by an internal mechanical device,” the will that produces human action “is the same will as that which makes plants grow.” Human intellect and animal instinct are on the same level. Intellect is merely one attribute of will. This “omnipotent” will carries pessimistic implications for human beings: “Human beings are only apparently pulled by what lies in front of them; in fact, they are pushed by what lies behind them. It is never life that lures them forward; it is necessity that drives them onward.” Individual human beings have no value at all for nature; human life is merely “a labor to be completed.”

For an individual, there are at least two paths to escape that conquering force of the will. One is through ethics, the other through aesthetics. The will to live expresses itself in the form of endless desire. And if the intensity of human desire can be reduced, a person may at least attain momentary happiness. We can turn from a person’s intense desire toward compassion for all humankind, and in this sense desire can provide a path toward a more selfless ethics; all selfless virtues are grounded in compassion.

The enjoyment of beauty can, in a similar way, also turn away our attention from those objects that arouse our aggressive will to live, and instead focus our attention on objects of contemplative observation that are free from passion and desire.

 Schopenhauer section referenced from [US]Samuel Enoch Stumpf James Fieser: A History of Western Philosophy (Seventh Edition), translated by Ding Sandong, Zhang Chuanyou, Deng Xiaomang, Zhang Lihai, Hao Changdi, Zhang Jianhua, and He Weiping, proofread by Deng Xiaomang , Zhonghua Book Company, 2005, pp. 482–491

A Compilation of Final Exam Reflection Questions for the Course on Modern Western Philosophy: 4, 5, 6, 7. Kierkegaard

EPR posted on 2005-12-15 22:36:20

4. Kierkegaard: subjective truth

Truth is subjectivity, which means that for the person making a choice, there is no preconstructed truth “out there” externally; what is out there externally is only “an objective uncertainty.” Kierkegaard believed that Socrates’ assertion of ignorance is precisely the expression of this principle, namely, that eternal truth is related to the existing individual. This shows that intellectual cultivation is not the only important thing in life; the development and growth of our personality is more important.

5. Kierkegaard: the three stages of life 

In describing the human condition, Kierkegaard distinguishes between what we are now and what we ought to be. Human nature contains a relation to God, and our sins separate us from God; our condition of existence is the result of our alienation from God. In order to overcome our insecurity and finitude, seeking the meaning of life among the crowd will only weaken our self; the real solution is to connect us with God and turn our direction toward God, so that our lives will not be filled with anxiety. Kierkegaard uses the three stages of life to describe this process, and describes the self’s development from one level of existence to another as “through action by choice” (rather than Hegel’s “thought”); the dialectic of life includes the gradual realization of the individual.

The first stage of this dialectical process is the “aesthetic stage” (the aesthetic stage, the sensory stage). Don Juan in Western literary works is the typical figure of this stage. At this stage, I act according to my instinctual impulses and emotions. The “I” at this stage is to a large extent dominated by sensibility. I do not know any universal moral standards or definite religious faith. I can exist because I consciously choose to be an aesthetic person, but this is a rather inferior mode of existence.

The second stage is the “ethical stage.” Socrates is the typical figure of this stage. The ethical person recognizes and accepts the rules of conduct established by reason; life is governed by moral principles. On moral questions, I assume that knowing the good means doing the good. (But because one gradually discovers the nonconformity between action and reason, a deep sense of “guilt” arises.)

The third stage is the “religious stage.” Abraham in the Old Testament is the typical figure of this stage. At this stage, the individual communicates directly with God. This relationship between human beings and God is different from the relation between person and person, or person and thing; it cannot be measured by human reason. From a rational point of view, faith is absurd; yet it is precisely this sense of absurdity that always accompanies faith which serves as the measure of the strength of faith.

6. According to Kierkegaard, why does a person in the sensory stage fall into despair?

Kierkegaard points out that an unrestrained life is not freedom; a life determined by sensory stimuli has no meaning of its own. When people discover that they are in fact living in a sensory “cage,” this conflict gives rise to anxiety and despair.

7. How should Kierkegaard’s concept of “leap” be understood?

Refer to question 5. (One should note not to understand Kierkegaard’s three stages of life as “one stage having better value than another,” because for Kierkegaard the transition between stages is not determined by thought. Every transition is an unknown adventure; the “despair” of the sensory stage, the “guilt” of the ethical stage, and the “absurdity” of the religious stage are all unavoidable tendencies, while the psychology at the moment of choosing transition is simultaneously one of fresh excitement and fear.)

One cannot complete the transition from one stage of existence to the next through “thought” alone; one must make a commitment through an act of will in free choice. Free choice is the adventure of life, and only when the result is uncertain is it truly free choice. But Kierkegaard believes that free choice is always a “leap” toward a goal rather than a fall away from the goal; it is a continuous striving toward God’s infinite possibilities, a process in which the individual increasingly breaks away from existence as part of a collective and realizes the self, and a process of realizing infinite possibility within finite life. This continuous effort to approach God is what Kierkegaard calls the “leap.”

Kierkegaard section referenced from

[US]Samuel Enoch Stumpf James Fieser: A History of Western Philosophy (Seventh Edition), translated by Ding Sandong, Zhang Chuanyou, Deng Xiaomang, Zhang Lihai, Hao Changdi, Zhang Jianhua, and He Weiping, proofread by Deng Xiaomang, Zhonghua Book Company, 2005, pp. 532–538

Zhao Dunhua: A New Compilation of Modern Western Philosophy, Peking University Press, 2001, pp. 23–26

A Compilation of Final Exam Reflection Questions for the Course on Modern Western Philosophy: 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Nietzsche (I)

EPR posted on 2005-12-16 11:57:32

8. How do Apollo and Dionysus symbolize human power 

Nietzsche believed that aesthetics had the greatest promise of replacing religion and becoming the new foundation of value. Only as an aesthetic phenomenon do human existence and the world receive eternal justification. Aesthetic value arises from the fusion of two principles—Dionysus, the god of wine, symbolizes the dynamic current of life, resisting all limitations. Worshippers of Dionysus would fall into frenzy, thereby losing their identity in the larger sea of life. On the other hand, Apollo symbolizes order, restraint, and form; Dionysus represents the dark forces of negation and destruction in the soul, and when left unrestrained, it will “reach its peak in repulsive lust and brutality, which is the nature of most ferocious beasts.” In contrast, Apollo represents the power to deal with this surging tide of powerful life energy. It harnesses destructive forces and transforms them into creative action.

Nietzsche believed that people are not confronted with a choice between Dionysus and Apollo. Human life necessarily contains the dark surge of violent passions, and what ancient Greek tragedy reveals is that the recognition of these driving forces becomes the occasion for creating works of art. Nietzsche regarded the birth of tragedy—that is, artistic creation—as the basic factor of a superior person’s health—Apollo’s response to the frenzied challenge of an unhealthy Dionysus. Without the stimulus of Dionysus, art would not come into being; denying Dionysus his rightful place merely postpones the inevitable eruption of vital force. Nietzsche held that life has a more decisive force than knowledge, but primal vitality is ultimately destructive of life itself; therefore, modern culture needs a practical and effective code of conduct to be provided through a scheme in which Dionysus and Apollo are fused.

Reference for Question 8: [American] Samuel Enoch Stumpf and James Fieser, Western Philosophy: History of a Civilization (7th ed.), trans. Ding Sandong, Zhang Chuanyou, Deng Xiaomang, Zhang Lihai, Hao Changchi, Zhang Jianhua, and He Weiping, with editorial review by Deng Xiaomang, Zhonghua Book Company, 2005, pp. 564–566

9． How does Nietzsche use Schopenhauer’s metaphysics in analyzing tragedy? 

Nietzsche idealized Schopenhauer and Wagner as the philosophers of tragedy and Dionysian art in the contemporary world; in comparison with their brilliance, modern people appear so decadent that poverty and hypocrisy become the two fatal weaknesses of modern civilization. Nietzsche pointed out that the root cause of all the maladies of modern civilization is the withering of the life instinct.

In Nietzsche’s view, to cure society’s modern illnesses, one must restore human life instinct and give it a new soul—that is, offer a new interpretation of the meaning of life. He drew inspiration from Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will and pessimism. Schopenhauer believed that the noumenon of the world is the will to life, and that all phenomena, including individual human beings, are nothing but representations of the will. Although the will, as an inexhaustible impulse of life, never ceases, for the individual, no matter how strong the desire to survive may be, death is ultimately unavoidable; thus human life can be said to have no meaning, and its essence is nihilism. Nietzsche admired the depth and honesty of this tragic view, but was dissatisfied with its negative attitude toward life. Through the tragic image of Dionysus, he restored meaning and value to life. He said that in tragic art, although the individual life of the protagonist suffers pain, hardship, and death, this is only the waxing and waning of phenomena. “The life that belongs to the basis of things is eternally indestructible and full of joy.” The pleasure tragedy brings people is like the instinctive impulse that arises after intoxication; the destruction of the individual, against the eternal background of the world’s will to life, manifests a sorrowful beauty. By viewing life aesthetically, Nietzsche endowed the world’s becoming and change— which Schopenhauer regarded as a meaningless cycle—with an inner vitality of endless generation and active creation. The consolation Dionysus brings to life is a metaphysical insight; it enables us, for a moment, to escape the disturbances of worldly change and, in an instant, experience the irresistible will to survive and the joy of survival of a primal creature. This is where the meaning of life lies.

Reference from the previous section: Jiang Yi, ed., Walking Toward the New Century: Western Philosophy, China Social Sciences Press, 1998, p. 470

In general, Nietzsche is the direct inheritor of Schopenhauer’s voluntarism. In explaining the world and life through irrational will, and in his fierce attacks on traditional metaphysics represented by rationalism, he shares common ground with Schopenhauer. But the main differences between them are as follows. First, Nietzsche opposed treating the will, as the essence of human beings and the world, as a thing-in-itself beyond phenomena; instead, he believed that it exists within the phenomenal world itself, and that human will exists in concrete human activity. Second, he opposed reducing the human life instinct to a will that passively seeks survival; he believed that the essence of life is not blind survival-seeking, but should be assigned higher purposes and meanings, and that action should be taken toward such purposes and meanings. He replaced Schopenhauer’s theory of the will to survive with a theory of the will to power. Third, although he too believed that life is essentially painful, he did not agree with Schopenhauer’s final negative pessimism that denies life; rather, he advocated facing and overcoming pain directly, and seeking the meaning of life in struggle.

Reference from the previous section: Liu Fangtong et al., eds., Newly Compiled Modern Western Philosophy, People’s Publishing House, 2000, p. 50

10． How does Nietzsche discuss the transformation of the “true world” (the true world) into a fable? 

Philosophy begins with the awakening of reason. The first sign of the awakening of reason is doubt about the senses: is this world of becoming and change that we perceive truly the real world? Is there another world behind it, a world that remains permanently unchanged, beyond sensory perception, yet more real?—Philosophy has always had an inseparable bond with ontology, an ontology whose sole mission is to construct the “true world.”

In Nietzsche’s view, this is the greatest mistake of philosophy, and the root of this mistake is reason. “Reason is the source of our falsification of the evidence of the senses.” The senses name becoming, change, and passing-away, but reason seeks to deny them. “Everything that has been handled by philosophers for thousands of years has turned into conceptual mummies; not one real thing has escaped their grasp alive.” They put the cart before the horse, placing the “highest concept” that arrives last—God, that is, the emptiest of all general concepts—at the beginning.

That is how the so-called “true world” came into being. This “true world” corresponds to human reason; at the same time, the real world we live in—opposed to this world beyond life, nature, and history—must be denied and declared the “apparent world.”

However, the historical development of philosophy gradually turned this “true world” into a fable. This is the process by which philosophy frees itself from old-fashioned ontology. Nietzsche gives a witty depiction of this process. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra—“How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable”) In Plato, this world could be attained by all the wise, the devout, and the virtuous; he dwelt within it—he himself was this world. In Christianity, this world was merely promised to the wise, the devout, and the virtuous, that is, to the repentant sinner. In Kant, this world was neither attainable nor promised; it existed gloomily in a fog that never dispersed. By the time of the positivists, whether it existed or not could no longer even be known. Nietzsche called this “the first cry of reason.” Finally, Nietzsche himself appears on the scene and simply declares this “true world” abolished. There is only one world, and that is the real world of becoming and change in which we live.

Nietzsche believed that the fiction of the so-called “true world” is the theoretical premise of traditional morality. He pointed out that “the world is divided into the ‘true’ world and the ‘apparent’ world, whether in the Christian manner or in Kant’s manner (after all, a sly Christian), is only a symptom of decadence—a sign of a declining life…” So Nietzsche regarded reason as a factor that corrupts instinct.

Nietzsche’s criticism of reason here is not meant to oppose all generalization about the world. In fact, his own reduction of the world to the will to power is itself a kind of generalization. What he opposed was constructing a rational model of the world according to humanity’s own rational nature, and then using that model to regulate human life in reality. The tools of human cognition (reason and logic) are elevated to the highest status, while life is devalued, instinct is suppressed, law rules over everything, and human life loses its vitality and joy.

Nietzsche pointed out that the world is precisely such a process, without reason, without purpose, endlessly creating and destroying itself. Human reason finds it difficult to accept this fact. Only when we free ourselves from the prejudice of reason and acknowledge that the world itself has no meaning can we then provide the world with a human meaning. And giving the world meaning cannot appeal to reason either; it must appeal to the whole of life. 

Reference for Question 10: Zhou Guoping, Nietzsche—At the Turn of the Century, Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1986, pp. 169–173

11． What does Nietzsche’s “God is dead” mean? 

Refer to Question 10: philosophical systems and worldviews are nothing but fictions, created in order to give our existence a sense of security. But human beings have a special ability to forget: the structure we assign to the world is gradually understood as the structure of the world itself, an order created by God; this is the precondition for peace and security.

And because God has lost value and authority, when we realize that existence cannot be interpreted through concepts such as “goal,” “unity,” “purpose,” and “truth,” we are struck by a sense of the emptiness of value. These value-laden categories are ones we ourselves have bestowed upon the world—when we discard them, the world appears utterly worthless.

Nietzsche understood nihilism as a worldview of total disillusionment. For Nietzsche, the thought that “God is dead” awakens a new understanding of a world without purpose at its origin. In the Christian tradition, morality and truth derive from God. Therefore, if God is dead, the foundation of morality and truth no longer exists. Nothing is “true”; “everything is permitted.” But nihilism is not Nietzsche’s final conclusion. (The destruction of the old value system precisely heralds the birth of a new value system, that is, the “revaluation of all values.”) His Zarathustra is precisely intended to go beyond God and overcome nihilism and ontological emptiness. The condition is that we leave our “useful” life behind.

Reference for Question 11: [Norwegian] G. H. von Wright? N·Iyer: A History of Western Philosophy—From Ancient Greece to the Twentieth Century, trans. Tong Shijun, Yu Zhenhua, and Liu Jin, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2004, p. 478

12． How did God die? 

Nietzsche not only used the fearless voice of the madman to expose the truth of God’s death, but also used witty language to coldly announce to the world the reasons for the collapse of old faith. How did God die? Nietzsche, through the madman, answered frankly: “I tell you the truth, we have killed him—you and I! We are all his murderers!” Why did we kill God, who “was once the holiest and mightiest being on earth”? In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the ugliest man reveals one of the reasons: “God saw everything, even man; he could not live without dying! Such a witness must be unbearable to mankind.” As humanity’s observer, God constrained human hearts with the value standards of Christian ethics, suppressing human instinct. Thus God’s existence runs counter to human nature. To free human nature, God must be killed. In this reversal of values, the killers thereby gain the legitimacy of action. In the same book, a retired old priest gives another reason for God’s death: when God was young, he came from the East, and after suffering all kinds of hardship and tribulation he came to love vengeance. “In the end he grew old and gentle, peaceful and merciful. Not like a stern father but like a loving father, more like a decrepit old grandmother. Weakly he sat in the corner of a wall, resenting his frail two legs, resenting the weariness of the world, the weariness of the will; and one day he finally choked to death from his own excess of compassion.” This passage alludes to the historical transformation of Christianity. What Nietzsche is speaking of is the irresistible process of the waxing and waning of things; the decline of Christianity is precisely the age beyond it. Therefore, God’s death is not only justified, but also has a certain historical necessity. Since God originally arose from the psychological and social activities of humanity in its early history, it is only natural that this sacred idol should be overthrown with the arrival of a new era.

Reference for Question 12: Jiang Yi, ed., Walking Toward the New Century: Western Philosophy, China Social Sciences Press, 1998, p. 472

整理 of the final-exam thought questions for the course on Modern Western Philosophy: 13, 14, 15, 16, Nietzsche (Part II)

EPR published at 2005-12-17 02:02:03

13． How should Nietzsche’s genealogical method be understood?

Nietzsche’s most important achievement was to introduce the concepts of meaning and value into philosophy. As Nietzsche conceived it, a philosophy of values is the genuine realization of critique, the only way to realize philosophical thinking through “hammering.” The notion of value implicitly contains a critical subversion. On the one hand, value seems to be, or is defined as, a principle: evaluation presupposes value, and only on that basis do phenomena receive assessment. On the other hand, a deeper view holds that evaluation and the “perspective of assessment” are themselves the precondition of value. The problem of critique is a question about the value of value itself, the question of evaluation that produces value. In essence, evaluation is not value, but a mode of existence, the way of life of those who judge and assess; it serves as the principle of value.

Critical philosophy is an inseparable dual movement: to return all things and origins to value, and to return these values to the things that seem to be their origin and that determine their value. Nietzsche’s double struggle is expressed as follows: on the one hand, he opposed those who make value evade critique, those who are satisfied with listing existing values, or who criticize things in the name of established values. These are the “philosophical craftsmen” of the Kantian and Schopenhauerian sort; on the other hand, he also opposed those who criticize or praise value by deriving it from simple facts, from so-called “objective facts”—that is, the utilitarians or the so-called “scholars.” In both cases, philosophy moves within the “indifferent” factor that is itself value or that has value for everything. Nietzsche also attacked “profound” primordial theories, which attribute indifferent value to their origin. He likewise criticized simplistic causal derivation and banal origin theories, which imply that all value has an indifferent origin. Nietzsche created the new concept of genealogy. The philosopher is a genealogist, not a Kantian judge, nor a technician pursuing utility. Nietzsche replaced Kant’s principle of universality and the utilitarians’ principle of similarity with a sense of difference and distance (factors of distinction).

Genealogy refers both to the value of origins and to the origins of value. It opposes absolute value, yet it does not endorse relativism or utilitarian value. Genealogy signifies the differentiating factors of value; it is from these factors that value gains its own value. Thus, genealogy means origin or descent, while also meaning the difference or distance present in origin. Differentiating factors are at once the critical judgment of the value of various values and the positive factor of creation. This is why Nietzsche never understood critique as passive “reaction,” but rather as active “action.” Critical activity stands opposed to revenge, envy, and resentment; it is the active expression of a positive mode of existence, aggression but not revenge. This mode of existence is precisely the mode of existence of the philosopher, because he seeks, like a critic and a creator, to wield the differentiating factor like a hammer. Nietzsche said that those who opposed him could only think in a “base” way. He believed that genealogy is a new mode of organizing science and philosophy, and the establisher of future values.

The above references [Fr.]Gilles Deleuze: “Nietzsche and Philosophy,” trans. Zhou Ying Liu Yuyu, Social Sciences Academic Press, 2001, pp. 1–4

Appendix: Terminology Explanations:

Genealogy refers to the study of ancestral lineage. In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche defines genealogy as the study of the origins of moral prejudices. He traces the roots of human morality back to the most naked struggle for force or power. (Later developed by Foucault)

Unlike the usual sort of historical research that seeks a necessary thread and shows the present as based on the past, genealogy starts from the present and moves backward in time until it finds a difference; it tends to undermine the connection between past and present and shake the legitimacy of the present. Genealogy does not acknowledge the role of causality or explanation, and rejects the demand for a theoretical unity. What it attends to are local, discontinuous forms of knowledge, and it strives to reveal the multiple factors behind an event and the fragility of historical configurations. By showing the heterogeneity of the past, it exposes the relativity of current phenomena, which are taken for granted.

Reference: Nicolas Bunin Yu Jiyuan ed.: Dictionary of Western Philosophy in English and Chinese, Wang Keping Jiang Yi Yu Jiyuan Chen Bo Zhang Xianglong Zhou Xiaoliang Duan Zhongqiao Hu Xinhe Xu Kailai Xu Youyu Tao Xiu’ao Tang Refeng Gong Qun trans., People’s Publishing House, 2001, p. 405 

14. What is master morality? What is slave morality? How do you evaluate them?

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche announced his discovery of two basic moral types: “master morality” and “slave morality.” Indeed, in the higher forms of all civilizations they are mixed, and the factors of both can be found in the same person. In master morality, the good always means a noble, high-quality soul; the evil means the coarse and vulgar. Noble people see themselves as the creators and determiners of value. They do not seek from outside themselves any recognition of their actions. They recognize themselves; it is a morality of self-praise. The actions of these noble people spring from their sense of power; they help the unfortunate, but not out of pity, rather out of an impulse arising from an abundance of power. In contrast, slave morality originates among the lowest strata of society: the abused, the oppressed, slaves, and those uncertain about themselves. Grounded in weakness and obedience, for the slave, the good represents qualities that can help relieve the sufferings of victims, such as “sympathy, enthusiasm, patience, diligence, kindness,” and so on. According to the standards of slave morality, what master morality regards as good is seen as evil and immoral. Yet although the masters are powerful, the slaves are cleverer: by establishing their own moral judgments as absolute standards, they tame the masters. Nietzsche strongly protested Western dominant morality, believing that it elevated the mediocre values of the “herd” and made the master morality’s affirmation of life seem “evil.”

The above references: [Nor.] G. Skirbekk N. Ijsseling: History of Western Philosophy: From Ancient Greece to the Twentieth Century, trans. Tong Shijun Yu Zhenhua Liu Jin, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2004, pp. 480–482

[U.S.]Samuel Enoch Stumpf James Fieser: Western Philosophy: The Seventh Edition, trans. Ding Sandong Zhang Chuanyou Deng Xiaomang Zhang Lihai Hao Changdi Zhang Jianhua He Weiping, proofread by Deng Xiaomang, Zhonghua Book Company, 2005 edition, pp. 566–568

Different interpretations:

Did Nietzsche think that our passions and impulses should be allowed to run free beyond good and evil? In the realm of morality, can we adopt a laissez-faire attitude? For Nietzsche, all morality, including the morality that goes beyond good and evil, contains a certain tyranny over “nature,” and this is necessary; without morality, life loses its value. Without some degree of compulsion, without an ascetic attitude toward life, art, poetry, and much more so great philosophy would be impossible. What matters is to cultivate passions and desires, not to drain them away. Nietzsche is not trying to “return” to nature, to return to a primitive state of expressing passions; all this lays the groundwork for Nietzsche’s ideal of the human being, namely the “overhuman.”

[Nor.] G. Skirbekk N. Ijsseling: History of Western Philosophy: From Ancient Greece to the Twentieth Century, trans. Tong Shijun Yu Zhenhua Liu Jin, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2004, p. 482

Through the critique of slave morality, we can see that Nietzsche’s moral thought is intended to cultivate a type of person who is healthy, strong, independent, enterprising, and sincere. In his own words, he was aiming for “the highest intensity and magnificence of the human type to the fullest extent possible.” In his view, whether such a type of “master” can be formed, whether such people can occupy a position of dominance, is a matter that determines the fate of humanity’s future.

Zhou Guoping: Nietzsche — At the Turn of the Century, Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1986, p. 236

In fact, people of a higher type do not want to impose their own values on the weak; the two moralities can coexist, so long as the slaves do not impose their morality on others. But the slaves are unwilling to do that; they desperately want to universalize their own values. Christian morality is essentially just this, and it has succeeded. Nietzsche never denied that Christianity has value, believing that it can at least make people noble. But at the same time he also saw that it expressed the slaves’ resentment toward the masters. Nietzsche opposed democratic and socialist movements because he believed that they too sprang from resentment and were derived from Christianity.

Nietzsche rejects a universal, unified, absolute moral system because it is a product of hatred and represents a lower, degraded form of life; aristocratic morality represents the upward movement of life. Nietzsche does not oppose ordinary moral norms; he affirms their value. Beyond good and evil certainly does not mean being amoral; rather, it means urging people to transcend their present condition and develop in a higher direction. That higher direction is the overhuman.

Zhang Chunlun: Fifteen Lectures on Modern Western Philosophy, Peking University Press, 2003, p. 56 

Although Nietzsche treats master morality and slave morality as two types of morality in a metaphorical sense, his main intention in advocating the use of master morality against slave morality is to oppose depression and decadence and to advocate vigorous striving; this cannot simply be reduced to taking the side of a small aristocratic privileged class in opposition to the broad masses of the people. Nevertheless, his stance on aristocratic privilege remains obvious; whatever Nietzsche’s own intention may have been, his theory is very easily used by privileged classes as a tool against the broad masses of the people.

Liu Fangtong et al., eds.: A New Compilation of Modern Western Philosophy, People’s Publishing House, 2000, p. 57

15. Why does Nietzsche say that human beings are a “bridge,” not an “end” (end)?

Nietzsche: “Man is a rope stretched between animal and overhuman… Man’s greatness lies in being a bridge, not a goal; man’s lovableness lies in his being a transition and a going under.” “What concerns me is the overhuman, he is my first and only one; not man, not the neighbor, not the poorest, not the most suffering, not the best.” “The goal is not man, but the overhuman!”

Quoted in Zhou Guoping: Nietzsche — At the Turn of the Century, Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1986, p. 258

(Ancient: human beings are not the goal; the “overhuman” is the “goal.” But Nietzsche does not deny real human beings; the overhuman provides a value goal for human existence in reality, and the overhuman is humanity’s self-transcendence. The significance of human beings lies in the fact that they are a bridge between the “non-human” and the “overhuman.” To answer this question, one needs to connect it with Question 16.) 

16. What is the “overhuman”?

The overhuman is rare; it is the next stage in human evolution. History is not an evolutionary movement toward an abstract “human nature,” but toward the emergence of extraordinary individuals: the overhuman is the goal. However, the overhuman will not be the product of a mechanical evolutionary process; only when the higher type of human being has the courage to revalue all values and freely respond to their inner will to power can history’s next stage be reached. Humanity needs to be surpassed; the overhuman will represent the highest level of development and the highest level of expression of bodily, intellectual, and emotional power. The overhuman will be the truly free person; the overhuman will embody the spontaneous affirmation of life.

Excerpted above from [U.S.]Samuel Enoch Stumpf James Fieser: Western Philosophy: The Seventh Edition, trans. Ding Sandong Zhang Chuanyou Deng Xiaomang Zhang Lihai Hao Changdi Zhang Jianhua He Weiping, proofread by Deng Xiaomang, Zhonghua Book Company, 2005 edition, p. 572 

Nietzsche’s disappointment with modern human beings led him to dream of improving humanity. He pinned his hopes on the overhuman. What is the overhuman? In Nietzsche’s writing, the overhuman is earth, sea, lightning… This is an illusory image; we can only catch a glimpse of him through metaphor and description.

First, the overhuman does not yet exist in reality. Therefore, he can neither refer to heroes and great figures in secular society, nor to any particular nation or race. He is only the ideal image of future humanity.…………

Second, the overhuman provides a value goal for human existence in reality. Nietzsche uses the overhuman to fill the value vacuum left after the death of God.……

Third, the overhuman refers to human self-transcendence. The overhuman should be made from human beings themselves and by human beings themselves. Nietzsche compares man to a rough block, while the overhuman is the perfect statue hidden within it, which can only be carved out by the will to create as a hammer.……

Excerpted above from Jiang Yi, ed.: Western Philosophy Toward the New Century, China Social Sciences Press, 1998, p. 481

The overhuman is the life ideal Nietzsche offered humanity after the previous ideal of humanity, namely God, had died. The overhuman is the temporal counterpart of God; it is the unity of the strongest mind and body. For Nietzsche, it realizes humanity’s deepest potential and talent. It overcomes or negates the mediocrity of ordinary humanity. The overhuman has no inner division of human nature; it is the full affirmation of life by the creator of life’s meaning. It affirms eternal recurrence, in which the will to power reaches its highest point; human beings should surpass themselves and become overhuman. Their salvation will not come from a divine savior, but from the glory of the human species. The purpose of culture should be to produce overhumans. For Nietzsche, any culture that produces a large mass of mediocre people is necessarily pathological and ought to be condemned. Human life lies between beasts and overhumans, and its value lies in producing overhumans. The overhuman is the ideal human being. Nietzsche did not give any example of an overhuman; he only denied that he or Zarathustra was an overhuman.

“Attention! I teach you the overhuman; it is this world’s meaning, let your will say; the overhuman shall be this world’s meaning.” — Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Reference: Nicolas Bunin Yu Jiyuan ed.: Dictionary of Western Philosophy in English and Chinese, Wang Keping Jiang Yi Yu Jiyuan Chen Bo Zhang Xianglong Zhou Xiaoliang Duan Zhongqiao Hu Xinhe Xu Kailai Xu Youyu Tao Xiu’ao Tang Refeng Gong Qun trans., People’s Publishing House, 2001, p. 1033

physis
2008-12-20 23:06:03 anonymous 218.95.123.10 [reply]
Could you give a more comparative example, or explain it a bit more simply: what exactly is genealogy? This should be a method; perhaps in Nietzsche it is used, but the object of study is morality.

Gu Chu
2008-12-20 23:50:33 [reply]
I haven’t read the relevant original works by Nietzsche or Foucault; my understanding is merely hearsay:

In simple terms, genealogy can be understood as a tracing of the history of ideas. But it differs from the traditional historical approach—that is, it does not seek in history some definite, necessary, and consistently coherent logical thread, nor does it try to reveal how human thought evolved step by step and reasonably into its present state. Genealogy is precisely the opposite: it is precisely an attempt to destroy the connection between past and present, to destroy the legitimacy of the present.

In the bilingual philosophical dictionary it is put this way: … “Unlike the usual kind of historical research, which seeks a necessary thread and shows the present to be based on the past, genealogy begins from the present and traces backward through time until it finds a difference; it tends to sever the connection between past and present and to unsettle the legitimacy of the present. Genealogy does not acknowledge the role of causality or explanation, and it rejects any appeal to a theoretical unity. What it attends to are local, discontinuous bodies of knowledge, and it strives to reveal the multiple factors behind an event and the fragility of historical configurations. By showing the heterogeneity of the past, it exposes the relativity of present phenomena that are taken for granted.……”

To take an example, does the assignment I recently wrote, “The Mechanization of ‘Force’,” have something of this sort of meaning? I start from today’s understanding of force and trace it back until I find a difference—namely, the before and after of Newtonian mechanics. By revealing the heterogeneous understandings of the traditional concept of force, I suggest that the current understanding of “force” is not something self-evident; its legitimacy is questionable. It is not the necessary result of the concept’s inner logical evolution, but rather something brought about through a certain semantic sleight of hand and a series of coincidences (for example, the mathematical success of Newtonian mechanics).

In short, Nietzsche used the genealogical method to “revalue all morals”; likewise, many other notions—such as causality, knowledge, and so on—can also be “revalued” by means of genealogy. The genealogical method itself does not seem to be a constructive method, but rather something more like a destructive one.

physis
2008-12-21 00:11:47 Anonymous 218.95.123.10 [Reply]
Put this way, it’s a bit easier to understand. It seems that Derrida’s “différance” and “supplement” have a similar meaning.

 

Compilation of Final Exam Reflection Questions for the Course on Modern Western Philosophy: 17, 18, 19, Peirce

EPR posted on 2005-12-17 14:05:38

17． Understand Peirce’s four methods for fixing belief.

Peirce believed that belief lies between thought and action. Belief guides our desires and shapes our behavior. But when there is doubt, belief is “unfixed.” When the “irritation of doubt” sets us struggling to obtain belief, the business of thought begins. Through thought, we try to fix our beliefs so that we may have a guide for action. According to Peirce, there are several methods by which belief may be fixed.

The first is the method of tenacity. According to this method, people can stubbornly cling to their own views on all questions, regard what they believe as unchanging and unshakable, and take such belief as a guide for personal action, entirely ignoring whether it provokes disagreement or accords with reality.

The second is the method of authority (the method of force). This means accepting the principles laid down by the state, the church, or other powerful and authoritative institutions in order to determine belief. Peirce thought this method suited those who have no definite belief of their own. “For most people there may perhaps be no better method than this; since at best they can do no more than be mental slaves, let them be slaves.”

The third is the a priori method (the method of inclination, the rational method). This is the method used by cultivated people in society. They accept neither the extreme arbitrariness of the method of tenacity nor the excessive authoritarianism of the method of authority. They try to prove that their beliefs have sufficient intellectual grounds and conform to the demands of eternal reason; metaphysicians such as Descartes were all accustomed to using this method. These people take their own systems to be systems of eternal reason, but in fact they build their systems from the beliefs they themselves already hold. This method is in no essential respect different from the method of tenacity, and Peirce did not approve of it either.

The fourth is the scientific method (the method of inquiry, investigation, and reasoning). The main feature of this method is that it is rooted in an empirical basis of reality. The three methods above all depend on what is purely within us, as a result of our own thinking. By contrast, the scientific method is based on the assumption. Moreover, because these real things act on our senses according to certain rules, we can suppose that they act in the same way on every observer. Therefore, beliefs grounded in real things can be verified, and the fixing of these beliefs is a public rather than a private act.

Peirce believed this was the best method for settling belief and overcoming personal bias. First, the scientific method requires us not only to state the truths we believe, but also to state how we arrived at them. The process of reaching truth can be repeated and tested. Second, the scientific method is highly self-critical. The conclusions of a theory are adjusted in light of new evidence and new thought. Third, science requires close cooperation among all members of the community; scientific conclusions must be conclusions that all scientists can arrive at.

Reference for Question 17:

[U.S.] Samuel Enoch Stumpf James Fieser: A History of Western Philosophy (7th ed.), translated by Ding Sandong Zhang Chuanyou Deng Xiaomang Zhang Lihai Hao Changchi Zhang Jianhua He Weiping, proofread by Deng Xiaomang, Zhonghua Book Company, 2005 edition, pp. 581–582

Liu Fangtong et al., eds.: A New Compilation of Modern Western Philosophy, People’s Publishing House, 2000, pp. 185–186  

18． How does Peirce understand “believing” and “doubt”?

Peirce believed that anyone, in order to survive, must adopt certain actions; and in order to act effectively, one must have some effective rules of conduct or habits, which, once accepted by people, become their beliefs. “A real belief or opinion is that by means of which people prepare themselves to act”; conversely, once people have a definite belief, they can act. Human action depends only on definite belief, not on correct cognition. Whether thoughts and ideas can become people’s beliefs does not depend on whether they are accurate reflections of objects, but only on whether they can prompt people to act and achieve the expected results in action.

Peirce believed that the mission of philosophy is not to know the world, but to settle belief. The main content of Peirce’s pragmatism as a scientific methodology is to escape the state of doubt through inquiry and arrive at definite belief. The process of inquiry is the process from doubt to definite belief. “Thinking activity is aroused by the irritation caused by doubt, and comes to an end when belief is reached, and reaching belief is the sole function of thought.” Peirce’s method was thus called the “inquiry theory of doubt-belief.”

Peirce’s understanding of doubt differs both from Hume’s and from Descartes’s. Hume took doubt as the final limit of human cognition. Descartes took doubt as a subjective supposition and required people to doubt everything. Peirce thought neither of these was the doubt experienced in real life; he believed that doubt should be regarded as a state of unease in which belief is lacking or lost and one is unable to act, a state in which human action comes to a halt or is obstructed, that is, a state of hesitation and uncertainty.

How exactly does one establish belief through inquiry? On the one hand, Peirce emphasized that belief must have factual and experiential grounds; on the other hand, when explaining facts and experience, he often set aside their objective basis. The standard for whether an idea is clear and distinct is often not objective fact, but rather the practical effect the idea has on people: “As long as doubt finally ceases—by whatever means—the purpose of thought has been achieved.”

See Question 17 for the four methods of fixing belief.

Reference for Question 18: Liu Fangtong et al., eds.: A New Compilation of Modern Western Philosophy, People’s Publishing House, 2000, pp. 183–185  

19． How does Peirce understand “truth”? How does it differ from the traditional “correspondence theory”?

Belief is not only the premise of our doubt, but also the result after doubt has been overcome. Since ultimate truth is in fact impossible, and any proposition can in principle be mistaken, all we have in the final analysis are beliefs, not truth in the traditional sense of objective reality. Peirce even thought it meaningless to speak of truth apart from belief. In Peirce’s view, truth is actually immanent in our beliefs; it is the belief that is increasingly agreed upon by people.

Zhang Rulun: Fifteen Lectures on Modern Western Philosophy, Peking University Press, 2003, p. 105

Peirce equated truth with an opinion or view such that, if the process of inquiry were long enough, all investigators would agree on it.…… In short, for Peirce, truth is what corresponds to the final opinion, and the object of the final opinion is reality.

[U.S.] Cornelis de Waal, Peirce, translated by Hao Changchi/, Zhonghua Book Company, 2003, p. 70

Some Western philosophers think that Peirce’s pragmatism differs from that of James and others chiefly in that it emphasizes theory of meaning rather than theory of truth. Peirce took the theory of meaning as the principle of scientific definition, hoping thereby to avoid the vulgar mentality of people like James, who take “what is useful is true” as their fundamental creed.

Liu Fangtong et al., eds.: A New Compilation of Modern Western Philosophy, People’s Publishing House, 2000, p. 187

Peirce’s semiotics is the foundation of his entire epistemology; in perceptual cognition, perception is the sign of the perceived object. His theory of perception is mainly realist. Insofar as his semiotic context is concerned, Peirce advocates the correspondence theory of truth; as long as a proposition taken to be a sign corresponds to the object for which the proposition is made, that proposition is true. The pursuit of truth is a gradual advance toward ideal truth—an ideal that can never be fully realized. Peirce denies that one can attain absolute certainty, intuitive truth—his doctrine of fallibilism—is the characteristic feature of his epistemology. But do not confuse fallibilism with agnosticism or skepticism; even if it is impossible to know everything, everything is nonetheless knowable,

[U.S.] Thilly, with additions by Wood: A History of Philosophy in Europe (expanded and revised edition), The Commercial Press, 1995, p. 726

Compilation of Final Exam Reflection Questions for the Course on Modern Western Philosophy: 20, 21, James

EPR posted on 2005-12-17 15:32:35

20． How should William James’s stream of consciousness be understood?

The structuralist psychology that held sway in the mid-nineteenth century was a continuation of the associationist psychology of Locke and Hume, and its greatest feature was that it treated conscious activity atomistically: all mental states and activities of consciousness could be reduced by analytical methods to the simplest “ideas” and “perceptions.” James categorically opposed this view; he believed that the activities of human mental consciousness cannot be analyzed into simple, unchanging ideas; they are always fluid and mixed together.

In James’s psychology, the stream of consciousness is also called the stream of thought, the stream of subjective life. Because it takes thought as a concept corresponding to the whole of consciousness, and this is precisely the subject’s total mental activity. In his concrete explanation of the stream of consciousness, he pointed out the following five characteristics:

First, thought is always personal thought. For the individual, their thoughts are always connected into one continuous whole, but as between different people, their consciousnesses do not communicate with one another……

Second, thought is always changing. Even the same person may have different sensations of the same thing at different moments.

Third, thought is always continuous. The discontinuous states of consciousness usually imagined by people are nothing more than discontinuities in time or discontinuities in quality and content, but human consciousness remains continuous; “the consciousness after a break feels itself to be linked in one continuous whole with the consciousness before the break, and feels itself to be another part of the same self.” “Consciousness is not something that is joined together; it flows, and the most natural metaphor for consciousness is a river or a stream.”

Fourth, thought must have an object that is independent of thought. From the fact that different people, and the same person at different times, have thoughts with the same object, James affirms the existence of a reality outside thought that serves as its object.

Fifth, thought is selective and is always related to human interests and concerns. The world human beings confront is itself a chaotic, undifferentiated, absolutely continuous world. As for the things that become objects of human consciousness, they are constituted by people selecting one part of the world and setting aside the rest according to their own interests and attention.

James’s doctrine of the stream of consciousness has far exceeded the scope of ordinary psychology and has obvious philosophical significance; within it one can already discern the embryonic form of the pragmatist theory he later advanced.

Reference for Question 20: Liu Fangtong et al., eds.: A New Compilation of Modern Western Philosophy, People’s Publishing House, 2000, pp. 195–197  

21． In what way does James’s notion of experience differ from that of British empiricists such as Locke?

“Radical empiricism” is the most fundamental part of James’s philosophy. James: “My philosophy is what I call radical empiricism, that is, a pluralism, a contingentism, indicating an order gradually attained and always in the process of being created. It is theistic, but not in its essence. It opposes all doctrines concerning the absolute.” Radical empiricism is not a modern version of traditional empiricism; on the contrary, it is meant precisely to address the problems of traditional empiricism and put forward a new empiricism.

The concept of experience in traditional empiricism is built on identifying experience with sensation or perception. Experience is original and reliable because it occurs directly in human beings and is personally undergone by them. This is of course not wrong, but the problem is that experience is a dynamic and multifaceted process, whereas traditional empiricists treat experience in a static and one-sided way. For example, when eating a pear, we are by no means experiencing an abstract thing; rather, we experience everything contained in the object itself, such as the pear’s shape, size, taste, and other rich contents. Traditional empiricists take human beings to be pure subjects of cognition, who know or experience an object that stands as the object of their cognition. Such a relation between subject and object is necessarily abstract and one-sided, whereas in real life human beings are always situated within all sorts of intricate and complex relations.

James put forward his concept of experience precisely from the standpoint of human practical existence. For him, experience is not an activity that can be abstracted or cut apart, but the basic mode of human existence. We do not experience things in a static and abstract environment; rather, we always experience things in the process of things themselves.

Traditional empiricism holds precisely that the “given” we obtain in experience is the basic idea of things: sound, color, shape, taste, and so on. “Whether we are willing or not, the various objects of the senses will certainly imprint their special ideas deeply on the mind; … since these ideas are presented to the understanding, the understanding cannot refuse to receive them; and since they are imprinted there, it likewise cannot alter them, erase them, or fabricate something new. It is just like a mirror that cannot refuse, cannot change, cannot erase the various images or ideas imprinted within it by the various objects before it. Since the objects around us stimulate our senses in various ways, the mind cannot but receive those impressions, and cannot but perceive the ideas caused by those impressions.” — Locke This passage fully shows the standpoint of traditional empiricism: “Since these ideas themselves are each simple and undivided, they contain only one pure phenomenon, can only give rise to a pure cognition in the mind, and cannot be further divided into various different ideas.”

Traditional empiricism cannot see that experience embodies the intricate and complex relation between the human being living in the world and things. James’s theory of experience, however, precisely broke through the intellectualist epistemological standpoint of traditional empiricism, and understood experience starting from concrete human practical existence. Experience is first of all not a cognitive process, but a process of life, a way in which human beings encounter the world.

Pure experience is the common basis of subject and object, body and mind; it is experience prior to self-conscious awareness or reflective consciousness, the flow of life at the present moment, transcending the distinction between matter and spirit.

In James’s view, Humean empiricism was wrong to reduce relations to habit and belief; relations are in fact internal to original experience. In his words, pure experience is full not only of nouns and adjectives, but also of prepositions and conjunctions.

Question 21 referenced Zhang Rulun: “Fifteen Lectures on Modern Western Philosophy,” Peking University Press, 2003, pp. 110~113

Compilation of Final Exam Reflection Questions for the Course on Modern Western Philosophy: 22, 23, Husserl

EPR posted on 2005-12-17 22:44:39

22． How should “intentionality” be understood?

Husserl’s philosophy arose from his firm conviction that Western culture had lost its true direction and purpose. He set as the goal of his life “to save humanity’s reason.”

The key to the crisis of modern thought lies in the progress of the natural sciences. But Husserl’s critique is not aimed at science itself; in fact, his highest goal is to rescue reason by developing philosophy into “a rigorous science.” His critique is directed at the assumptions and methods of the natural sciences. Husserl believed that the natural sciences depend on a fatal prejudice: that nature is fundamentally material, and thus that the realm of spirit is grounded in matter. Natural scientists deny the possibility of constructing a science of spirit that includes the self; this naturalism holds that materiality contains everything that exists, and it also implies that knowledge and truth are established on the basis of a reality transcending our individual self. Husserl argued that from this natural-scientific attitude, “it is impossible to have an inquiry into the spiritual realm that purely includes the self. …” So he constructed his transcendental phenomenology as a science for grasping the essence of spirit, thereby overcoming the objectivist mode of naturalism.

Descartes’s thought was one of the important sources that inspired Husserl’s method. Husserl said, “Phenomenology must honor Descartes as its true founder.” Husserl started where Descartes started, that is, from thought itself, but he accepted only part of Descartes’s starting point, and even adopted an even more radical approach than Descartes, because he tried to establish a philosophy without any presuppositions.

For Husserl and Descartes alike, the source of all knowledge is the self. But for Descartes, the self is the first axiom in a logical sequence, whereas Husserl directly regarded the self as the source of experience. In view of the two terms emphasized in Descartes’s “I think,” Husserl believed that a more precise formulation of experience contains three terms: “I think something” — this is the philosophical intentionality of consciousness, meaning that consciousness is always consciousness of something.

The most obvious fact about consciousness is that its essence is to be directed toward, or inclined toward, some object. We are constituted by our projects toward intentional objects, and thus Husserl believed that the essence of consciousness is intentionality. For Husserl, intentionality is both the structure of consciousness itself and a basic category of existence. This means that, since things are the things that exist insofar as we intend them, we should seek the reality of things in the process of discovering reality.

Question 22 referenced [American] Samuel Enoch Stumpf and James Fieser: “History of Philosophy: The Seventh Edition,” translated by Ding Sandong, Zhang Chuanyou, Deng Xiaomang, Zhang Lihai, Hao Changdi, Zhang Jianhua, and He Weiping; proofread by Deng Xiaomang; Zhonghua Book Company, 2005 edition, pp. 658~662

 The concept of “intentionality” first appeared in medieval philosophical texts. Brentano used this concept to explain the difference between the objects of psychology and the objects of physics: the basic feature of psychological objects is that they are intended by the mind (including sensing, thinking, willing, desiring, and so on); unlike physical objects, they need not exist independently of the mind. Husserl, however, used “intentionality” to establish all phenomena, including physical and psychological objects, and both external and internal objects. The reason he could make this shift was that he changed the philosophical question. His question was not whether the objects of our knowledge exist, but whether the objects of knowledge are the things themselves. To judge whether the objects of knowledge are the things themselves is to see whether these objects are the reality of the things themselves.

The above is excerpted from Zhao Dunhua: “A New Introduction to Modern Western Philosophy,” Peking University Press, 2001 edition, p. 96 

23． What is “phenomenological reduction”?

People generally believe that the main problem of modern Western philosophy is the problem of epistemology, that is, the relation between human intellect and things. This problem-framework is built on two basic concepts: the immanent and the transcendent. The immanent refers to our consciousness, which is a closed whole; the transcendent refers to all things outside consciousness. The immanent is reachable and certain; the transcendent is unreachable, questionable, and even unknowable. Solving the problem of the rupture between the immanent and the transcendent became the main task of modern Western philosophers.

However, in Husserl’s view, the philosophers of the past misunderstood the immanent and the transcendent. Earlier philosophy operated with natural thinking, but true philosophy must have a wholly new starting point and a wholly new method. The spirit of this method is the same as Descartes’s method, namely doubt; and its aim is likewise to reach a wholly new starting point through doubt.

Husserl borrowed a term from Pyrrho and called his method “epoche.” Husserl wanted to suspend all our natural beliefs, to put them “in brackets,” in order to attain a phenomenological attitude. But this is by no means a negative denial; epoche does not deny anything, but only changes our attitude. Through epoche, the philosopher loses nothing; the world still exists just as before, while knowledge becomes phenomena. This is the first step from natural world-experience to phenomenological world-experience, so this method is also called reduction.

Whether epoche or reduction, the point is only to make us “return to the things themselves,” that is, to break through the various prejudices and misunderstandings of the naturalistic mode of thinking in the empirical sciences, and return to our original intuitive experience. In this way, the immanent and the transcendent stand on the same phenomenological plane; their distinction is only a difference in the way they are presented to us, not an ontological difference. As phenomena, both are objects of intentionality. Thus the gulf between the immanent and the transcendent disappears without a trace.

After we have bracketed our natural attitude and natural beliefs, we can think about the world of essences. But that is still not Husserl’s aim; what he is concerned with is the essence of consciousness. He wants to obtain a new domain of being through epoche, namely the domain of transcendental consciousness. Transcendental consciousness is the phenomenological residue left after epoche; epoche is intended not only to make essential meaning appear in intuition, but also to lead directly to transcendental consciousness.

Therefore phenomenological reduction must proceed in two steps: eidetic reduction (addressing ontological questions) and transcendental reduction (addressing metaphysical questions).

Eidetic reduction is a return from facts to their essential structure through a close description of the state of affairs. Husserl compared this essential method of the phenomenologist with the mathematician’s method of intuiting ideal objects. When the mathematician is purely defining line, plane, and sphere, he can abstract from a particular concrete spatial object. In this way, through free imagination, he obtains an invariant norm amid the various variations of a concrete object, and the characteristic content of this invariant is the essence of that concrete thing.

The above references Zhang Rulun: “Fifteen Lectures on Modern Western Philosophy,” Peking University Press, 2003, pp. 210~212

Transcendental reduction is used to solve the metaphysical problem, that is, the problem of being as being. Husserl believed that the source of the world (here meaning the totality of intentional objects of consciousness) is the transcendental subject. Transcendental reduction means suspending the view that the world exists in relation to the transcendental subject. Transcendental reduction is a road leading to transcendental subjectivity.

Husserl believed that people normally adopt a natural attitude, seeing the world as the totality of all sorts of experienced and unexperienced things. These things exist objectively and in themselves, independent of our consciousness, and human beings themselves are one among these things. The world provides us with experience, and we make judgments about the world on the basis of these experiences. What Husserl called the natural attitude refers to the attitude commonly held by people and adopted by most natural scientists. He believed that the fundamental defect of this attitude is that it does not consider the question of how knowledge is possible.

Husserl believed that opposed to the natural attitude is a philosophical attitude, one that reflects on the question of the possibility of knowledge. To answer the question of the possibility of knowledge, one cannot presuppose in advance that things-in-themselves exist outside consciousness and that consciousness can transcend itself to reach things-in-themselves; doing so would mean taking as a premise, in advance, a question that remains unresolved. One must carry out a universal and thorough suspension of judgment (suspension of judgment), requiring not only that the belief in the existence of everything taken as an object of cognition be suspended, but also that the belief in the existence of the cognizing subject in the world be suspended. Thorough suspension of judgment reduces the natural attitude to a reflective, non-presuppositional, and cautious philosophical attitude concerned with the possibility of knowledge.

Now we can explain the literal meaning of “transcendental reduction.” Kant believed that before studying beings and their determinations, one must study how knowledge is possible. In Kant, “transcendental” does not mean studying the objects of knowledge, but studying the mode of our knowledge of objects, and this study must proceed in a way that does not depend on experience, but is a priori. “Transcendental” does not mean beyond experience, but rather that which makes experiential knowledge possible. Husserl uses the word transcendental in Kant’s sense, calling his phenomenology “transcendental phenomenology,” and emphasizing the study of how the objects of consciousness appear to intentional consciousness, and how intentional consciousness constitutes the objects of consciousness. His difference from Kant lies in the fact that his study of the mode of cognition is developed on the basis of the theory of intentionality.

Husserl’s line of thought is: first affirm the activity of consciousness, the structure of intentionality, and the self-evidence of the ego as the agent of conscious activity; then explain how conscious activity constitutes the objects of conscious activity. For example, if I see a tree, then whether I have seen wrongly, whether that tree exists, and so on are all questionable; but the act of my seeing — my thinking that I saw a tree — is absolutely self-evident. Husserl called questions within the domain of pure consciousness immanence, and questions such as whether the object of cognition exists objectively he called transcendence. Phenomenological research is conducted within the domain of pure consciousness; only after he suspends the question of transcendence does he begin to study how acts of cognition constitute the objects of consciousness.

The above references Liu Fangtong et al., eds.: “A New Edition of Modern Western Philosophy,” People’s Publishing House, 2000, pp. 319~321

Compilation of Final Exam Reflection Questions for the Course on Modern Western Philosophy: 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, Heidegger

EPR posted on 2005-12-18 14:00:17

24． How should the ontological difference be understood? What is its significance?

Heidegger believed that traditional metaphysics, from Plato onward, committed a fundamental error: it affirmed the existence of beings before understanding how beings in fact “exist.” In Heidegger’s view, the confusion of being and beings is the fundamental reason traditional metaphysics fell into difficulty and crisis; precisely because philosophers wrongly cared only about beings while setting aside being, which alone has originary significance, their accounts of beings lost their foundation. In order to overcome the errors of traditional metaphysics, the fundamental path is to strictly distinguish being itself from beings, that is, to newly detach being from beings.

The above references Liu Fangtong et al., eds.: “A New Edition of Modern Western Philosophy,” People’s Publishing House, 2000, pp. 337~339

Heidegger uses the term “of beings (states of affairs)” to discuss beings, and “ontological” to discuss being. I am completely certain that I exist; I am aware of my everyday and being-level existence, and yet I still ask: “Who am I?” This is an ontological question.

Heidegger believed that in order to pose the question of being in a meaningful way, we must question the appropriate being; we must figure out which being we are asking. We would not ask a tree for a pie recipe; if we want to ask the question of the meaning of being, then we must identify the being to which we can put the question.

The being to which Heidegger’s ontic questioning is directed is determined as the questioner himself. He points out that each of us is a being capable of asking the question of Being, which means that we already have some vague, preliminary understanding of Being. If we ask ourselves, we may be able to pose the question of the meaning of Being in a more proper way. Heidegger uses the term “Dasein” to name the being that each of us is. Taken literally, “Dasein” can be translated as “being-there.” “Da” can mean both “there” and “here.” I am here, or you are there: both situations emphasize the firsthand “I” and “you.”

Excerpted from [U.S.] Patricia Ottenberg Johnson: Heidegger, trans. Zhang Xianglong, Lin Dan, and Zhu Gang, Zhonghua Book Company, 2002, p. 17

25． Understand the meaning of “Dasein.”

See Question 24.

Terminological explanation: being-there (Dasein)

A key term used by Heidegger. In traditional German philosophy, Dasein, in a broad sense, refers to a kind of being (in the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, it refers to any being with determinacy, translated as “determinate being”); in a narrow sense, it refers to that kind of being belonging to human beings (in everyday German). Heidegger uses this word only to designate the (mode of) being of human beings. Human beings must have their place in this world: the there; and they must be regarded as “being-in-the-world.” Such a way of being is a human (existential) structure, not the ready-made existence of this or that particular individual. Heidegger believes that the meaning of Being is the subject matter of philosophy. Dasein is the only being that can ask about Being and marvel at its own existing self. Ontologically, it is distinctive, because it makes understanding of Being possible. Dasein is not an object in any sense, but is defined as being-in-the-world. Since it is regarded as a life course or story unfolding between birth and death, it is closely related to “temporality” and “historicity.” For Heidegger, any inquiry into Being must begin with the study of Dasein. The analysis of Dasein is an inquiry into the conditions of the possibility of understanding Being itself; it is not an epistemological study of our cognitive way of knowing Being, but an ontological investigation of the meaning of Being. The study of Dasein is the theme of Heidegger’s Being and Time, and is the necessary preparation for solving the question of Being itself. The book begins with a study of the formal structure of Dasein, and then discusses its temporal structure. Heidegger’s view of the human being as Dasein is entirely different from Descartes’ view of the human being, the latter treating human beings as an external combination of the mind and body of an isolated subject.

Excerpted from Nicolas Bunnin and Yu Jiyuan, eds.: A Dictionary of Western Philosophy in English and Chinese, trans. Wang Keping, Jiang Yi, Yu Jiyuan, Chen Bo, Zhang Xianglong, Zhou Xiaoliang, Duan Zhongqiao, Hu Xinhe, Xu Kailai, Xu Youyu, Tao Xuao, Tang Refeng, Gong Qun, People’s Publishing House, 2001, p. 227

26． Understand Dasein’s priority on the ontological level and on the level of beings.

Heidegger believes that Dasein has an evident priority over all other beings: first, the priority in terms of the state of beings. Dasein is only its own being, prior to any other determination; it is not a ready-made, substantively conceived being, but only an appearance, a possibility. Second, the ontological priority. Dasein is able to question its own being. Ontology concerning Being in general is a theoretical explication of the meaning on the level of beings; an account of the ontology of Dasein is not a simple account of its state as a being, but instead asks about Dasein’s being itself, and this questioning itself is the meaning of Dasein’s being as a being. Third, Dasein includes not only an understanding of its own being, but also an understanding of the being of all other beings. Dasein opens the gate to all other beings. Ontological studies of all other beings should be carried out through Dasein. Or rather, the ontology of all other beings is based on the ontological study of Dasein.

Question 26 excerpted from Liu Fangtong et al., eds.: Newly Compiled Modern Western Philosophy, People’s Publishing House, 2000, pp. 341–342

27． What does Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein tell us?

The existing contents of Being and Time can be divided into two parts: the existential analysis of Dasein and the study of the overall structure and temporality of Dasein.

The existential analysis of Dasein is, in other words, an analysis of Dasein’s distinctive mode of being. Compared with other beings, the characteristic of Dasein lies in its special relation to Being; or rather, it must transcend itself toward Being, or go forth to exist. Thus Heidegger essentially defines Dasein as transcendence. This is exactly the opposite of the traditional philosophical definition of transcendence. Traditional philosophy holds that the external world is what is transcendent, while the human being is internal. But in Heidegger’s view, the distinctive feature of human existence is that it must go beyond itself and exist in the world; the essence of human beings, or transcendence, is being-in-the-world.

However, the “world” Heidegger speaks of is not the sum of all things as it is usually understood, but should be understood ontologically as the totality of meaning disclosed to us by Being. Heidegger believes that whether the world is formulated as a synonym for the totality of all natural things, or as a collective noun for human beings, is mistaken. The world is the relation among the totality of beings, the relations between human beings and things, between human beings and human beings, and the meanings that emerge in the totality of these relations.

Question 27 excerpted from Zhang Rulun: Fifteen Lectures on Modern Western Philosophy, Peking University Press, 2003, p. 231

28． Analyze Dasein’s “being-in-the-world,” and explain why epistemology is not basic.

Regarding “world,” see Question 27.

To say that Dasein is “being-in-the-world” means that Dasein is already in the world. In traditional philosophy, the human being is defined either as subject or as consciousness, and the world is external to the human being. But Dasein is always within the world. “In” refers to the original experience of our living in the world, namely our everyday practical activities, our life activities. These activities are as natural to us as breathing; we would never ask: “What are you going to do in the external world today?” because whenever we do anything, we are always already in the world. There is no problem here of how the self communicates with the world, yet that is precisely the typical problem of traditional philosophy.

The above refers to Zhang Rulun: Fifteen Lectures on Modern Western Philosophy, Peking University Press, 2003, p. 231

Heidegger opposes the traditional philosophical epistemological view of the subject-object dichotomy, believing that its essence is first to posit an isolated subject and then to know and demonstrate the object (the world) opposed to it. Some philosophers affirm the reality of the “external world” (the object), believing that one can go beyond the subject to reach the object; others doubt this; still others hold that the object is the subject’s creation. They debate these matters fiercely, but all alike divide subject and object (world) apart, and none understands the inseparability of Dasein and world. Because they all necessarily posit, in different ways, a subject that sets the world aside—that is, an isolated self—they all inevitably lead to methodological solipsism. For Heidegger, a world apart from the subject is indeed incapable of being verified, and a subject apart from the world is even more impossible to exist. If Dasein does not exist, then its world is not there either; if the world is not there, then there is no Dasein to speak of.

Above excerpted from Liu Fangtong et al., eds.: Newly Compiled Modern Western Philosophy, People’s Publishing House, 2000, pp. 342–343

29． Give examples to explain “present-in-hand” and “ready-to-hand.”

We do not know things by way of an objective distance; rather, we always encounter things in the world in an entangled manner. In his description of how we encounter things, Heidegger makes an interesting and useful distinction, namely between present-in-hand things and ready-to-hand things.

We can encounter intraworldly things as present-at-hand, can keep ourselves at a distance from things and deal with them theoretically; this is the way philosophers usually handle things and the world. Although this way of encountering intraworldly things does indeed enable us to live in the world, it does not reveal the most basic way in which we encounter intraworldly things. Heidegger strongly maintains that the more fundamental way in which we encounter things is ready-to-hand. Things are disclosed in our use of them. Heidegger takes the hammer as an example. When we use a hammer to drive a nail, we do not think about the structure of the hammer handle that is swinging as we work; we are using this hammer in a rather practical way. We use it to drive the nail into the wall. In this relation with the hammer, we do indeed gain a kind of knowledge: we learn how to drive nails, and thus come to understand what this thing is for. The hammer is disclosed within the atmosphere of its relation of use with us.

For contemporary readers, learning to ride a bicycle may be a better example. When someone goes to learn how to ride a bike, others may offer various suggestions about what needs to be done, but the real task of learning to ride is to establish a ready-to-hand relation with the bicycle. Learning to ride a bike is less a matter of thinking about how to keep balance, how to pedal, or how to stop, than of encountering the bicycle in a close relation.

Our everyday encounters with intraworldly things are mostly encounters in practical relations with things as ready-to-hand, but this does not mean that we know nothing of these things. A highly skilled artisan knows how a hammer stands in the network of relations with a variety of other tools. Once someone has learned to ride a bicycle, he can offer others suggestions about how to ride. Heidegger believes that we know how things correspond to the world in which we live; precisely because we are essentially entwined and embodied in the world do things become disclosed in different ways, and our labor enables us to know things and provides us with perspectives from which to know them.

Question 29 excerpted from [U.S.] Patricia Ottenberg Johnson: Heidegger, trans. Zhang Xianglong, Lin Dan, and Zhu Gang, Zhonghua Book Company, 2002, pp. 23–24

30． What is the “they”?

Dasein, in the world, not only has to deal with things, but also with others. Others are neither present-at-hand nor ready-to-hand, but are there with us. Although Dasein first exists without involvement with others, only on the basis of being-with are there individuals; the being-with of others belongs to the internal structure of Dasein, and the mode of being of human beings is being-with others. Being-with is first of all an ontological determination; Dasein cannot fail to coexist with others.

In our coexistence with others, we naturally find ourselves at a distance from them; with such a distance, we begin to measure ourselves by others’ standards. Structure—we discover that we are often governed by others, and that others have taken over being from Dasein. But this “other” is not a determinate person; rather, it is an elusive neutral one, an average of many others who do not appear as individuals. Heidegger calls it “the they”. This they is nothing magical or supernatural; it is the collective name for all modes of behavior, institutions, and viewpoints. “The they” is the prevailing standard of value, norms, and public opinion. In dealing with things and others, Dasein basically follows the demands of the they, doing things according to the rules and drifting with the current. The being of the they is always commonplace and even fails to attract our attention, yet people welcome its rule because it relieves Dasein of the burden of being. Dasein can hand over all choices of existence to the they without feeling any unease, because Dasein first, and usually always, is the they. This is how inauthenticity comes into being. Although Heidegger believes that here he is merely offering an objective description of Dasein’s condition of existence, and not at all a criticism of the culture or morality then in vogue, we can still hear in it an echo of Nietzsche’s critique of modern life.

Question 30 excerpted from Zhang Rulun: Fifteen Lectures on Modern Western Philosophy, Peking University Press, 2003, pp. 232–233

31． What is “care”? What does it mean to say that Care is Dasein’s Being?

Heidegger believes that human existence as Dasein is in an open state, that is, existence within the “boundaries” of the whole of human existence, or rather existence within the totality of the relation between human beings and their world (things external, other people). This state of openness is “care” (German Sorge). The basic existential structure of Dasein is being-in-the-world, and the mode of being of being-in-the-world is care.

Heidegger divides care into concern and trouble. Concern refers to the state of being of Dasein in relation to things other than itself. The existence of things and of the world is all related to the use of equipment; all are subordinated to the activity of concern, which grants meaning to other beings and to the world. Trouble refers to the state of being of Dasein in relation to others. The world of being-in-the-world is not merely the world of isolated individuals, but a world shared with others; Dasein in this mode of being-in-the-world of trouble is being-with-one-another.

Heidegger’s doctrine of Dasein and being-in-the-world prominently expresses his basic tendency to replace the mode of epistemological thinking with the mode of ontological thinking. First, he emphasizes that relations of being precede and are higher than relations of cognition; people first exist, and only then can there be knowledge, and human existence is always linked together with its world. Affirming human existence also means simultaneously affirming the existence of its world (nature, society, other people), and vice versa; as for human cognition of the world, it can only occur on the premise that human beings and the world are together. Compared with cognition, the relation of human existence has an original significance. Second, Heidegger believes that the relation between human beings and their world is not an external, static relation, but a unified whole that is existing (that is, in process); human cognition of all the other beings in its world is reached through the use of tools.

Question 31 references Liu Fangtong et al., eds.: Newly Edited Modern Western Philosophy, People’s Publishing House, 2000, pp. 343–344

Compilation of Final Exam Thought Questions for the Course in Modern Western Philosophy: 32, Sartre

EPR posted on 2005-12-18 14:22:53

32． How should we understand Sartre’s claim that “existence precedes essence”?

In the brief lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (a work whose views Sartre himself later repudiated), Sartre offered a classic formulation of the basic existentialist principle: existence precedes essence.

Sartre believed that we cannot explain human nature in the same way we explain artifacts. For example, when we think of a knife—it is made by someone, who has an idea of it, including what it is for, and so on. If what we mean by the essence of a knife is the procedure and purpose that produced it, then we can say that the essence of the knife precedes its existence. When we think about human essence, we also tend to describe ourselves as the product of a maker or creator or God. Yet Sartre believed that if there is no God, then there is no given human nature; human nature cannot be defined in advance, because it cannot be conceived in advance. Man simply exists, and only later do we become the selves of our essence.

Sartre points out that to say existence precedes essence means that human beings first exist, encounter themselves, appear in the world, and then define themselves.

The most important result of putting existence before human essence is not only that we create ourselves, but also that responsibility for existence falls upon each and every person. Human beings possess a higher dignity than stones or tables, and what gives me dignity is a life with subjectivity, meaning that I am something oriented toward the future, and I am aware that I am doing so.

Question 32 references [American] Samuel Enoch Stumpf and James Fieser, A History of Western Philosophy (7th ed.), translated by Ding Sandong, Zhang Chuanyou, Deng Xiaomang, Zhang Lihai, Hao Changchi, Zhang Jianhua, and He Weiping, with editorial review by Deng Xiaomang, Zhonghua Book Company, 2005, pp. 179–182

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Compilation of Final Exam Thought Questions for the Course in Modern Western Philosophy: 33, Frege

EPR posted on 2005-12-18 14:57:17

33． Understanding Frege’s ideas of “sense” and “reference”  

In Frege’s view, every complete sign expresses a sense and refers to something that we call its reference. Frege introduced this distinction by considering the proposition “the morning star is the evening star.” Although the two phrases “the morning star” and “the evening star” refer to the same object, namely Venus, they clearly have different senses. So the sentence “the morning star is the morning star” offers nothing new, whereas the sentence “the morning star is the evening star” is informative.

This distinction is closely related to the distinction between connotation and denotation, and between intension and extension. It shows that the meaning (sense) of an expression and its reference do not always vary together—a view that had a considerable impact on the later development of analytic philosophy. For Frege, a basic proposition consists of a referring expression (as subject) and a predicate (as function or concept). Frege called the sense or meaning of a proposition a “thought”; the latter is compounded from the senses of the proposition’s constituent elements, and he said that the reference of a proposition is its truth value.

Excerpted from Nicholas Bunnin and Yu Jiyuan, eds., Dictionary of Western Philosophy in English and Chinese, translated by Wang Keping, Jiang Yi, Yu Jiyuan, Chen Bo, Zhang Xianglong, Zhou Xiaoliang, Duan Zhongqiao, Hu Xinhe, Xu Kailai, Xu Youyu, Tao Xiu’ao, Tang Refeng, and Gong Qun, People’s Publishing House, 2001, p. 919  

Compilation of Final Exam Thought Questions for the Course in Modern Western Philosophy: 34, 35, 36, 37, Wittgenstein

EPR posted on 2005-12-18 16:33:52

34． How should we understand the “world structure” in early Wittgenstein?

Although the world is composed of things that differ infinitely and change infinitely, these things are all combined according to ways that accord with their inner properties. Logic reflects the necessary connections among things, and the sum of all necessary connections among things is the logical structure of the world. It is in precisely this sense that one can say, “Logic is a mirror of the world.”

The world structure disclosed by logic differs from the natural laws described by the natural sciences. Natural laws are limited to a certain range and are contingent, whereas logical relations are universal, necessary, and a priori. Yet logical analysis of the world has similarities with scientific methods of analysis. For example, physicists analyze the material world into individual visible objects, and then analyze objects into atoms, and so on. Logical analysis of the world can likewise be divided into three steps: first the world is analyzed into the totality of events, then an event into a combination of atomic events, and finally atomic events into a series of simple objects.

Reference: Zhao Dunhua, A New Edition of Modern Western Philosophy, Peking University Press, 2001, pp. 74–75

35． What is “picture theory”?

Picture theory: a theory of propositions proposed by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which holds that propositions are pictures of reality; to understand a proposition is to know the state of affairs it depicts. The word “picture” (German Bild) derives both from painted images and from the mathematical sense of an abstract model. All propositions are truth-function combinations of elementary propositions. Each elementary proposition consists of unanalyzable names that name simple “objects”; the sense of a proposition is the state of affairs it depicts. The way elements are connected in a proposition represents objects being connected to one another in the same way. Thus, propositions have a pictorial character. However, this is a logical picture, and it shares with what it depicts a “pictorial form,” rather than spatially assembling what it depicts. Although all propositions are pictures, not all pictures are propositions. One controversial question is whether the proposition-picture theory collapsed when Wittgenstein abandoned the metaphysics of “logical atomism” in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Question 35 excerpted from Nicholas Bunnin and Yu Jiyuan, eds., Dictionary of Western Philosophy in English and Chinese, translated by Wang Keping, Jiang Yi, Yu Jiyuan, Chen Bo, Zhang Xianglong, Zhou Xiaoliang, Duan Zhongqiao, Hu Xinhe, Xu Kailai, Xu Youyu, Tao Xiu’ao, Tang Refeng, and Gong Qun, People’s Publishing House, 2001, p. 768

36． How does Wittgenstein criticize the Augustinian picture?

Augustine’s language picture: a view attributed to Augustine and criticized by Wittgenstein at the beginning of Philosophical Investigations. According to this view, every word has a meaning, and that meaning is the object the word stands for; thus every word has meaning because it is linked to some entity. This view is criticized as overly simplistic because it focuses only on nouns and ignores other kinds of words that function quite differently from nouns; and even among nouns, the relation of naming is extremely complex. From precisely this standpoint, Wittgenstein put forward another theory of his own, emphasizing the different uses of the diversity of language in various kinds.

Question 36 excerpted from Nicholas Bunnin and Yu Jiyuan, eds., Dictionary of Western Philosophy in English and Chinese, translated by Wang Keping, Jiang Yi, Yu Jiyuan, Chen Bo, Zhang Xianglong, Zhou Xiaoliang, Duan Zhongqiao, Hu Xinhe, Xu Kailai, Xu Youyu, Tao Xiu’ao, Tang Refeng, and Gong Qun, People’s Publishing House, 2001, p. 91

37． What are family resemblances?

This term can be traced back to Nietzsche, but it became widely known through Wittgenstein’s later discussion of the nature of language. Traditional essentialism held that general terms such as “language” or “game” must possess a single common feature in order to connect everything subsumed under them. Wittgenstein rejected this view. The terms falling under many general terms are like a family, whose different members resemble one another in different ways, forming a whole network of overlapping similarities. These relations and similarities are what are called family resemblances. The concept was introduced to show that there is no need to go beyond actual ordinary language in search of an ultimate deep structure in which each term would possess a unified essence. We should therefore describe the relations required for any investigation, rather than seek definitions that specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for applying terms. This account of family resemblances can be more broadly applied to attempts to solve the traditional problem of universals in a general way.

Question 37 excerpted from Nicholas Bunnin and Yu Jiyuan, eds., Dictionary of Western Philosophy in English and Chinese, translated by Wang Keping, Jiang Yi, Yu Jiyuan, Chen Bo, Zhang Xianglong, Zhou Xiaoliang, Duan Zhongqiao, Hu Xinhe, Xu Kailai, Xu Youyu, Tao Xiu’ao, Tang Refeng, and Gong Qun, People’s Publishing House, 2001, p. 367

Compilation of Final Exam Thought Questions for the Course in Modern Western Philosophy: 38, Reference Works and Important Notes

EPR posted on 2005-12-18 16:37:48

38． Reference works and important notes

Aside from the items listed below, I guarantee that the quoted passages have no other sources.

l          [American] Samuel Enoch Stumpf and James Fieser: A History of Western Philosophy (7th ed.), translated by Ding Sandong, Zhang Chuanyou, Deng Xiaomang, Zhang Lihai, Hao Changchi, Zhang Jianhua, and He Weiping, with editorial review by Deng Xiaomang, Zhonghua Book Company, 2005

l         Edited by Jiang Yi: Western Philosophy on the Eve of the New Century, China Social Sciences Press, 1998

l         Edited by Liu Fangtong et al.: Newly Edited Modern Western Philosophy, People’s Publishing House, 2000

l         [American] Thilly, supplemented by Wood: A History of Western Philosophy (supplemented and revised edition), Commercial Press, 1995

l         [Norwegian] G. Hildebbert and N. Ihyer: A History of Western Philosophy—From Ancient Greece to the Twentieth Century, translated by Tong Shijun, Yu Zhenhua, and Liu Jin, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2004

l         Zhang Rulun: Fifteen Lectures on Modern Western Philosophy, Peking University Press, 2003

l         赵敦华: Modern Western Philosophy: A New Edition, Peking University Press, 2001

l         Edited and compiled by Nicholas Bunnin and Yu Jiyuan: Chinese-English Dictionary of Western Philosophy, translated by Wang Keping, Jiang Yi, Yu Jiyuan, Chen Bo, Zhang Xianglong, Zhou Xiaoliang, Duan Zhongqiao, Hu Xinhe, Xu Kailai, Xu Youyu, Tao Shao’ao, Tang Refeng, and Gong Qun, People’s Publishing House, 2001

l         周国平: Nietzsche—At the Turning Point of the Century, Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1986

l          [Fr.] Gilles Deleuze: Nietzsche and Philosophy, translated by Zhou Ying and Liu Yuyu, Social Sciences Academic Press, 2001

l          [U.S.] Patricia O’Tanberde Johnson: Heidegger, translated by Zhang Xianglong, Lin Dan, and Zhu Gang, Zhonghua Book Company, 2002

l          [U.S.] Cornelis Waar: Peirce, translated by Hao Changchi, Zhonghua Book Company, 2003

Citing or reposting while clearly indicating the source is the most basic academic norm, the minimum requirement of a serious and rigorous scholarly attitude, and even more, the most elementary respect due to the labor of others. My notes and compilations have always been made available for classmates to circulate and copy freely, but on the condition that all notes on my book sources must be preserved and that they must be marked as coming from the compilation by Gucha.

Thank you
2005-12-18 22:37:20 [reply]
Great kindness needs no thanks…
We will definitely respect Xiaogu’s labor! We’ll correct our attitude!

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.

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