On My Research Plan for the Next Few Years—Coursework for Reading and Writing

In academic matters, I am not used to setting plans or goals for myself. That does not mean I am a person who drifts with the tide; on the contrary, at any given moment I have a clear understanding of the road beneath my feet, and I will decisively take the next step, but I am not attached to some distant goal that has not yet entered my field of vision. Up to now, the path of my growth, seen in detail, has seemed as though every step were natural and continuous, yet taken as a whole it appears unexpectedly—although looking back now one can hardly find any obvious break or turning point, it is always extremely difficult for the me of a few years ago to imagine the road I would be on a few years later. This is a marvelous thing. I feel that such a life is rich, full of possibilities and freshness. I hope this way of growing will continue, and I do not want the road ahead to be presented to me too early, as though if I simply walked along the path under my feet step by step, the future would be clear beyond doubt—whether such a life turns out to be successful or unsuccessful, it seems terribly dull.

Philosophy has brought infinite richness to my life—I know what I am looking at and thinking about now, but I will never know what the me of a year from now will be looking at and thinking about. I can always interpret the thoughts, attitudes, and views of the me of a year ago as continuous and unified with the me of now, and I also believe that my growth will continue to be continuous and unified, yet I simply cannot predict the shape of my thoughts a year later—this is truly thrilling. In the ocean of philosophy, I deeply feel for the first time that I am a living organism, growing on its own, fresh every day, possessing infinite possibilities, and yet always continuous and identical.

Therefore, I will undoubtedly choose to continue my philosophical adventure, not as my profession, but as my life. If by chance I can also find a corresponding profession that allows me to make a living, that would of course be even better.

Of course, my choice of philosophy is only due to my personal interests and preferences, and not because I look down on other more “practical” disciplines. Before entering the undergraduate philosophy program back then, my first choices had been physics or economics; sociology and history were also ranked above philosophy. I have always remembered this: it was because I lacked the ability that I ended up studying philosophy, and I would never be the kind of person who, unable to get the grapes, says they are sour. For me now, not choosing directions such as social research is not because philosophy is somehow “higher” than them, but because, considering factors such as my personality and abilities, I am clearly not good at doing such research.

At the graduate level, first of all I should frankly say: I hope to follow Teacher Wu Guosheng, and to strive for a master’s-to-PhD transfer. Both of these are very much related to the research direction of the next few years. Because if Teacher Wu drops me and I move under another advisor, then I will choose completely different topics to work on. For example, with Teacher Su I might do environmental ethics or science and religion; with Teacher Liu I might do SSK or communication studies; with Teacher Sun I might look for topics within the analytic philosophy tradition. Of course, these topics would also all be ones that I am personally interested in.

The reason I hope to transfer from master’s to PhD is not to shorten the two years in between (in fact, even if the transfer succeeds, it may still require an extension), but to try to escape the master’s thesis and the PhD entrance exam—especially the latter. From childhood to adulthood, I have never once participated in any of the major exams of this exam-oriented education system, and if I were to hold out until the final hurdle and then lose my last ounce of integrity, that would be truly regrettable…

If I cannot obtain exemption from the exam, then the options may be to take the PhD exam at my own university, to take it at another university, or to just stay at home and be a folk philosopher. Depending on the situation, the approach to the master’s thesis would also differ, so I won’t imagine it in detail here. But if I can escape the master’s thesis, then I can make plans directly on a five-year cycle, and that would be very different.

If I only have two years, I fear I would not go into phenomenology. Because, on the one hand, phenomenology is too deep a well, and the phenomenological method is truly not easy to grasp; I absolutely do not want to churn out clouded, misty, evasive prose while I myself have not even figured things out clearly. In my view, although the language of phenomenology seems much more obscure than that of analytic philosophy, any good philosophy must certainly be lucid and clear, and a good philosopher must have worked through his own line of thought and expressed it in the way that, in his own view, is the clearest and most intelligible. The reason some phenomenologists’ language seems arcane and difficult to decipher is just like the way some analytic philosophers’ logical calculations seem complicated and cumbersome—not because they are deliberately like that, but simply because there really is no further way to simplify them. Since phenomenologists are trying to express fluid meaning, they are compelled to adopt a “circling” language,

Phenomenologists play with conceptual games precisely in order to try to transcend the shackles of concepts, to guide people out of their fixation on words and face the “things themselves” directly. Yet some phenomenology researchers in China are themselves precisely bewitched by those flashy “terms,” and end up falling back into conceptual entanglement instead; this is something I must certainly avoid. In short, if I myself have not gotten it straight and made it clear, I will not write a research paper on phenomenology.

On the other hand, as far as I currently understand it, phenomenology is still mainly on the Continent. Although there are quite a few works translated into English and even Chinese, if one truly wants to study phenomenological philosophers, it would probably be impossible not to read their original works in their mother tongue. Although philosophical literature is often difficult to translate, phenomenology-hermeneutics is especially so; this has to do with its philosophical outlook, and I won’t go into it here. If I only have two years, I would be thankful if I could even just handle English well. For someone as lazy by nature as I am, learning foreign languages well is indeed not an easy task; it can only be done slowly through reading and gradual familiarization.

In short, if I have more than five years, I will properly study German or French, find a phenomenologist and read his works carefully. After grasping the general character of his philosophy, I would then choose a specific topic—such as philosophy of technology, epistemology, philosophy of nature, or some other theme more closely linked to the philosophy of technology major—to sort out and expound this philosopher’s line of thought and views, and finally make some comparisons with the perspectives and styles of other schools, while appropriately pointing out its contemporary significance and room for development, and so on. This should be my most conventional research method as a philosophy graduate student.

If my time and ability are insufficient to complete an understanding of a phenomenologist, then depending on the situation I may adjust my object of research. Such an adjustment would probably only move toward an earlier period. In fact, as I mentioned in my personal statement when applying for graduate admission without an exam, one of my ideals is “to restate the pluralism of science (philosophy) starting from the classical.” I have my own understanding of what “classical” means; that is a long story. But roughly speaking, phenomenology already counts as a bit too “new” in my view. I want to go back to Kant and start again. However, considering various factors, it seems unlikely that I would directly do research on Kant as a graduate student, so I may consider looking for a subject somewhere between Kant and Husserl. Besides German philosophy, Peirce and James also seem worth considering.

If there are only two years, and I do a master’s thesis, then things are completely different. I might go and research certain issues concerning the intuitionist school. When I was in my second year of undergraduate study, I had already become interested in intuitionism. At that time I read most of the Chinese-language literature I could find and wrote a review essay of nearly 40,000 characters. Later, my junior-year term paper made use of that essay and also incorporated late Wittgenstein as a comparative interpretation (because I found that the thought of late Wittgenstein is extremely close to intuitionism, though that paper did not satisfy me enough). I found that both the introduction to and research on intuitionism in China are clearly inadequate, and in my view the intuitionist school is quite important, almost worthy of being called a key to understanding twentieth-century philosophy as a whole.

Intuitionism inherits the philosophical tradition from Aristotle through Kant, resonates with Romanticism, and has connections with both early existentialism and phenomenology; it also had an important influence on the later development of both Continental philosophy and Anglo-American philosophy. As one side in the debate over the foundations of mathematics, intuitionism, like logicism, plays a role in the history of philosophy that cannot be ignored. In a certain sense, the influence of intuitionism on philosophy is even broader—after all, logicism’s lineage has mainly been limited to the Anglo-American world, whereas intuitionism, though it failed to flourish as an independent school, has spread its influence in all directions, from Anglo-American to Continental,

Even if we do not consider its role in the history of philosophy, intuitionism is still striking simply in terms of its themes. In my view, for many of the problems that have become prominent in the development of philosophy of science in the second half of the twentieth century—such as the linguistic turn, historicism, issues related to quantum mechanics, scientific realism, naturalized epistemology, sociology of knowledge, relativism, and so on—intuitionism seems to have already prepared mature answers long ago. One can imagine intuitionism’s response to these “new developments” as something like: “See, didn’t we say this long ago?” But at the same time, most radical intuitionists were passionate and highly accomplished scientists, which is different from later kinds of “anti-science” coming from outside science.

As for research on intuitionism, the easiest way would be to consider continuing my undergraduate thesis, supplementing it with relevant foreign-language materials, and rewriting it as a broad introduction to intuitionism, because I found that similar rough summaries seem to be rather lacking in China as well; in any case, back then I did not find a satisfactory review. One could also do a study of figures, for example, Weyl seems quite interesting; of course, one could also use late Wittgenstein, Dummett, Quine, Putnam, and so on to discuss intuitionism directly within concrete issues in philosophy of science.

Besides studying philosophers and schools, I might also take a certain problem as the main thread for research, critically sorting out the different positions that have been debated around that problem. At present I do not have a settled preference in this regard. Issues of realism and causality are relatively what I care about.

Of course, in the end I myself must become the protagonist of my own research—asking the questions personally, thinking in my own way, reasoning in my own style, and writing philosophy in modern Chinese. That is a matter for later.

January 7, 2009

Latest Comments

• mist

  2009-01-07 22:30:52 Anonymous 219.234.81.66 

  You’ve got a chance to bg now — Wu sir won’t turn you down

• Gu Chu

  2009-01-07 22:53:10 

  Whatever the reason, I’d be willing to bg too, but unfortunately if it’s only you q-ing, that’s not very interesting…

• mist

  2009-01-08 00:24:59 Anonymous 65.49.2.157 

  Indeed, it’s very uninteresting…
  Or you could go make one serious post on the bbs, and then lots of little friends will bg you~~~
  The more you water the forum, the better the strategy~~ For instance, after you finish reading one section of a book, you can go post some water there, and conveniently rest a bit too~~

• Starry Sky

  2009-01-12 22:22:58 Anonymous 124.205.78.225

  I reckon even if you want to push Teacher Wu, you won’t be able to push him away…
  That’s a basic fact

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