分类：Philosophy & Thought

Virtue, Reason, and Spirit

Philosophy & Thought2007.05.03
Virtue, Reason, and Spirit
I once said, “The sublime are often rational; their decisions or choices should be guided more by reason than by mere whim, or by blind obedience to habit—a person of limited intelligence can also be trained into a selfless sacrificer, and a fanatical cultist may likewise completely abandon his own interests, but they cannot be called sublime, because behind their consistent behavior we see more irrationality. Only someone who has freely reflected upon his own life and can autonomously and rationally control his behavior is possibly capable of becoming sublime.” Later I added: “Actually, there is also a matter of level here. When the sublime reach a certain level, their…
philosophy reason emotion virtue
阅读全文

2007年5月3日
On “the Sublime”

Philosophy & Thought2007.05.01
On “the Sublime”
Reply to UINC’s second question: “How do you view human morality? Do you believe that an absolute, sublime morality exists?” This question is really too broad—especially the first half, which basically requires a review of my views on ethics. However, my ethical position has not yet truly taken shape, so I can only talk about some scattered, immature ideas. “Sublime” is a word I quite like, and in fact this word is neglected in mainstream modern normative ethics, because they are more concerned with the minimum moral norm than with the highest pursuit of virtue. And since I lean toward virtue ethics, the first thing I have to do is…
philosophy pluralism virtue
阅读全文

2007年5月1日
Outline for a Discussion of the Philosophy of Religion: Does the Sacred Reality in Religious Experience Really Exist? How Can We Know?

Philosophy & Thought2007.04.27
Outline for a Discussion of the Philosophy of Religion: Does the Sacred Reality in Religious Experience Really Exist? How Can We Know?
I am a scholar of philosophy of science, so let me begin with a few examples related to science: First question: Can we experience “force,” or how do we experience it? The concept of “force” is used extremely widely: we speak of gravity, pressure, magnetic force, tensile force, and so on. But how do we experience or come to know the existence of “force”? In fact, we do not directly feel “force.” When we touch or weigh something with our hands, we may say that we feel pressure or gravity, but in fact all that happens is that our sense of touch is stimulated in certain ways. And at other…
philosophy faith Aristotle religion
阅读全文

2007年4月27日
Are There Hierarchies of Value, Higher and Lower, Noble and Mean?

Philosophy & Thought2007.04.18
Are There Hierarchies of Value, Higher and Lower, Noble and Mean?
In response to UINC’s question. Questions in ethics and morality are very difficult to discuss. As Teacher Cheng said, many great philosophers only expressed opinions on ethical questions in the later period of their academic lives, when their entire philosophical systems had reached maturity. For the likes of us, insignificant nobodies, it is even less realistic to expect to have anything like definite views on ethical questions very early on—especially since many questions are never something one can gain deep insight into while still young. Young people will always be confused; if one is not confused at all, that in itself is abnormal. Confucius said that at thirty he stood…
philosophy pluralism virtue Confucius
阅读全文

2007年4月18日
Ethics Course on the Life-and-Death Question: Second Assignment — On the Value of Life

Philosophy & Thought2007.04.08
Ethics Course on the Life-and-Death Question: Second Assignment — On the Value of Life
Choose one of the following four questions for discussion: 1. Is life itself valuable, or is life merely a necessary condition for other values? 2. If life itself is valuable, why? What kind of value does life have? 3. If it is precisely life itself that is valuable, does that mean all living beings possess value equally? 4. If only certain beings have value, what is the basis for drawing such a limit? Is life itself valuable, or is life merely a necessary condition for other values? It is worth noting that these four questions are arranged in a progressive sequence: if one does not accept the previous position, then…
philosophy value virtue life
阅读全文

2007年4月8日
Form Is Emptiness, Emptiness Is Form (Old Post)

Philosophy & Thought2007.03.24
Form Is Emptiness, Emptiness Is Form (Old Post)
This article was a small paper for Teacher Shangzhou’s “Selected Readings in Buddhist Original Texts” course back then, but I felt it was written awkwardly and in a complete mess, and I was too embarrassed to post it on my blog at the time. However, looking at it now, since my blog already has plenty of lousy text, one more piece of that sort hardly matters. I had originally been quite interested in Buddhism and Buddhist studies. Besides being deeply impressed by the philosophical depth of Primitive Buddhism (atheistic Buddhism), I was also rather interested in Tibetan esoteric Buddhism. Back then I found a number of audio recordings of…
book reading notes Buddhism
阅读全文

2007年3月24日
The Difference Between Ethics and Moral Standards and Legal Norms

Philosophy & Thought2007.03.24
The Difference Between Ethics and Moral Standards and Legal Norms
Ethics provides the basis for, or a justification of, law; law is the ethical minimum, and so on. Whether such claims are reasonable or not, they often tend to blur the essential difference between ethical-moral questions and questions of legal norms. The core of ethics is “the good,” or “virtue”; the core of jurisprudence is “justice,” or “order.” Ethics pursues “the good,” or seeks “virtue”; law proclaims “justice,” or safeguards “order.” “Justice,” at most, is only one aspect or one side of “the good”; and according to some other lines of thought, “justice” and “order” are even more often “evil.” “Norms” are the negation of self-discipline; “punishment” is the exercise…
philosophy virtue rule of law
阅读全文

2007年3月24日
First Assignment for the Special Topic on Ethical Questions of Life and Death: On Train-Hitting-Person Cases and DDE

Philosophy & Thought2007.03.19
First Assignment for the Special Topic on Ethical Questions of Life and Death: On Train-Hitting-Person Cases and DDE
First Assignment for the Bioethics Special Topic: On the Train Running People Over and DDE DDE（Doctrine of Double Effect, the doctrine of double effect）： When some actions inevitably bring about double consequences, namely one intended good result and another foreseeable bad result, the doctrine of double effect holds that such actions are good (that is, necessary under natural law) if and only if all of the following conditions are met at the same time: 1） The action must not be immoral 2） The bad consequence must not be the means to the good consequence 3） The intention of the action must be directed only toward the good consequence, although the accompanying…
philosophy Christianity virtue choice
阅读全文

2007年3月19日
Excerpts from My Reading of Marx in the Philosophy of Technology Course

Philosophy & Thought2007.03.13
Excerpts from My Reading of Marx in the Philosophy of Technology Course
Excerpts from Marx Readings in the Philosophy of Technology Class I looked up The German Ideology on my own in order to verify Marx’s understanding of the concept of the human being and of human freedom. The remaining materials all come from the electronic file distributed by Wu-laoshi. What follows is only a transcription of the original text; I am not commenting for the time being. The underlines and boldface are all my additions. “The German Ideology (Selected Excerpts),” People’s Publishing House, 2003: The constraint of the level of development of productive forces on freedom (Chinese first edition of the Complete Works, Vol. 3, pp. 506–508) The problem as Sancho…
book reading notes freedom Marx
阅读全文

2007年3月13日
On Feminism

Philosophy & Thought2007.03.08
On Feminism
It has been quite a while since I last really put pen to paper. The two books I finished reading, I was too lazy to jot down even notes on them; it seems my state has again fallen into a slump… Today is March 8, International Women’s Day, so let me write down some thoughts. I have said before that I am a kind of “female feminism of a male chauvinist sort.” If one were to look at some of the concrete views I call feminist, they might still seem, in the eyes of many women, to be utterly male chauvinist; yet I believe that male chauvinism is still this…
philosophy culture The Two Cultures women
阅读全文

2007年3月8日