分类：Philosophy & Thought

A Supplement on “Preserving Common Ground While Seeking Differences”

Philosophy & Thought2006.11.08
A Supplement on “Preserving Common Ground While Seeking Differences”
Today, in the course on globalization issues, the topic of dialogue among civilizations happened to come up, and I went ahead and advocated my own position of preserving commonality while seeking difference. There were many issues raised in the discussion. I’ll make a few supplementary remarks here. I acknowledge that diversity is a reality. But in what sense is it a reality? On the level of ontology, differences are certainly prior to dialogue; the fact of plural coexistence already existed long before plural dialogue got underway. But that is the ontological level—what about the level of knowledge? From the epistemic point of view, those differences may be known to us,…
philosophy culture discussion pursuit
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2006年11月8日
Preserving Common Ground, Seeking Difference—A Pluralist View of Dialogue

Philosophy & Thought2006.11.07
Preserving Common Ground, Seeking Difference—A Pluralist View of Dialogue
Keeping the Common While Seeking the Different “Seek common ground while reserving differences” is a good phrase. When the various parties differ in position and judgment, one can first set aside hostility, consider those claims on which everyone agrees, cooperate first, and then gradually negotiate the differences. This attitude is very important in many practical activities that require cooperation, and especially necessary for urgent issues such as ecological protection. However, “seeking common ground while reserving differences” is not enough to capture the attitude toward exchange held by pluralism. It is a very good attitude for cooperation, but not quite the best attitude for dialogue. The pluralist view of dialogical coexistence…
philosophy culture China discussion
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2006年11月7日
[Eng.] McGrath: Introduction to Christianity, translated by Ma Shulin and Sun Yi, Peking University Press, 2003

Philosophy & Thought2006.11.05
[Eng.] McGrath: Introduction to Christianity, translated by Ma Shulin and Sun Yi, Peking University Press, 2003
It’s been a long time since I last wrote a reading note… I don’t even know whether lately I’ve been lazy, decadent, irritable, depressed, fallen, or just down in the dumps… On the one hand, I’ve been reading much less, and when I do read I can’t be bothered to jot down any notes or impressions; at most I just use a highlighter to mark things directly in the book, sigh…… This is a book worth recommending. The author of this book is the same person who wrote *An Introduction to Science and Religion*. The book is not thick, and in four parts it introduces the core of Christianity (Jesus),…
book reading notes faith religion
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2006年11月5日
From “Pursuit” to “Demand” — The Idea of “Truth, Goodness, and Beauty”

Philosophy & Thought2006.10.02
From “Pursuit” to “Demand” — The Idea of “Truth, Goodness, and Beauty”
“Truth, Goodness, and Beauty” have been themes of philosophy from antiquity to the present, but the meaning these three words have for people seems to have changed in certain ways. In the eyes of the ancients, “truth, goodness, and beauty” represented the highest “pursuits.” Just as philosophy is “the love of wisdom,” the pursuit of wisdom, people pursued “truth, goodness, and beauty,” regarding them as supreme ideals. For example, the question traditional ethics asks is: for the sake of “goodness,” what ought we to do? What kind of behavior is worthy of goodness? Modern so-called “normative ethics,” represented by utilitarianism, asks instead: for what purpose do we do good? For…
philosophy Aristotle pursuit truth
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2006年10月2日
Selected Philosophical Aphorisms

Philosophy & Thought2006.09.02
Selected Philosophical Aphorisms
《蔡志忠哲理漫画》系列，三联书店 Montesquieu: Everyone has a sense of shyness! But one must know how to overcome it, and never abandon it. ////—To overcome it without abandoning it: nicely put. Pascal: It is no shame for a person to yield to pain; it is shameful to yield to pleasure. ////—Much admired. Pascal: Man’s greatness lies in the fact that humanity knows itself to be unhappy; a tree does not know itself to be unhappy. Thus, to know oneself unhappy is unhappiness, but man’s greatness lies precisely in knowing himself unhappy. Pascal: Man is like a reed, the most fragile thing in nature, yet a thinking reed. In the universe, anything can destroy…
philosophy book reading notes faith
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2006年9月2日
Draft Text for a Philosophy Popularization Display Board

Philosophy & Thought2006.08.29
Draft Text for a Philosophy Popularization Display Board
The images were too hard to match! I first rushed out a text draft: ten panels in all, each centered on a single “question.” Nearly five hundred Chinese characters, including three excerpts of philosophers’ own words. Doing academic work in Shanghai is really inconvenient. All my books are at school, and after several days of buying and borrowing books I didn’t gain much. With resources this scarce, this is about as far as I can get. Draft Text for Philosophy Popularization Display Panels Xingding published on 2006-08-29 03:52:57 1. What is philosophy? “What is philosophy?” This is precisely the most fascinating, and most bewildering, question in philosophy. Like philosophy’s many…
philosophy Aristotle Marx Plato
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2006年8月29日
God and Immortality

Philosophy & Thought2006.08.11
God and Immortality
Do Not Enter by Mistake if You Dislike This God and immortality—understood respectively as “ultimate or unconditional certainty” and “some kind of infinity or eternity”—are deeply rooted, ineradicable desires and demands of the human intellect. The unrestrained questing and questioning of human reason will ultimately and inevitably touch upon God and immortality—that is, it will touch upon the question of religion. Quite contrary to the common understanding, indulging reason will lead to religion; if one wishes to shake off or keep religion at a distance, one must resort to the intervention of the irrational. A moderate amount of irrationality and a moderate amount of rationality are both healthy for an…
philosophy faith religion Christianity
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2006年8月11日
Preliminary Thoughts on “Intuitionism”

Philosophy & Thought2006.08.07
Preliminary Thoughts on “Intuitionism”
My term paper for my class on logical paradoxes has now been decided: I’m going to write on intuitionism and the foundations of mathematics. At first I had been dead set on writing about inductive logic, and I read a lot of books, but the more I read, the fewer ideas of my own I seemed to have left; in the end they were almost completely buried. Writing an article that simply surveys the various schools of thought isn’t very interesting either, and I also seem unable to sort out any ideas of my own in such a short time, so in the end I had no choice but to…
philosophy mathematics Kant Poincaré
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2006年8月7日
Reason and Ultimate Concern—An Attempt to Examine Why Mature Rational People Seek Religion

Philosophy & Thought2006.07.31
Reason and Ultimate Concern—An Attempt to Examine Why Mature Rational People Seek Religion
Introduction The relationship between reason and religious faith has always been a vexed issue in theology, philosophy of religion, and sociology of religion: are reason and faith mutually supportive, complementary, or incompatible? Is religious faith merely the choice of people who are ignorant or not intellectually mature enough? If so, why do so many people who at least appear to have sound psychology and mature intellect—such as even many of the most outstanding natural scientists of the contemporary era[①]—still piously believe in religion? The sociologist of religion Stark complained: “The idea that humans are essentially rational animals is the common foundation of mainstream modern social science. Religion is the only…
philosophy faith Aristotle religion
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2006年7月31日
The Paradox of Boring Games

Philosophy & Thought2006.07.30
The Paradox of Boring Games
Someone in the paradox studies course was planning to talk about some chess sophistry, saying that chess is a boring game, but his reasoning has serious problems. Let me reinforce it a bit: I’ll first offer a chess variant with slightly altered rules, and start with a math problem: **Two-move chess:** Modify the rules of chess so that in each round each player may make two consecutive moves, with everything else unchanged. Prove that the player to move first has a strategy of at least a draw. The proof is very simple: Proof by contradiction. Assume the first player has no strategy of at least a draw. That is, no…
philosophy mathematics game logic
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2006年7月30日