分类：Philosophy & Thought

Phenomenology Notes 4: Speech and Propositions, Ready-to-Hand and Present-at-Hand

Philosophy & Thought2010.04.29
Phenomenology Notes 4: Speech and Propositions, Ready-to-Hand and Present-at-Hand
I’ve read quite a lot over the past two weeks, but because I’ve been bottling up a paper I haven’t managed to write notes in time. Still, I’ll jot down a few lines offhand, since this may also have something to do with the paper I’m about to write (about Heidegger’s ready-to-hand and guidance, and so on), so I won’t follow the order of the books. In other philosophy, especially early analytic philosophy, language is often analyzed as proposition, and what is called “truth” is also taken to be some kind of proposition or something that corresponds to a proposition. For example, Tarski said, “‘It is raining’ if and only…
philosophy book reading notes Heidegger
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2010年4月29日
Phenomenology Notes 3

Philosophy & Thought2010.04.07
Phenomenology Notes 3
Today I only read two sections, about the distinction between what is called the natural attitude and the phenomenological attitude. Simply put, the natural attitude is the non-reflective attitude of everyday life, whereas the phenomenological attitude is the reflective philosophical attitude. To distinguish these two attitudes is not to set them against each other, as if one were the natural attitude of ordinary people and the other the phenomenological attitude of philosophers. In fact, the phenomenological attitude is a kind of transcending of the natural attitude, not a rebellion or a rupture. After all, the natural attitude is the basic condition of human life; reflection can only be discussed on…
book reading notes media Heidegger
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2010年4月7日
Phenomenology Notes 2

Philosophy & Thought2010.03.26
Phenomenology Notes 2
This time I’ll mainly talk about “presence and absence.” Presence corresponds to “fulfilling intention,” and absence corresponds to “empty intention.” What is meant by presence, or by fulfillment, is the situation in which a thing is vividly and concretely presented before you, directly pointed out by you. More precisely, though, presence is determined by absence: “When we apprehend the presence of something, we apprehend it precisely as not absent: if we are to become aware of what is present, then there must exist the horizon of its possible absence. Presence is given as the removal of a certain absence.” When can we say that a thing is present? It is…
book reading notes phenomenology intentionality
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2010年3月26日
Phenomenology Notes 1

Philosophy & Thought2010.03.18
Phenomenology Notes 1
Writing is a habit; if you set it aside too long, the desire to write grows weaker and weaker, and in the end you lose the habit altogether. That is a terrible thing. In short, no matter what, I have to write something from time to time, to wake up the habit of putting pen to paper again. This semester, the Wumen group is reading Sokolowski’s *Introduction to Phenomenology*, and I’ll also take the chance to keep piggybacking on Jin Xiping’s offbeat Husserl, aiming to make a decent start in phenomenology this semester~ So I’ll casually jot down some notes and the like…… The introduction to *Introduction to Phenomenology* explains…
book reading notes Heidegger phenomenology
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2010年3月18日
Winter Break Essay V: Love, or the Search for Certainty

Philosophy & Thought2010.02.12
Winter Break Essay V: Love, or the Search for Certainty
Philosophy, or “love of wisdom,” is fundamentally an activity of love. I have always said that love is like philosophy, and philosophy is like love; related remarks can be found in the blog folder “谈情——说爱.” I also once wrote “Philosophical Style and Attitudes Toward Love,” in which I crudely mapped various philosophical styles across ancient and modern times onto various attitudes toward love. This was not some offhand joke of mine, The resemblance between philosophy and love is by no means merely a literary analogy; rather, it means that these two activities share something in certain fundamental senses. A culture, or a thinker, who has a certain philosophy will also…
philosophy pursuit Plato love
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2010年2月12日
Third Winter Vacation Essay: Will and Responsibility

Philosophy & Thought2010.02.01
Third Winter Vacation Essay: Will and Responsibility
Speaking of which, Kantian ethics contains a very rigid conception of duty—for example, the command “do not lie.” This injunction is an absolute duty: even if a murderer asks you where your beloved is, and you know that if you tell the truth and do not lie to mislead him your beloved will be killed, you still must not lie. Moral duty is that hard. For, in any case, murder is the murderer’s fault, whereas lying is your fault; whether or not there is a murder, lying is always wrong. If your beloved happens to appear at the very place you falsely claimed she was, then would her being killed…
philosophy Kant human nature emotion
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2010年2月1日
Winter Break Essay No. 2: Relativism

Philosophy & Thought2010.02.01
Winter Break Essay No. 2: Relativism
Modernity is accompanied by a certain nihilism, and that is natural: because the past is severed from the future, the present becomes a void point. But relativism is not necessarily nihilism; or rather, its aim is precisely the opposite. Relativism, or “relationism,” emphasizes not rupture but connection. Relativism does not accept an isolated point; any node has meaning only in the midst of the network of relations that interconnect it. Nihilism loses all aspiration, but relativism is not without aspiration; what it aspires to is connection. Relativism does not reject certainty, but what is called certainty can be understood as those important “nodes” in the whole web of relations. These…
philosophy ontology God relativism
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2010年2月1日
On “Benefiting Others by Serving Oneself”

Philosophy & Thought2009.07.15
On “Benefiting Others by Serving Oneself”
“Wei ji li ta” is a concept that Wang Haiming loves to talk about, his eureka moment, the core term in Wang Haiming’s ethical system… For some reason, these few words suddenly came to mind, so I might as well write a little about them. As for Wang Haiming and his philosophy, I certainly have no fondness for them at all; I can’t even bear to read his books, and I don’t want to spend much time evaluating them. But on the other hand, I feel a certain sympathy for him—“new philosophy,” “new ethics,” unifying and integrating the doctrines of all schools, ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign, and founding…
philosophy China freedom value
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2009年7月15日
Mirror and Glass: Tactility and Reality (Postscript to “Aristotle’s Tactile World”)

Philosophy & Thought2009.06.19
Mirror and Glass: Tactility and Reality (Postscript to “Aristotle’s Tactile World”)
The little essay I finished the day before yesterday, “Aristotle’s Tactile World,” was an assignment for Teacher Sun’s course in Selected Readings from Original Works in Natural Philosophy. This semester we’ve been reading the first two parts of The Mechanization of the World Picture. I should say that I chose the topic in close relation to the course theme. I also kept the length to four thousand characters, which for me is rather unusual. Although this paper itself only touches the matter lightly, I believe it points to a huge problem. Behind all kinds of philosophical questions about causality, reality, modernity, and so-called embodied phenomenology, there lies a profound connection…
philosophy Aristotle being consciousness
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2009年6月19日
Treating Concepts as Toys and Glasses as Toys

Philosophy & Thought2009.05.17
Treating Concepts as Toys and Glasses as Toys
In the last part of the previous essay, “Philosophy and Poetry,” I had originally wanted to mention “taking concepts as toys rather than regarding them as higher or lower,” but in the finished version I ended up deleting it because the writing never naturally flowed there. It just happened that a later chat touched on the related topic, so I’m putting it here as a supplement. At first I felt that the analogy between eyeglasses and language was not very convincing, but after thinking it over, it seems to be a pretty good analogy, actually rather interesting. Like eyeglasses, many concepts, pieces of knowledge, articles of faith, and so on…
philosophy language meaning philosophy talk
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2009年5月17日