标签：Kant

A Loose Talk on “Reasonable” and “Lawful” — Why Is Violent Revolution Unreasonable?

Culture & Public Commentary2008.06.21
A Loose Talk on “Reasonable” and “Lawful” — Why Is Violent Revolution Unreasonable?
I want to note first that what I am saying is that violent revolution is “unreasonable,” not that I will never support violent revolution, but rather that there is no reason to support violent revolution. Although philosophy’s mission is to probe reasons, it is not the case that every one of a person’s preferences must be given reasons. For example, I like eating vegetables; then I like eating vegetables, that is enough, there is no need to come up with a whole lot of reasons to argue for the reasonableness of liking vegetables, as if those who do not like vegetables were somehow at fault. Even if 99% of the…
philosophy culture Kant language
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2008年6月21日
On the Fan Paopao Incident

Culture & Public Commentary2008.06.07
On the Fan Paopao Incident
This was something I wrote two weeks ago when Ceiling initiated a group email discussion. Today I saw Fan’s new interview, so it counts as a hot topic too. I’ll just post my text to the blog; discussion is welcome — my position is roughly this: if you want to defend Fan, then I can criticize you; if you want to denounce Fan, then I’ll criticize you too. As for Zhou Xiaozheng’s attitude in the interview, I rather agree with it, though I didn’t read it carefully. Some of Fan Meizhong’s remarks are in fact quite reasonable — at the very least, they are worth thinking about — and one…
philosophy China commentary Kant
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2008年6月7日
Kantian Ethics and “Anthropocentrism” (Draft)

History of Science & Scholarship2008.05.14
Kantian Ethics and “Anthropocentrism” (Draft)
Abstract: The “human-centeredness” represented by Kant has become the main target of contemporary environmental ethics, and whether nonhuman beings possess “intrinsic value” has become the focal point of controversy. Yet contemporary scholars’ interpretation of what exactly “intrinsic value” means is entirely different from Kant’s. Taking as its point of departure the “human-centeredness” widely criticized by environmental ethics, as well as basic ethical concepts such as “value” and “purpose,” this essay sorts through and comments on the features of Kantian ethics, and points out that environmental ethics’ criticisms of Kant are to a considerable extent based on misreading. This essay argues that the so-called human-centeredness in the Kantian sense is, in…
value Kant human nature paper
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2008年5月14日
The Politics and Jurisprudence Behind the Philosophy of Science

History of Science & Scholarship2008.01.21
The Politics and Jurisprudence Behind the Philosophy of Science
From Plato onward, from the “freedom” of ancient Greece to the “Enlightenment” of the modern era, the issues of philosophy of science and political philosophy have always been entangled, impossible to disentangle. By the time we reach the “official history” of twentieth-century philosophy of science, we see this especially clearly: from Popper’s liberalism to Kuhn’s “revolution” and then to Feyerabend’s anarchism, the development of philosophy of science was practically a debate in political philosophy. Looking back at the history of thought from ancient Greece to the Enlightenment, we can be certain that philosophers of science borrowing political terminology is by no means merely a coincidence or a metaphor. Ancient Greece…
science politics Kant Plato
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2008年1月21日
Impressions and Notes on Heidegger and Schopenhauer

Philosophy & Thought2008.01.11
Impressions and Notes on Heidegger and Schopenhauer
This semester I only took these two courses: Heidegger’s *Being and Time* and Schopenhauer’s *The World as Will and Representation*. The day before yesterday I finally finished my paper on schedule, so this semester can be counted as a complete success. I still didn’t take these two courses very seriously; I skipped more than half the classes, and I only finished both books at the very last minute. But since the teacher for the Heidegger course was only giving rather general, introductory explanations, and the Schopenhauer course was even more centered on student presentations, skipping class didn’t really matter. At least I seized the opportunity to grit my teeth and…
book reading notes Heidegger phenomenology
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2008年1月11日
Inner Sense, Outer Sense, Time, Space…

Philosophy & Thought2008.01.11
Inner Sense, Outer Sense, Time, Space…
Since Kant introduced the notion of “inner sense” and assigned time to inner sense, it has seemed self-evident that time corresponds to inner sense and space to outer sense. And the idea that time is more fundamental than space—because while time can still be grounded when cut off from all outer sense, space without time has nowhere to stand—has also seemed to follow naturally. But what, exactly, is “inner sense”? What sort of sense is that, really? If the so-called “intuition” of the sixth sense is still some kind of outer sense, then could this be the legendary seventh sense? Thinking of Saint Seiya, just joking~ What I want to…
philosophy Kant space time
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2008年1月11日
A Tentative Discussion of Schopenhauer’s Spirit of Rationalism

History of Science & Scholarship2008.01.10
A Tentative Discussion of Schopenhauer’s Spirit of Rationalism
The epigraph to the first part of *The World as Will and Representation* quotes Rousseau: “Step out of childhood, my friend, awaken!” What did Schopenhauer want to express by this line? We might as well compare it with a fable he wrote late in life: “A mother, with the hope of educating and cultivating her children’s minds, lets them read Aesop’s fables; but they soon send the book back, and the eldest, precocious child says: this is not the sort of book we read; it is too childish, too silly; you cannot make us believe that foxes and wolves can talk, and we shall read nothing of the kind again!…
phenomenology Kant knowledge paper
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2008年1月10日
Relativism and Absolutism Are Birds of a Feather

Philosophy & Thought2008.01.07
Relativism and Absolutism Are Birds of a Feather
Some people fly the banners of relativism and postmodernism, claiming to oppose absolutism and universalism; in fact, they are unconsciously poisoned by absolutism, and at bottom they are nothing more than a further development of absolutism itself. Relativists will say one moment, “There is no absolute, universal, singular standard,” and then a moment later, either bluntly or obliquely, they say: “There is no standard”; one moment, “There is no interpretation beyond context,” and then a moment later, “interpretation is nothing but telling stories”; one moment, “Every argument has its limits,” and then a moment later they can, with righteous assurance and in complete ignorance of those limits, use their own…
philosophy scholarship Kant modernity
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2008年1月7日
Fragments, Episode 3

Philosophy & Thought2007.11.03
Fragments, Episode 3
l He—I—you; “I” — freedom; “you” — love; “he” — the real. (Don’t ask me; I don’t know just what I want to say.) l When you complain that others have not understood you, or even suffer because no one understands you, the first thing you should ask yourself is two questions: first, do you understand others (has anyone received your understanding, just as you hope others will for you); second, do you yourself understand yourself? If you never try to understand others, how can you deserve to expect understanding from others? And if even you cannot understand yourself (for example, if your thoughts are always hazy, ambiguous, changeable, so…
philosophy freedom Kant Schopenhauer
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2007年11月3日
A Reading Report on Schopenhauer

Philosophy & Thought2007.10.24
A Reading Report on Schopenhauer
I seriously underestimated the extent of my own decadence: I kept frittering away the time until there were barely more than two days left before I even started reading. I also seriously underestimated the difficulty of turning a reading report into prose, dragging it out until the evening of the last day before I began to write. I also seriously underestimated my ability to ramble, so that by §24 I had already run up some 4,500 characters, and when I looked at the clock it was already deep into the night. There was no time to ramble any further, and even if I finished rambling now, there would still not…
book reading notes Kant materialism
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2007年10月24日