Suixuan

标签：philosophy

  • “Love” as the Ultimate Meaning

    “Love” as the Ultimate Meaning
    Philosophy & Thought

    “Love” as the Ultimate Meaning

    What is the meaning of asking about the meaning of a thing? Broadly speaking, it is asking why one does this thing. But the purpose of a thing is often very hard to determine: the meaning of eating is to eliminate hunger, or to increase nutrition, or to satisfy taste, or perhaps to serve several purposes at once. At the same time, meaning can be further questioned. For example, if I say eating is for the sake of increasing nutrition, then one can ask again: what is the meaning of increasing nutrition? Continuing to ask about the meaning of increasing nutrition, one might answer that it is for the sake…

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  • What Logic Do We Use in Everyday Discussion?

    Philosophy & Thought

    What Logic Do We Use in Everyday Discussion?

    Today I listened to Hu Ge’s “intuitionistic logic.” The first class naturally began with a bit of introduction and overview before moving on to the logical system itself. What I was interested in was the introductory part. Hu Ge works in mathematics, so the philosophical disputes were brushed past in a sentence and did not take up much time. Hu Ge’s sketch of intuitionistic logic was still quite concise and on point: intuitionism is aimed at mathematics, not at everyday communication; in everyday communication, the law of excluded middle remains reliable, because the world with which daily life comes into contact is finite. And intuitionistic logic is not some paranoid…

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  • Philosophy of Love: Introduction

    Philosophy of Love: Introduction
    Philosophy & Thought

    Philosophy of Love: Introduction

    https://yilinhut.net/2008/02/17/1855.html（Song of Scientism） This song grows more and more admirable the more I listen to it. Every line is so apt, so concise, and so vivid; and it portrays scientism so comprehensively that it says everything that needed to be said, without a single irrelevant word! The subtlety with which this song depicts scientism is something that ordinary scholars who oppose scientism can hardly hope to match. The question is: how was this done? Why is it that the lyricist of a pop song, composing a popular love song, could depict “scientism” so precisely? Of course, I think “he did not mean to”; he was not deliberately setting out to…

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  • Value and Rights—The Ethics of Reification

    Philosophy & Thought

    Value and Rights—The Ethics of Reification

    This topic had already been discussed long ago in The Second Assignment for the Special Topic on Life and Death in Ethics: On the Value of Life and Outline for the First Discussion in the Introduction to Philosophy of Technology, but those earlier discussions were tucked away inside two assignments, and perhaps not prominent enough. Since this issue is quite important for my own “system of thought,” I am putting together a special post on it. I have not done any etymological detective work myself; I am simply going by Kingsoft PowerWord and a philosophical dictionary. The lineages of words like “value” and “right” are probably something like this: “to…

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  • Text Is Principle

    Philosophy & Thought

    Text Is Principle

    Earlier I mentioned the sciences, so here let me say a bit more about “wen” and “li.” The division between wen and li is a real situation. I do not want to erase the actual differences between theory and literature, but I do want to point out one thing: what is called “wen” — literature, writing, culture, the wen of the humanities — and what is called “li” — mathematics and the sciences, theory, ideals, principle — are in fact related at certain root levels, and were even originally one and the same. The present division of disciplines is: humanities versus science and engineering, as if the sciences and engineering…

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  • The Benefits of Mathematical and Logical Training for Studying Philosophy

    Philosophy & Thought

    The Benefits of Mathematical and Logical Training for Studying Philosophy

    Although I entered the philosophy department as an undergraduate, I still unabashedly identify myself as “from a science background.” Of course, the current Chinese practice of splitting high school students into arts and sciences is very bad; the so-called “science students” in high school are not necessarily all that “scientific” in any meaningful sense—after all, most of them choose physics. And it is even harder to say how much “literature” arts students have actually come into contact with—how can middle-school history, politics, and the like be called “literature”? But when I say I am “from a science background,” I do not mean that I was a high school science student;…

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  • What Exactly Does Philosophy Study?

    What Exactly Does Philosophy Study?
    Philosophy & Thought

    What Exactly Does Philosophy Study?

    Returning home for the Spring Festival inevitably means family gatherings; family gatherings inevitably mean asking after one another, and asking after one another inevitably means asking about me. This time, I was asked: what on earth does philosophy study? Among this round of relatives, my uncle was a college student, and even now he still occasionally reads books; the rest were all the most ordinary people of the market streets and alleys—that is to say, people who do not read books. My uncle was very concerned about me. He mentioned that last time, in Shanghai Book City, he had specially gone looking for books on philosophy of technology. He said…

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  • What Is the Meaning of Suixuan?

    What Is the Meaning of Suixuan?
    Site Matters

    What Is the Meaning of Suixuan?

    What, in the end, is the meaning of Suixuan? Why have I been running this blog? I have more or less forgotten these questions, because blogging has gradually become a daily habit: I write whenever I think of it, without needing any purpose or reason. But after setting it aside for a period of time, the question has surfaced again—why did I want to shut the blog down? And if I do not shut it down, then why should I continue blogging? I dug up a comment I myself left a year and a half ago: https://yilinhut.net/2006/03/24/350.html Gu 2006-07-07 01:59:06 The current orientation of this blog of mine is: First,…

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  • Nonsense about “Feeling”

    Philosophy & Thought

    Nonsense about “Feeling”

    Rewriting “to be is to be perceived” — “Dasein is sensation.” Human beings from beginning to end are a convergence of sensations. Sensation (the senses, perception) does not, in essence, have a distinction between “inside” and “outside”; on the contrary, the distinction between “inside” and “outside,” just like “hot and cold,” “light and dark,” “high and low,” “strong and weak,” and so on, is a differentiation that arises from sensation. What is special, however, is that the distinction between “inside” and “outside” comes from “sensation of sensation,” that is, “self-consciousness.” This capacity is generally considered uniquely human, or at least something at which human beings are especially adept. The concrete…

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  • On “Feyerabend Quotations”

    History of Science & Scholarship

    On “Feyerabend Quotations”

    Xinzhai Lao Jiang Quotations from Feyerabend I’m a fanatical admirer of Feyerabend, so from now on I’ll post some of the old gentleman’s quotations whenever I have nothing better to do: A free society is one in which all traditions have equal rights and equal opportunities to enter the centers of power (this differs from the usual definition: that everyone has equal rights to enter the positions defined by one special tradition—namely, the tradition of Western science and rationalism). A tradition acquires these rights not because it is important to outsiders, but because it is meaningful in the lives of those who participate in that tradition. Science in a Free…

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