The Zhuangzi is a deliciously protean text: it is concerned not only with personal realization, but also with social and political order. In many ways the Zhuangzi established a unique literary and philosophical genre of its own, and while clearly the work of many hands, it is one of the finest pieces of literature in the classical Chinese corpus. It employs every trope and literary device available to set off rhetorically charged flashes of insight into the most unrestrained way to (...) live one's life, free from oppressive, conventional judgments and values. The essays presented here constitute an attempt by a distinguished community of international scholars to provide a variety of exegeses of one of the Zhuangzi's most frequently rehearsed anecdotes, often referred to as "the Happy Fish debate." The editors have brought together essays from the broadest possible compass of scholarship, offering interpretations that range from formal logic to alternative epistemologies to transcendental mysticism. Many were commissioned by the editors and appear for the first time. Some of them have been available in other languages—Chinese, Japanese, German, Spanish—and were translated especially for this anthology. And several older essays were chosen for the quality and variety of their arguments, formulated over years of engagement by their authors. All, however, demonstrate that the Zhuangzi as a text and as a philosophy is never one thing; indeed, it has always been and continues to be, many different things to many different people. (shrink)

(1) is an example of an adjectival comparative. In it, the adjective important is flanked by more and a comparative clause headed by than. This article is a survey of recent ideas about the interpretation of comparatives, including (i) the underlying semantics based on the idea of a threshold; (ii) the interpretation of comparative clauses that include quantifiers (brighter than on many other days); (iii) remarks on differentials such as much in (1) above: what they do in the comparative and (...) what they do elsewhere in the language; (iv) the relationship between comparatives and other Degree constructions (e.g. as important, too impor- tant); and (v) the types of phrases in which comparatives are found (adjective: tighter versus noun: more water). Given the nature and purpose of this essay, I have tried not to presuppose background in formal semantics and I have departed from standard practice in journal articles by, as much as possible, not interrupting the flow with footnotes and references. There are two appendices. The first provides more analytical detail and there I do rely on formal techniques of natural language semantics. The second covers the sources for the ideas surveyed here. (shrink)

The classical Greeks give us a substance ontology grounded in ‘being qua being’ or ‘being per se’ (to on he on) that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for the human experience. With the combination of eidos and telos as the formal and final cause of independent things such as persons, this ‘substance’ necessarily persists through change. This substratum or essence includes its purpose for being, and is defining of the ‘what-it-means-to-be-a-thing-of-this-kind’ of any particular thing in setting (...) a closed, exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for it to be this, and not that.In the Yijing 易經 or Book of Changes we find a vocabulary that makes explicit cosmological assumptions that are a stark alternative to this substance ontology, and provides the interpretive context for the Confucian canons by locating them within a holistic, organic, and ecological worldview. To provide a meaningful contrast with this fundamental assumption of on or ‘being’ we might borrow the Greek notion of zoe or ‘life’ and create the neologism ‘zoe-tology’ as ‘the art of living’. This cosmology begins from ‘living’ (sheng 生) itself as the motive force behind change, and gives us a world of boundless ‘becomings’: not ‘things’ that are, but ‘events’ that are happening, a contrast between an ontological conception of the human ‘being’ and a process conception of what I will call human ‘becomings’. (shrink)

Uses a comparative hermeneutical method to explain the most important terms in the classical Confucian philosophical texts, in an effort to allow the tradition to speak on its own terms.

Starting from an examination of foundational issues, the book covers a range of topics, including animals, agency, enjoyment, the good life, contemplation, ...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is characterized by the loss of the dopaminergic nigrostriatal pathway which has led to the successful development of drug therapies that replace or stimulate this network pharmacologically. Although these drugs work well in the early stages of the disease, over time they produce side effects along with less consistent clinical benefits to the person with Parkinson's (PwP). As such there has been much interest in repairing this pathway using transplants of dopamine neurons. This work which began 50 (...) years ago this September is still ongoing and has now moved to first in human trials using human pluripotent stem cell‐derived dopaminergic neurons. The results of these trials are eagerly awaited although proof of principle data has already come from trials using human fetal midbrain dopamine cell transplants. This data has shown that developing dopamine cells when transplanted in the brain of a PwP can survive long term with clinical benefits lasting decades and with restoration of normal dopaminergic innervation in the grafted striatum. In this article, we discuss the history of this field and how this has now led us to the recent stem cell trials for PwP. (shrink)

Among theories which fit all of our data, we prefer the simpler over the more complex. Why? Surely not merely for practical convenience or aesthetic pleasure. But how could we be justified in this preference without knowing in advance that the world is more likely to be simple than complex? And isn’t this a rather extravagant a priori assumption to make? I want to suggest some steps we can take toward reducing this embarrassment, by showing that the assumption which supports (...) favouring simplicity is far more modest than it first seems. (shrink)

The Cold Moon occurs in late December, auguring the arrival of the winter sol stice. Approaching the winter solstice of his own life, Roger Rosenblatt offers a book dedicated to the three most important lessons he has learned over his many years: an appreciation of being alive, a recognition of the gift and power of love, and the necessity of excercising responsibility toward one another. Rosenblatt's poetic reflections on these vital life lessons offer a tonic for these perilous and (...) fearful times, and attest to the value of our very existence. Cold Moon: a book to offer purpose, to focus the attention on life's essentials, and to lift the spirit. (shrink)

Descartes and the last Scholastics: objections and replies -- Descartes and the Scotists -- Ideas, before and after Descartes -- The Cartesian destiny of form and matter -- Descartes, Basso, and Toletus: three kinds of Corpuscularians -- Scholastics and the new astronomy on the substance of the heavens -- Descartes and the Jesuits of La Fleche: the Eucharist -- Condemnations of Cartesianism: the extension and unity of the universe -- Cartesians, Gassendists, and censorship -- The cogito in the seventeenth century.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Impact of Fingarette’s Confucius: The Secular as Sacred on Confucian StudiesRoger T. Ames (bio)Confucius: The Secular as Sacred. By Herbert Fingarette. Hannacroix: Apocryphile Press, 2023.Writing a review of this Apocryphile Press edition of Herb Fingarette’s 1972 publication of Confucius: Secular as Sacred with its new preface by my good friend Michael Nylan is deeply personal. Like Michael and the several other distinguished scholars who have written their endorsements (...) for this new reprint, this occasion gives me a long moment to reflect on how this little book has changed my life. The project has also given me a reason to go back and reread the review of this book written by my longtime friend and collaborator, Henry Rosemont, Jr., published almost 50 years ago in Philosophy East and West.My first memory is of Herb Fingarette himself. I met this gentleman, and gentle he was, early on in my tenure at the University of Hawai‘i when Herb, always accompanied by Leslie, would make regular visits to participate in our public lectures and conferences. I always marveled at how in his presentations he would begin from some seemingly simple and offhand fact about our everyday lives. He would then quite masterfully take this ordinary detail and, through a series of incrementally insightful reflections and then again through his sensitive responses to the questions raised by his audience, elevate the discussion to become an extraordinarily memorable event. I remember well how this seasoned teacher always began the question session by calling upon the graduate students, leaving his eager professional colleagues to wait their turn. And then, with the rigor and impeccable logic of the best kind of analytical philosopher, he would gently and always smilingly, win everyone over to his conclusions.When Herb retired from Santa Barbara, he was adamant that he was retired, and in spite of the many efforts we made to draw him back into the circuit, he would have none of it. My only success in my numerous attempts to corral him was in persuading him to write a chapter for a Festschrift I edited celebrating the career of a philosopher much in his own mold as an independent thinker, my colleague Eliot Deutsch. [End Page 516]Even though Herb’s withdrawal from professional events was unequivocal, he was always available for a Reuben sandwich and a good conversation. Over the ensuing years that saw a clear-headed and always happy Herb carry on until a few years short of his centenary, I would sometimes accompany Rosemont in his regular pilgrimages to sojourn with his best Berkeley friends, which included, along with Herb, David Keightley, Huston Smith, and of course, Michael Nylan.Turning then from the large-souled man to the little book that changed the world of Confucian studies, to say that it was not well received is an understatement. When this monograph published by HarperCollins, a trade press, first appeared in the bookstores, whispers ran through the sinological community about how this pretender had the temerity to engage a canonical text well beyond his reach. Without proper philological training, he was actually challenging what we all know to be the proper translations of important Chinese terms. Again, Herb’s philosophical colleagues who were baffled by his efforts to engage Chinese philosophy as philosophy, also had his number, and it was not a high one.As Rosemont pointed out in both a critical, and to my knowledge, the first truly appreciative review of Fingarette’s commentary on the Analects (a feature review that in its pages would constitute a goodly portion of Fingarette’s 79-page book), what made this book an important inflection point for Confucian studies is that a rigorously trained philosopher was writing a philosophical and philological exegesis on what he deemed a philosophically profound text. Even for Fingarette who was himself initially nonplussed by the idea that the Analects was good philosophy, it took a careful reading and an open mind to fathom both the depth and the worth of the Analects for reflecting on our lives as they are lived today.It is a commonplace that we often do not appreciate those teachers who have influenced... (shrink)

John Earman's A Primer on Determinism treats the doctrine of Laplacian determinism by a careful look at a considerable variety of physical theories. This paper enriches Earman's discussion of chaos theory by considering in some detail the analysis of dripping faucets due to Robert Shaw. Shaw's analysis exhibits in a nice way some of the techniques used in chaos theory and gives a feel for research in this area. The paper concentrates on the tension between the determinism inherent in any (...) description involving differential equations and the in-practice unpredictability resulting from the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions of the non-linear differential equations characteristic of chaos theory. (shrink)

‘To translate’ means quite literally ‘to carry across, to bring across,’ that is, ‘to remove from one place to another.’ The questions I want to address in this essay are: To what extent have we been successful in, first, understanding the Chinese philosophical narrative and, then, in ‘carrying it across’ into the western academy? To what extent have we been able to grow and ‘appreciate’ our own philosophical parameters by engaging with this antique tradition? The self-conscious strategy of translation, then, (...) must be to go beyond word-for-word translation and attempt to enable students of Chinese philosophy to read the seminal texts by providing them with a means of developing their own sophisticated understanding of a set of critical Chinese philosophical terms. The premise is that there is no real alternative but to cultivate a nuanced familiarity with the key Chinese vocabulary itself. It is in this effort to take Chinese philosophy on its own terms, then, that we must begin from the interpretive context by taking into account the tradition’s own indigenous presuppositions and its own evolving self-understanding. We must be aware of the ambient, persistent assumptions that have given the Chinese philosophical narrative its unique identity over time. (shrink)

Reid thought that testimony possesses positive epistemic value. Epistemic autonomy is not necessarily the royal road to truth; nor is credulity a systematic epistemic fault and indeed, it can be an intellectual virtue. Even though the notion of epistemic virtue does not explicitly appear in Reid’s epistemology, it seems inherent to his views that what will give a heteronomous agent exercising the social operations of the mind the best chance to acquire and develop true beliefs is the epistemic virtues that (...) permit her to recognize reliable authorities. This is why it seems to me possible to associate Reid with to the virtue epistemology tradition. (shrink)

Over the last twenty years, John Rawls has developed an approach to political philosophy which appeals to the notion of reflective equilibrium. This notion has proven suggestive to those attracted to coherence approaches to justification, in ethics and in other domains as well. In this paper, I explore the question whether Rawls’s approach provides a model for a coherentist account of justification, concluding that although the discussion of reflective equilibrium has provided helpful insights it has not produced a coherentist model (...) of justification. (shrink)

Among other interesting proposals, Juan Comesaña’s _Being Rational and Being Right_ makes a challenging case that one’s evidence can include falsehoods. I explore some ways in which we might have to rethink the roles that evidence can play in inquiry if we accept this claim. It turns out that Comesaña’s position lends itself to the conclusion that while false evidence is possible and not even terribly uncommon, I can be rationally sure that I don’t currently have any and perhaps also (...) that I won’t get any, and (absent certain evidence to the contrary) you are not afflicted with any either. This conclusion might seem too good to be true. I finish by raising a puzzle about one of the main motivations for Comesaña’s view. (shrink)

This paper outlines some of the issues and basic philosophy that have guided my work and that of my students in the last ten years. It describes the progression of conceptual representational theories developed during that time, as well as some of the research models built to implement those theories. The paper concludes with a discussion of my most recent work in the area of modelling memory. It presents a theory of MOPs (Memory Organization Packets), which serve as both processors (...) and organizers of information in memory. This enables effective categorization of experiences in episodic memory, which in turn enables better predictive understanding of new experiences. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Ein wohlbekannter kritischer Einwand gegen jene unter uns, die versuchen, kulturelle Unterschiede im Dienste verantwortungsvoller kultureller Vergleiche hervorzuheben, richtet sich darauf, dass wir uns dabei der Essentialisierung genau dieser Kulturen schuldig machen. Essentialismus ist dabei als eine Verallgemeinerung zu verstehen, die besagt, dass bestimmte Eigenschaften einer gegebenen Bevölkerung innerhalb dieser Kultur universell und zugleich ihr eigentümlich sind, demnach nicht von kontingenten Kontexten abhängen und dass wiederum ebendiese Eigenschaften Relativismus und Inkommensurabilität unter den Kulturen bedingen. In diesem Essay möchte ich (...) den Widerstand einiger zeitgenössischer Forscher anfechten, die es ablehnen, grobe kulturelle Verallgemeinerungen als notwendig zu akzeptieren, wenn es darum geht, die reichhaltigen Differenzen, die zwischen Traditionen walten, zu respektieren und so weit als möglich einen verarmenden Kulturreduktionismus zu vermeiden. Ich würde voraussetzen, dass die Wipfel eines kontinuierlich emergierenden kulturellen Vokabulars selbst in einem tiefen und relativ stabilen Grund aus unbenannten Annahmen wurzeln, die sich über Generationen in der Sprache, den Gebräuchen und den Lebensformen einer lebendigen Tradition abgelagert haben. Und weiter möchte ich argumentieren, dass das Versäumnis, den fundamentalen Charakter kultureller Differenzen als eine ursprüngliche Absicherung gegen die Vergehen des „Essentialismus“ anzuerkennen, selbst nicht harmlos ist. Tatsächlich bewirkt diese Ablehnung kultureller Verallgemeinerungen ironischerweise eine unkritische Essentialisierung der je eigenen kulturellen Annahmen, so dass sich ebendiese Voraussetzungen in die Interpretationen der Lebens- und Denkweisen anderer Traditionen einschleichen. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Bodyheartminding” (xin 心): Reconceiving the Inner Self and the Outer World in the Language of Holographic Focus and FieldRoger T. Amesin body consciousness: a philosophy of mindfulness and somaesthetics, Richard Shusterman expands upon a professional oeuvre in which his exploration of the phenomenon of “body consciousness” has effected nothing less than a somatic turn in the contemporary Western philosophical narrative.1 But his contribution does not end there. Over the (...) past two decades, the reach and influence of his “somaesthetics” has been extended to the gates of China. Indeed, it has become a theme engaged by scholars of China’s indigenous philosophical traditions, thus providing an opportunity for a further edifying conversation between the Chinese and Western philosophical traditions.2 And it is this conversation, as it has been inspired by Shusterman’s work, that I propose to join in this short essay.In Body Consciousness, Shusterman tells the story of how John Dewey advances the pragmatic project of not only understanding the body better, but indeed of applying the Alexander Technique as his way of using his own body properly.3 Just as Dewey has been a prominent resource for Shusterman in his development of somaesthetics, for Dewey in turn, it was William James’s Principles of Psychology that was a self-confessed inspiration for the development of his own evolving interpretation of pragmatism.4 Indeed, one way of reading Dewey’s philosophical career and his thirty-seven-volume opus is that it is a sustained effort to take the radical “stream-of-consciousness” insights developed in James’s Principles to their logical, systematic conclusion. In pursuing this project, while appreciative, Dewey is at times impatient with James’s dualistic lapses in which he continues to separate individuals from community, mind from body, emotions from intellect, agents from actions, and theory from practice. Dewey takes these unfortunate reversions to old ways of thinking as serving only to confound James’s holistic doctrines of pure experience and radical empiricism. Given Dewey’s own postulate of [End Page 100] immediate and continuous empiricism, one way of tracking his journey from having been inspired by James’s biological naturalism to achieving his own philosophical coherence is to register his unrelenting aversion to dualism in any form.But Dewey himself was not always consistent in this respect. Shusterman gives an account of the early neo-Hegelian Dewey who, affirming the familiar transcendent conception of soul we associate with idealism, unsurprisingly embraces a clear soul and body dualism. And in spite of the philosophically mature Dewey’s best efforts to think “process,” he has no choice but to use both a language and a grammar freighted with substance ontology that resists his more holistic insights. On occasion, even while trying to remain consistent in his thinking, Dewey seems to fall victim to terminology that if not dualistic is at best ambiguous. Dewey’s struggle against this problem of equivocation is particularly apparent in some of the language he appeals to in attempting to put the Humpty Dumpty of mind and body together again. In his effort to register the irreducible continuity and inseparability of the nonanalytic abstractions we differentiate as body and mind—the ontological givenness or “hadness” of “bodyminding”—Dewey still at times invokes terms such as “combination,” “integration,” “unity,” and so on, that take as their suppressed premise “two things becoming one.” By way of contrast, in the correlative vocabulary of Chinese process cosmology, expressions such as yinyang 陰陽, the natural/cultural and the human (tianren 天人), and knowing and doing (zhixing 知行), primacy is given to vital relationality and the continuity it entails. It is not putting two things together that is referenced with these binomials, but the deepening of the horizon of constitutive, internal relationships that transforms the two aspects of the same phenomenon qualitatively into harmonics (he 和) for yinyang, sagacity (sheng 聖) for tianren, and acting wisely (zhi 智) for zhixing. In each instance, the two aspects themselves are simply conceptual abstractions from a complex relational process. The proper and effective measure (du 度) sought in this Confucian cosmology is not quantitatively more or less of two distinct things—taking mind and body as our example—but rather a qualitative and transformative change that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:First Order Relationality and Its Implications:A Response to David ElsteinRoger T. Ames (bio)David Elstein has asked a series of important questions about Human Becomings that provide me with an opportunity to try to bring the argument of the book into clearer focus. Let me begin by thanking David for his always generous and intelligent reflection on not only my new monograph [End Page 181] but also on Henry Rosemont's (...) and my best efforts to expand upon the idea of "role ethics" as a productive way to read Confucian ethics.David asks: Is relationality truly a part of original Confucian thought? Does relationality rule out any notion of essential human nature, and does it necessarily imply or entail role ethics? Is relationality true or merely a useful way of thinking (if these can be distinguished)? Do we know that it's useful?I think the answer to these questions turns on two very different ways of understanding relationality, namely the doctrines of first and second order relationality. The term 'ontology' as "the science of being per se or in itself" gives us a doctrine of external, second order relations. Ontology was introduced into our philosophical vocabulary as a new term for an old way of thinking at the beginning of the seventeenth century by two German philosophers.1 For the classical Greeks, "the science of being per se" (to on he on) was posited as their "first philosophy" with all of its implications for metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, philosophy of religion, and so on. Ontology is that branch of metaphysics that seeks to classify and explain the things that exist, with its underlying assumption that there are unchanging substances or essences internal to things that are available to us to classify them as this and not that. Ontology privileges "being per se" with its categorical language and its "substance" and "attribute" dualism, giving us a grammar of substances as property-bearers and properties that are borne, respectively.Such ontological thinking animates Plato's pursuit of formal, "real" definitions in his quest for certainty (that is, definitions not of words but of what really is), and underlies Aristotle's taxonomical science of knowing "what is what." For these classical Greek philosophers, only what is real and is thus true can be the proper object of knowledge, giving us a logic of the changeless. Corollary to ontology is causal thinking, formal definitions, and, important for David's question, a doctrine of external, second order relationality in which relations conjoin discrete and self-sufficient things, such as human "beings." As the contemporary philosopher Zhao Tingyang 趙汀陽 avers, this kind of substance ontology defining the real things that constitute the content of an orderly and structured cosmosprovides a "dictionary" kind of explanation of the world, seeking to set up an accurate understanding of the limits of all things. In simple terms, it determines "what is what," and all concepts are footnotes to "being" or "is."2In the Book of Changes, we find a vocabulary making explicit cosmological assumptions that stand in stark contrast to this substance ontology and that brings with it a doctrine of first order, constitutive relations. This alternative "first philosophy" has prompted me to create the neologism "zoetology," with the Greek zoe- "life" and -logia "discourse," as my own new term for an old way of thinking that we might translate into modern Chinese as shengshenglun 生生論: "the art of living." The starting point in this zoetological cosmology, then, is that nothing does anything by [End Page 182] itself; association is a fact. Since the very nature of life is associative and transactional, the vocabulary appealed to in defining Confucian cosmology is irreducibly dyadic and collateral: always multiple, never one.And further, it is the nature of life itself that it seeks to optimize the available conditions for its continuing growth, where such growth has a persistent existential and thus intentional aspect. "Life" is the productive correlation between organism and environment that gives rise to correlative, relational, ecological thinking that many of our best sinologists (Marcel Granet, David Keightley, Tang Junyi, K. C. Chang, A. C. Graham, and many others) would ascribe to the earliest semblances of Chinese... (shrink)

Given the accelerating robotic AI revolution and China’s perceived central role in it, how will this grand transformation in the human experience be received and responded to within a distinctively Confucian cultural context?

Art, like Christian faith itself, is at home in the region of symbol - that realm in which meanings are not so much stated as they are evoked or illuminated, and in which events are not so much described as they are remembered and celebrated. This common zone is fertile, inexhaustible, and highly volati≤ therein lie both its powers and its dangers. Yet it claims the effort and allegiance of us all, insofar as we are humanly capable of fashioning and (...) responding to the world in which we live. Art and faith stand here on common ground, more common than the devotees of each ordinarily realize, and this ought to be pointed out and better understood. (From the Preface). (shrink)