Abstract
This volume contains essays that discuss and/or involve dialogue between East and West, and the editors clearly have sought to encourage this sort of dialogue through the essays collected here. But such encouragement seems ultimately directed to a larger goal: some kind of integration between Western and Eastern philosophy, a process or development that reaches beyond long-separate traditions toward a genuine “world philosophy.” My own recent work has definitely been striving or working in that direction.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
If Newton’s laws are a priori metaphysically necessary truths and those truths lie behind all ordinary processes of physical (and perhaps psychological) causation, then the idea that Hume was so skeptical about in the first Enquiry, the idea of necessary connection between cause and effect, turns out to have a great deal of truth to it. Properly interpreted, therefore, Newton’s laws may be able to provide us with a solution to the age-old problem of conceptualizing and identifying causal necessity, and we do not need Kant’s distinction between noumena and phenomena in order to make these points. Newton’s laws (appropriately relativized to inertial frames of reference) can be seen as entailing an element of (metaphysical) necessity within causal connections independently of any commitment to Kant’s transcendental idealism. Those like Leibniz and A. C. Ewing who have held that causation is a matter of metaphysical (as more than physical) necessity have been closer to the truth than recent philosophy of science has ever recognized.
- 2.
I earlier mentioned such things as dreams and psychological depression as not being part of the functioning mind or xin, but that needs to be qualified. In the small, a momentary stab of pity or compassion does not seem to contain yin and yang, but this fails to see such feeling in context. In the larger context of empathy and responsiveness, such feeling finds a place. So if, as I argued, empathy and responsiveness to suffering exemplify yin/yang, the momentary feeling contextually exemplifies them too. It is the same with depression. If someone is depressed because of the death of a loved one (mourning is familiarly viewed as a kind of depression), that depressive mourning yin reflects the reality of what has happened to one, and the refusal, for a period of time, to engage in normal and happy activities constitutes a yang response to that reality. Similarly, if any one of a number of theories of dreaming is correct, dream contents yin reflect what is happening in one’s life and yang serve a useful psychological function as well. So if one widens the relevant contexts, it can be seen that yin and yang are present where they might initially seem not to be.
- 3.
I make use of yin/yang in these other disciplines in A Larger Yin/Yang Philosophy. The extension of yin/yang analysis to mathematics, logic, and language moves us toward a thoroughgoing overall philosophical naturalism that we might call Chinese naturalism. To anticipate, consider Frege’s propositional semantics, according to which a proposition results from a singular term/concept’s fitting into the open place in a predicate concept. Does this remind you of anything?
- 4.
In books and various Internet videos, Eckhart Tolle takes the Buddhist idea of miserable human existence and brilliantly gives it a positive spin. Rather than urge us to leave the desire-filled world of human suffering for nirvana, he says we can have a good life if we stop obsessing about future and past and focus on the positive present reality of our lives. For example, a man separated by war or business from his wife could obsess about all he is missing, but in doing so could fail to appreciate the wonderful reality of his (having a) precious relationship with her. He would then be being less than yin receptive to his actual reality and would be embroiled in non-yang obsessive thinking rather than acting positively. So Tolle’s reworking of Indian Buddhism finds a place within updated yin/yang Chinese thought. I will have more to say about this in another venue.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Slote, M. (2021). Integrating Chinese with Western Philosophy. In: Peters, M.A., Besley, T., Zhang, H. (eds) Moral Education and the Ethics of Self-Cultivation. East-West Dialogues in Educational Philosophy and Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8027-3_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8027-3_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-13-8026-6
Online ISBN: 978-981-13-8027-3
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)