Chinese Philosophy Qua Philosophy

History of Chinese Philosophy Overview of Chinese Philosophy

Pre-Confucian China Although there is evidence of advanced civilization in China in very ancient times, actual recorded history begins with the Shang dynasty, in the fourteenth century B.C.E. Available evidence indicates that this was an advanced civilization. For example, art from this period is quite sophisticated, even according to modern standards. This dynasty ended with the invasion by mo...

Philosophy of Philosophy of Religion

Basic Philosophy: an Old Chinese Poem Says

This essay grew from a talk I gave on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the Chinese Mathematical Society. I dedicate the lecture to the memory of my teacher S. S. Chern who had passed away half a year before (December 2004). During my graduate studies, I was rather free in picking research topics. I [724] worked on fundamental groups of manifolds with non-positive curvature. But in ...

How to Escape Irrelevance: Performance Philosophy, Public Philosophy and Borderless Philosophy

 Carlo Cellucci has rightly pointed out that contemporary professional academic philosophy has a serious problem of irrelevance. Performance philosophy and public philosophy are two recent attempts to solve that problem and radically transform professional academic philosophy into what I call real philosophy. Nevertheless, performance philosophy and public philosophy have some prima facie probl...

Philosophy of Mathematics and Philosophy of History

mathematical and one philosophical. In the first, Socrates leads the slave boy to correct, refine, and extend his intuition of a pair of geometrical diagrams by examining his presuppositions in the light of certain background knowledge (about arithmetic), as they solve a problem together. In the second, Socrates leads Meno to correct, refine, and extend his intuition about virtue as well as abo...