Yet another philosophy department shut down, at Birkbeck, University of London. Don't even know what to say. Keep doing philosophy, out of spite. We've always had detractors. Remember Socrates?
One more twitter transfer. I was intrigued by Husserl’s rather effusive praise of Buddhist thought in his review of the Pali Canon, "On the Teachings of Gotama Buddha," and wanted to know more about the backstory. Karl Schuhmann's chapter "Husserl and Indian Thought" in Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy has some details about this. According to Schuhmann, Karl Eugen Neumann's German translation of Sutta Pitaka was initially published around the turn of 20th cent. 1/ @philosophy#philosophy
Of course, such an effort is not unique to Hegel, Husserl, or Western philosophers. In Chinese Buddhist philosophy, many of the scholastic “schools” would use their own preferred text as the ultimate framework to adjudicating all other systems, invariably making their preferred ideas the goal to which all sentient beings should strive toward. Maybe philosophers are just like other flawed, fallen, and karmic humans after all. /end @philosophy#philosophy
Another transfer. If Allegory of the Cave has shaped Western understandings of knowledge, truth, reality, ethics, & politics, Fable of a Frog in the Well has played a similar role in the Chinese approaches. There is some overlap but the differences and their implications are fascinating. The primary setup in the Cave is illusion/ignorance vs reality/knowledge while in the Well the primary tension is between limitation/small-mindedness and limitlessness/capaciousness. 1/ @philosophy#philosophy
I'm transferring some earlier materials from twitter to this platform. Here's Linda Zagzebski's amazing story at last year's Rutgers Workshop on Chinese Philosophy (virtue epistemology). It highlights the intimate body/mind connection. When she was in Dublin several weeks before the workshop, she went to the Chester Beatty Museum that has a huge collection of Asian manuscripts and paintings. The rest of this thread is a slightly edited quote from her comment of a paper on Xunzi and Aristotle. 1/
"in a much more modest way. Zhongsen illustrates to an extraordinary degree the connection between control of biological functions and the ability to direct one’s body to create feats of artistic virtuosity, and the connection between both of these abilities and the most advanced level of hyperconscious awareness... I think that that connectedness extends from the highest level of consciousness all the way down to the most minute level of bodily functioning."/end @philosophy#philosophy