Philosophy
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[edit] Philosophy
The study of philosophy is never dull when the interested is initiated purposefully in a search for reality and understanding of the Cosmos<world> we lived in..: Alien talk 03:47, 20 April 2006 (SGT)
The etymological meaning and common assumptions
- Philosophy (a combination of the Greek words philos meaning love and sophia meaning wisdom) So it means the love of wisdom or simply the practice of some kind of understanding, knowledge or wisdom about fundamental matters regarding life and purpose. It is also search for matters as touching us in terms of reality, knowledge, meaning, value, being and truth.
- Philosophy may also refer to the collective works of major philosophers. Aristotle is considered the Great western thinker and philosopher. Confucius would the oriental counterpart.
- Philosophy is a discipline or a major subject studied in almost colleges and universities. It can mean the academic exploration of various questions raised by philosophers; it can also mean a certain critical, creative way of thinking. However in Singapore , we fall short in such studies in our schools of higher learning. Our technological pursuits had outpaced and outdistanced this so important discipline that we can only start to appreciate our great need for it in our communal and social as well as individual life and well being.
- Two main branches of Philosophical thought can be seen in the west and the east. For instance, the western basic belief systems are based on argumentative and logic systems whereas in the Chinese orientation, such system are contrasted with based upon relevancy and context of the situation rather than mere rules or principles as developed in the western thought.
One common portrait of the difference between the Chinese and Western traditions posits a radical incommensurability on the very nature of philosophical inquiry. Chinese philosophy is "wisdom" literature, composed primarily of stories and sayings designed to move the audience to adopt a way of life or to confirm its adoption of that way of life.
[edit] The Chinese or Oriental mind
Western philosophy is systematic argumentation and theory. Is there such a difference? One reason to think so is the fairly widespread wariness in Chinese philosophy of a discursive rationality that operates by deduction of conclusions about the particular from high-level generalizations.
- The seventeenth chapter of the Zhuangzi notes that the sage-king Yao looked for a suitable successor, found the perfect candidate in Shun, and then abdicated so that Shun could take over the throne. The result was glorious. However, when Kuai imitated Yao the result was disastrous. Tang and Wu were kings who fought and conquered. But Duke Bo also acted on that rule, fought, and lost. That is why it is impossible to establish any constant rule.In practice the westerner is unable to see any form of logic in this kind of oriental thinking.
Inspired by the achievement of insight or wisdom in some particular cases, we create general rules that we believe will work for many other cases in the future. The unfortunate result is that our original insights and wisdom are magnified beyond the scope of their applicability.
Confucians are more willing to articulate their teachings in the form of principles, but such principles seem to function as designators of values or general considerations that ought to be given weight in judgments about what to do.
Never lost is recognition of the necessity for the exercise of discretion in judgment according to the particular circumstances at hand. The best rules lose applicability in unusual circumstances. Rules and values conflict in many circumstances, and there are no "super-principles" to supply ready answers. The appropriate resolution to each conflict depends very much on the situation.
In Mencius <7A35>, Mencius is asked what the legendary sage-king Shun would have done if his father had killed a man.Mencius replies that the only thing to do would be to apprehend him. Shun could not interfere with the judge, who was acting on the law. However, Mencius continues, Shun would then have abdicated and fled with his father to the seacoast. As Mencius portrays it, then, Shun's actions strike a balance between the different values in tension with one another. The refusal to interfere with the judge is a way of acknowledging the necessity of impartially administering a social order. At the same time, fleeing with one's father is honoring the value of greater loyalty to family. Shun manages to honor both values at different moments in his dealing with the situation.
Deduction from a principle could not yield such a balance. We are expected, however, to learn from stories such as Shun's, precisely because they function as concrete paradigms for judgment-making in the future. When we encounter situations that pose similar-looking conflicts between impartial concern and familial loyalties, we have Shun's judgment as a resource and a model. That model is not the same as a general principle that would deductively yield a judgment about what to do in the present situation. We must exercise judgment in determining whether new situations are similar enough to the case of Shun, and we must exercise judgment as to what actions would be parallel to Shun 's actions. goto [[1]]
[edit] The Ocidental Western Mind or the Philosophical thinking of the West
A quote:
- Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View
- by Richard Tarnas
- We may be seeing the beginnings of the reintegration of our culture, a new possibility of the unity of consciousness. If so, it will not be on the basis of any new orthodoxy, either religious or scientific. Such a new integration will be based on the rejection of all univocal understandings of reality, of all identifications of one conception of reality with reality itself. It will recognize the multiplicity of the human spirit, and the necessity to translate constantly between different scientific and imaginative vocabularies. It will recognize the human proclivity to fall comfortably into some single literal interpretation of the world and therefore the necessity to be continuously open to rebirth in a new heaven and a new earth. It will recognize that in both scientific and religious culture all we have finally are symbols, but that there is an enormous difference between the dead letter and the living word.
- Robert Bellah
- Beyond Belief
- Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View
unquote.
[edit] How does the western see the world is known as the worldviews?
Basically its study and concepts used to center its thinking along the assumption with the belief in monotheistic God but rationality and unbelief slowly had moved that center from God to Man <humanity as the core of belief as in reality>. It has three thousand years of collective understanding from the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. In order to break down such studies we have to go to the basic assumptions of each philosophical worldview prevailing at the cultural stage from Egyptian, Greek to Roman Times and the Middle ages with the Hebrew thinkers in the Diaspora along with the medieval monastic worldviews then to the Reformation <or Renaissance> to the modern enlightenment of the early twenty century.
Links to
return to [[2]]
