As a german academic, who is very interested in comparative philosophy and theology, I'd like to thank you very much for all of your excellent content about chinese history and philosophy. Keep up the good work! -Greetings from Berlin!
I'm watching this series as an introduction to Chinese Philosophy , and I'm gaining much more insight than I was anticipating. Thank you for making these videos - they deserve much more attention than they have received so far.
Splendid work! Very good explanation on the topic and very thorough with the background & relevant sources, I find the bit about Feng Youlan and Hu Shih's philosophical lineage to Bertrand Russell particularly helpful. I've read Feng's the History of Chinese Philosphy (Chinese edition), it was very informative but I always felt something is off with his analysis. I cannot point my finger to any obvious errors, but the whole argument/vibe just doesn't sit very comfortably with me. Today I know why. Subscribed and liked and saved, your work much appreciated :) Please keep it up!!
I agree The Analects is not pure record of Confucius and his students, but I think arguments made by Michael Hunter or Bruce & Taeko Brooks are too radical. Thank you for providing this good video, professor Van Norden
That was fascinating. My own projection onto the 13:3 passage is that it is, at one level, an injunction to rationality, on the principle that one cannot have moral order without intellectual order.
since discovering your lectures at the end of last year, most of my reading is now in translations of Chinese philosophy! I love it, especially the Confucians! I think Fung Yulan is a good philosopher in his own right.
Great lecture, professor it's very interesting to learn the arguments in favor of 13.3 being a later interpolation. But when you cite Zhu Xi and Cheng Yi at 58:00 it seems to me that they are arguing in favor of a "platonic" view, if not in the vein of a logical positivist. That's to say, there is a compromise with a metaphysical "correct" way of understanding "what is" to be "something" which serves as a paradigmatic criterion to judge how well each individual instance is a good enough representation of those ideals or not.
@@BryanVanNordenPhilosophy Certainly not. I didn't mean Platonism proper (hence the quotation marks) but only in a sense restricted within the point which I mentioned taking in context what is said at 49:30. Zhu Xi and Cheng Yi's commentary at 58:00 seem to be in vein with it, unless "the Way" which was lost has nothing to do with "essence" or "ideal concept".
Dear Professor Van Norden, Thank you very much for your lectures. As a passionate chess player I came in touch with Chinese chess (xiangqi) and somehow I ended up with learning about Chinese Philosophy. :) After having watched an Introductory video series by Professor Sebastian Gaeb (in German here on TH-cam) I was curious to listen to other experts in this field and I learned a lot of new things in your lectures. My two questions I had for this lecture: 1.) Is Ayn Rand ('Sophist'/'not a philosopher') in some way similar and comparable to Ancient Chinese philosopher Yang Zhu by also following an 'ethical egoism' based on 'rational egoism'? 2.) It was not easy for me to understand the interpreations of 6.23 & 12.11 without 'semantic ascent''. I could somehow make sense of the Chinese/'non-western' interpreations after I read them as 'A ruler is not a ruler anymore' & 'A gu is not a gu anymore'. Do Zhu Xi & Cheng Yi mean this when they say 'lost the Way'? It would be interesting to see your thoughts on this. Greetings from Germany
@BryanVanNordenPhilosophy But, Chinese are more symbolic, meaningful, and autonomous. What we discussed about Analects, on the modern language sound, "let's agree about terminology." But back to Confucius 11 years travel experience with different Kingdoms, does every of them created own vocabulary that in the logical chein affected decision making? What was the reason for Confucius semantic intentions?
@@nataliamironova1507 I'm not sure if this is relevant but I came across something interesting in regards to Chinese characters as symbols. The proper way to describe a beautiful woman in Chinese is written as "美女", however there is a commenter online who writes it as "美釹" in their comment. Both are pronounced as měi nǚ, but you can tell the rightmost characters are slightly different. "女" (nǚ) means girl/woman whereas "釹" (also nǚ) means Neodymium (a kind of metal.) The latter which literally means beautiful Neodymium doesn't make sense. At first glance, one may think that it's a typo error, but I think it's unlikely because the probability of "女" appearing in the auto-prediction is much higher than "釹". In fact, I think it's quite clever--it's a pun. Here's why. The character "釹" itself can be dissected in two parts--the left and the right. As you can tell the right part is actually the same as "女", as in “美女”, which means girl/woman, while the left part "金" literally means gold (which is also used to represent metal in Chinese culture.) So my interpretation of the term "美釹" is that the commenter is trying to imply that the woman they're referring to has beauty of which its value is comparable to that of gold. Although it sounds poetic, no one will ever write it in this way in a proper setting. It's simply for fun. (To put into context, the commenter is referring to a woman with big bosom sitting at a train station.) I have to warn you though, I'm not a linguist, but as far as I know, Chinese characters are not completely symbolic, sometimes they are used phonetically. This is most apparent when translating terms that exist in other cultures but not in Chinese culture, so they just adopt the phonetic of the foreign term into the Chinese vocabulary. This also occurs in the original Chinese vocabulary as well like "东西"（"东" means east and "西" means west) which literally means "east-west" but actually when these 2 characters put together, it means "thing". If you're going to read "东西" as symbols, you'll find that it's meaningless.
58:54 wouldnt this is logically the same saying "there exists a someone called a ruler that isnt a ruler", "there exists a someone called a son who is not a son" both are making the same claim about the state of the world how rulers, sons, etc, lose there way.
正名，纠正定义和事理， Rectify definition( of things ) and logic ( of reasoning) . Why Confucius said that, because at that time everything was seemed out of order. That situation is 名不正言不顺。 Translating everything from Chinese to western language is something like translating C language to Python, you can not convert each other word for word, but have to use compiler and links.
As a german academic, who is very interested in comparative philosophy and theology, I'd like to thank you very much for all of your excellent content about chinese history and philosophy. Keep up the good work! -Greetings from Berlin!
Thank you for your kind words!
I'm watching this series as an introduction to Chinese Philosophy , and I'm gaining much more insight than I was anticipating. Thank you for making these videos - they deserve much more attention than they have received so far.
Thank you for your kind words!
Excellent! This lecture is so useful for my research on the epistemology of Xunzi.
Splendid work! Very good explanation on the topic and very thorough with the background & relevant sources, I find the bit about Feng Youlan and Hu Shih's philosophical lineage to Bertrand Russell particularly helpful. I've read Feng's the History of Chinese Philosphy (Chinese edition), it was very informative but I always felt something is off with his analysis. I cannot point my finger to any obvious errors, but the whole argument/vibe just doesn't sit very comfortably with me. Today I know why. Subscribed and liked and saved, your work much appreciated :) Please keep it up!!
I agree The Analects is not pure record of Confucius and his students, but I think arguments made by Michael Hunter or Bruce & Taeko Brooks are too radical. Thank you for providing this good video, professor Van Norden
That was fascinating. My own projection onto the 13:3 passage is that it is, at one level, an injunction to rationality, on the principle that one cannot have moral order without intellectual order.
since discovering your lectures at the end of last year, most of my reading is now in translations of Chinese philosophy! I love it, especially the Confucians! I think Fung Yulan is a good philosopher in his own right.
Great lecture, professor it's very interesting to learn the arguments in favor of 13.3 being a later interpolation. But when you cite Zhu Xi and Cheng Yi at 58:00 it seems to me that they are arguing in favor of a "platonic" view, if not in the vein of a logical positivist. That's to say, there is a compromise with a metaphysical "correct" way of understanding "what is" to be "something" which serves as a paradigmatic criterion to judge how well each individual instance is a good enough representation of those ideals or not.
Almost all philosophers have some conception of what the correct way to live is. This does not make them Platonists. :-)
@@BryanVanNordenPhilosophy Certainly not. I didn't mean Platonism proper (hence the quotation marks) but only in a sense restricted within the point which I mentioned taking in context what is said at 49:30. Zhu Xi and Cheng Yi's commentary at 58:00 seem to be in vein with it, unless "the Way" which was lost has nothing to do with "essence" or "ideal concept".
Wow, I was reading 13.3 as a general statement, ignoring the first part of Wei. Thank you Professor.
Dear Professor Van Norden,
Thank you very much for your lectures. As a passionate chess player I came in touch with Chinese chess (xiangqi) and somehow I ended up with learning about Chinese Philosophy. :) After having watched an Introductory video series by Professor Sebastian Gaeb (in German here on TH-cam) I was curious to listen to other experts in this field and I learned a lot of new things in your lectures.
My two questions I had for this lecture: 1.) Is Ayn Rand ('Sophist'/'not a philosopher') in some way similar and comparable to Ancient Chinese philosopher Yang Zhu by also following an 'ethical egoism' based on 'rational egoism'?
2.) It was not easy for me to understand the interpreations of 6.23 & 12.11 without 'semantic ascent''. I could somehow make sense of the Chinese/'non-western' interpreations after I read them as 'A ruler is not a ruler anymore' & 'A gu is not a gu anymore'. Do Zhu Xi & Cheng Yi mean this when they say 'lost the Way'? It would be interesting to see your thoughts on this. Greetings from Germany
Does a hieroglyph have a more complex immersion and content-context communications than a literal word?
Egyptian hieroglyphs are a syllabic script.
@BryanVanNordenPhilosophy
But, Chinese are more symbolic, meaningful, and autonomous. What we discussed about Analects, on the modern language sound, "let's agree about terminology." But back to Confucius 11 years travel experience with different Kingdoms, does every of them created own vocabulary that in the logical chein affected decision making? What was the reason for Confucius semantic intentions?
@@nataliamironova1507 I'm not sure if this is relevant but I came across something interesting in regards to Chinese characters as symbols. The proper way to describe a beautiful woman in Chinese is written as "美女", however there is a commenter online who writes it as "美釹" in their comment. Both are pronounced as měi nǚ, but you can tell the rightmost characters are slightly different. "女" (nǚ) means girl/woman whereas "釹" (also nǚ) means Neodymium (a kind of metal.) The latter which literally means beautiful Neodymium doesn't make sense. At first glance, one may think that it's a typo error, but I think it's unlikely because the probability of "女" appearing in the auto-prediction is much higher than "釹". In fact, I think it's quite clever--it's a pun. Here's why.
The character "釹" itself can be dissected in two parts--the left and the right. As you can tell the right part is actually the same as "女", as in “美女”, which means girl/woman, while the left part "金" literally means gold (which is also used to represent metal in Chinese culture.) So my interpretation of the term "美釹" is that the commenter is trying to imply that the woman they're referring to has beauty of which its value is comparable to that of gold. Although it sounds poetic, no one will ever write it in this way in a proper setting. It's simply for fun. (To put into context, the commenter is referring to a woman with big bosom sitting at a train station.)
I have to warn you though, I'm not a linguist, but as far as I know, Chinese characters are not completely symbolic, sometimes they are used phonetically. This is most apparent when translating terms that exist in other cultures but not in Chinese culture, so they just adopt the phonetic of the foreign term into the Chinese vocabulary. This also occurs in the original Chinese vocabulary as well like "东西"（"东" means east and "西" means west) which literally means "east-west" but actually when these 2 characters put together, it means "thing". If you're going to read "东西" as symbols, you'll find that it's meaningless.
People can speculate anything as they like. B it surely they have a purpose for doing so.
58:54 wouldnt this is logically the same saying "there exists a someone called a ruler that isnt a ruler", "there exists a someone called a son who is not a son" both are making the same claim about the state of the world how rulers, sons, etc, lose there way.
No, it is not logically the same. That is the point. 🙂
Hb authentic Dialogue
孔子的正名思想
正名，纠正定义和事理， Rectify definition( of things ) and logic ( of reasoning) . Why Confucius said that, because at that time everything was seemed out of order. That situation is 名不正言不顺。 Translating everything from Chinese to western language is something like translating C language to Python, you can not convert each other word for word, but have to use compiler and links.
How is your comment different from what the lecture said? :-)
@@BryanVanNordenPhilosophy Possibly not, but reflection is a valuable process:)