Peimin Ni

Despite consistent student interest in Chinese philosophy, the author reports that American students tend to demonstrate a sense of distance from Chinese authors and texts, often exoticizing or romanticizing them. This paper describes one pedagogical strategy that proved highly effective for overcoming this cultural distance which can hinder students’ ability to engage critically or deeply with the material. The author recounts her experience of teaching a six week Chinese philosophy course to illustrate how becoming acquainted with the place and culture that gave rise to a philosophy help to render that philosophy more concrete. By being able to speak and interact with people in China (e.g. a Buddhist monk, a doctor practicing traditional Chinese medicine, etc.), the study of Chinese philosophical texts was brought to life, nuanced, and inflected by familiarization with the cultural, geographical, and political contexts of the philosophy being studied. Included in this paper are the course syllabus and one course assignment.

The thesis aims at analyzing metaphysical implications of the ordinary concept of "cause". The approach is justified through a discussion of Hume's theory of causation, accompanied by discussions about the nature of definition itself. ;Four major metaphysical problems of causation are discussed: The ontological status of cause ; the temporal relation between causes and effects ; the direction of causation ; and causal necessity . ;Through analytical discussions of the existing literatures on those problems, the thesis identifies certain metaphysical assumptions to be responsible for the profound difficulties that the authors encounter, including the assumptions of a sort of Cartesian dualism of beings and activities, Leibniz' law of identity, and the Newtonian mechanical model of causation. A "particle-wave" ontology is introduced as an alternative to these assumptions, and thus provides solutions to the difficulties which otherwise cannot be solved. The dialectical nature of the ontology may not be happily accepted by philosophers of strict analytical tradition, but it finds its predecessors in the Chinese Taoist philosophy, Hegelian philosophy, Whiteheadian philosophy, and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. The author hopes to convince the readers that there is a paradox in the metaphysics of causation analogous to the paradox in the arithmetics revealed by Godel's theorem: We cannot have a complete metaphysics of causation without inconsistency

Roger Ames and David Hall’s Focusing the Falimiar makes a significant contribution to revealing the holistic and dynamic worldview entailed in the Confucian classic--the Zhongyong. Yet their emphasis on metaphysics eclipses an important dimension of the book—the “gongfu” (kungfu) instruction dimension. In this paper, the author first explains this concern by discussing Ames’ and Hall’s translation of the key terms of the book, namely “zhong,” “yong,” and “cheng.” Then he shows that their work, though falls short of revealing the gongfu dimension, has laid the groundwork for taking the further step.

Different from the commonly used moralistic perspective, this article articulates and evaluates major ideas about human desire within the Confucian tradition through a gongfu perspective, and shows that, although there are historical reasons for blaming Confucianism for suppressing human desires and suffocating humanity, what classic Confucianism advocates is ultimately about how to cultivate humanity, transform human desires, and live artistically, and not imposing a rigid normative moral system externally to constrain human life, making it unsatisfying.