The question of the self is a major one, and it grounds many problems which in orthodox academic philosophy remain unsolved. Here is a prior essay about the issue. When asked who one is, the common immediate response is to give one’s name. The significance … Continue reading What Is A ‘Who’?
The great man regards Heaven and Earth and the myriad things as one body. He regards the world as one family and the country as one person. As to those who make a cleavage between objects and distinguish between the self and others, they are … Continue reading Wang Yangming: One Body With Heaven and Earth
The purpose of this piece is primarily to extol the virtue of the Daoxue (Neo-Confucianism in the West), which was the culminating synthesis of Confucian ethics, Taoist metaphysics, and a few concepts from Buddhism. I wish to express its living pattern, and to thereby perhaps awaken the reader to an interest in a tradition which is luckily not yet dead even if in China and its cultural diaspora in South East Asia it remains a minority. To any who have sympathies with Hegelianism, this is a call to pay attention to something of utmost importance. Nearly two billion human beings live with the objective and subjective legacy of this thought, and if in it we spy the Spirit of freedom, here is a most important ally to lock arms with and intertwine into the project of human emancipation.
The Empyrean Trail 