Oct 23, · A common family of arguments, inspired by Wittgenstein’s famous remarks about games (Wittgenstein ), has it that the phenomena of art are, by their nature, too diverse to admit of the unification that a satisfactory definition strives for, or that a definition of art, were there to be such a thing, would exert a stifling influence on Jan 10, · The tradition of Chinese ethical thought is centrally concerned with questions about how one ought to live: what goes into a worthwhile life, how to weigh duties toward family versus duties toward strangers, whether human nature is predisposed to be morally good or bad, how one ought to relate to the non-human world, the extent to which one ought to become involved in reforming the A convention is a set of agreed, stipulated, or generally accepted standards, norms, social norms, or criteria, often taking the form of a custom.. In a social context, a convention may retain the character of an "unwritten law" of custom (for example, the manner in which people greet each other, such as by shaking each other's hands).Certain types of rules or customs may become law and
Chinese Ethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The personal, social, and political are often intertwined in Chinese approaches to the subject. Anyone who wants to draw from the range of important traditions of thought on this subject needs to look seriously at define neo conventional family Chinese tradition.
The canonical texts of that tradition have been memorized by schoolchildren in Asian societies for hundreds of years, and at the same time have served as objects of sophisticated and rigorous analysis by scholars and theoreticians rooted in widely variant traditions and approaches. This article will introduce ethical issues raised by some of the most influential texts in Confucianism, Mohism, Daoism, Legalism, and Chinese Buddhism. In the Analects Confucius Kongzi, best known in the West under his latinized name, lived in the 6 th and 5 th century B.
E replies that in his village, uprightness lies in fathers and sons covering up for each other. The contrast between these two stories highlights one of the distinctive features of Chinese ethics in general: its respect for the practical problem. The practical problem discussed by Confucius and Socrates is arguably a universal one: the conflict between loyalty owed to a family member and duty to uphold public justice within the larger community. The nature of the define neo conventional family demands a practical define neo conventional family. However, another dimension of a reflective respect for the practical problem is to maintain a certain humility in the face of a really hard problem.
It is to be skeptical that highly abstract theories will provide a response that is true to the complexities of that problem. A tradition exemplifying such respect will contain influential works that will not pretend to have resolved recurring tensions within the moral life such as those identified in the Analects and the Euthyphro.
Confucius gives an immediate practical answer in Do fathers and sons cover up for each other on all occasions, no matter how serious, and if there is a cover-up, is there also an attempt to compensate the victim of the wrongdoing? The particularity of these passages is tied up with the emphasis on praxis. What is sought and what is discussed is often the answer to a particular practical problem, and the resulting particularity of the remarks invites multiple interpretations.
One passage With this passage in mind, we might then wonder whether the apparent tension between remarks made in connection with a concept is to be understood in terms of the differences between the individuals addressed or the context of the conversation.
All texts that have become canonical within a tradition, of course, define neo conventional family, are subject to multiple interpretations, but Chinese texts invite them. They invite them by articulating themes that stay relatively close to the pre-theoretical experience that gives rise to the practical problems of moral life see Kupperman, on the role of experience in Chinese philosophy.
The pre-theoretical is not experience that is a pure given or unconceptualized, nor is it necessarily experience that is universal in its significance and intelligibility across different traditions of thought and culture. This attention to pre-theoretical experience also leads to differences in format and discursive form: dialogues and stories are more suited for appealing to and evoking the kind of pre-theoretical experience that inspires parts of the text.
By define neo conventional family, much Western philosophy has gone with Plato in taking the route of increasing abstraction from pre-theoretical experience. The contrast is not meant to imply that Chinese philosophy fails to give rise to theoretical reflection. Theoretical reflection of great significance arises in define neo conventional family MoziMenciusHanfeiziXunziand Zhuangzibut there is more frequent interplay between the theorizing and references to pre-theoretical experience.
In Chinese texts there are suggestions for theorizing about this experience, but the suggestions often indicate several different and fruitful directions for theorizing to go further. These directions may seem incompatible, define neo conventional family, and they may or may not be so in the end, but the tensions between these directions are real.
The result is a fruitful ambiguity that poses a problematic. Pre-theoretical experience poses a practical problem. Apparently incompatible solutions to problems are partially theorized in the text, but the apparent incompatibility is not removed.
Much of the value of these texts lies in their leaving the tensions in place define neo conventional family enough theory given to stimulate thinking within a certain broadly defined approach. There is more than enough for the sophisticated theorist to try to interpret or to reconstruct a more defined position as an extension of that broadly defined approach, define neo conventional family.
At the same time, the problematic is partly framed with the language of pre-theoretical experience in the form of dialogue and story, making the texts accessible to a much broader range of readers than is usually the case with philosophy texts, define neo conventional family. The following sections present some of the major kinds of problematic that appear in the major schools of Chinese ethical thought.
A common way to understand Confucian ethics is that it is a virtue ethic. For some scholars this will be an obvious, uncontroversial truth. For others, define neo conventional family, it is a misconstrual that imposes contentious Western assumptions on Confucianism about what it is to be a person and what an ethics should be about.
In light of this controversy, it is important to specify the sense in which it is relatively uncontroversial to claim that virtues constitute a major focus of attention in these texts. Virtues in the relevant sense are qualities or traits that persons could have and that are appropriate objects of aspiration to realize.
These virtues go into the conception of an ideal of a kind of person that one aspires to be. Tiwald distinguishes between something like the broad sense of virtue and a philosophical usage that confers on qualities or traits of character explanatory priority over right action and promoting good consequences.
Virtue ethics in this sense is a competitor to rule deontological and consequentialist theories. There define neo conventional family is not enough discussion in the Confucian texts, especially in the classical period, that define neo conventional family addressed to the kind of questions these Western theories seek to answer.
Virtues might be supposed to be qualities that people have or can have in isolation from others with whom they interact or from their communities, define neo conventional family, societies, or culture. Such atomistic virtues could make up ideals of the person that in turn can be specified or realized define neo conventional family social isolation.
Further, virtues might be supposed to be identifiable through generalizations that hold true in every case, such that the ways these traits are concretely manifested in conduct do not vary across context or situation. As will become clear in subsequent discussion here, one can employ virtue language with the appropriate qualifiers and at the same time acknowledge much of what the critics claim as insights of Confucian ethics: e.
It is part of the Confucian vision of a life befitting human beings that it is a life of relationships marked by mutual care and respect, that one achieves fullest personhood that way. None of this is inconsistent with virtue characterizations in the broad sense for an alternative role-ethic characterization of Confucian ethics that incorporates these insights in a different way, see Ames, The most frequently discussed ideal is that of the junzi, define neo conventional family.
These traits are virtues in the sense that they are necessary for following the daothe way human beings ought to live their lives. As Yu points out, the dao plays the kind of role in ancient Chinese ethics that is analogous to the role played by eudaimonia or flourishing, in ancient Greek ethics.
The junzi is the ethical exemplar with the virtues making it possible to follow the dao. Besides the concepts of dao and junzithe concept of ren is a unifying theme in the Analects. But in the Analects the concept is of a moral excellence that anyone has the potential to achieve. Various translations have been given of ren.
Many translations attempt to convey the idea of complete ethical virtue, connoting a comprehensive state of ethical excellence. In a number of places in the Analects the ren person is treated as equivalent to the junziindicating that ren has the meaning of complete or comprehensive moral excellence, define neo conventional family, lacking no particular virtue but having them all. However, ren in some places in the Define neo conventional family is treated as one virtue among others such as wisdom and courage.
In the narrower sense of being one virtue among others, it is explained in It is in light of these passages that other translators, such as D. It is possible that the sense of ren as particular virtue and the sense of comprehensive excellence are related in that attitudes such as care and respect for others may be a pervasive aspect of different forms of moral excellence, e.
Why is the central virtue discussed in such an elusive fashion in the Analects? The answer may lie in the role that pre-theoretical experience plays in Chinese philosophy. Tan has pointed to the number and vividness of the persons in the Analects who serve as moral exemplars. She suggests that the text invites us to exercise our imaginations in envisioning what these people might have been like and what we ourselves might become in define neo conventional family to emulate them.
Use of the imagination, she points out, draws our attention to the define neo conventional family of virtue and engages our emotions and define neo conventional family. Amy Olberdingdevelops the notion of exemplarism into a Confucian epistemology, according to which we get much of our important knowledge by encountering the relevant objects or persons.
Upon initial contact, we may have little general knowledge of the qualities that make them so compelling to us, but we are motivated to further investigate. Confucius treated as exemplars legendary figures from the early days of the Zhou dynasty, such as the Duke of Zhou and Kings Wu and Wen. Confucius served as an exemplar to his students, perhaps of the virtue of renthough he never claimed the virtue for himself. Book Ten of the Analects displays what might appear to be an obsessive concern with the way Confucius greeted persons in everyday life, e.
Such concern becomes much more comprehensible if Confucius is being treated as an exemplar of virtue from which the students are trying to learn. The focus of Book Ten and elsewhere in the Analects also suggests that the primary locus of virtue is to be found in how people treat each other in the fabric of everyday life and not in the dramatic moral dilemmas so much define neo conventional family in contemporary Western moral philosophy.
Analects 1. The chapter also stresses the importance of li the rites, ritual in this project. In the Analects ritual includes ceremonies of ancestor worship, the burial of parents, and the rules governing respectful and appropriate behavior between parents and children.
Later the word came to cover a broad range of customs and practices that spelled out courteous define neo conventional family respectful behavior of many different kinds. Engaging in ritual, learning to perform it properly and with the right attitudes of respect while performing it, is to engage in a kind of cutting and carving and polishing and grinding of the self.
One of the most distinctive marks of Confucian ethics is the centrality of ritual performance in the ethical cultivation of character. For example, while Aristotelian habituation generally corresponds to the Confucian cultivation of character, there is no comparable emphasis in Aristotle on the role of ritual performance in this process of character transformation.
Yet Confucians will say that any complete description of self-cultivation must include a role for the culturally established customs that spell out what it define neo conventional family to express respect for another person in various social contexts.
Just how that role is conceived in the Analects is one of the central interpretive puzzles concerning the Analects. The interpretive question of how li is central to self-cultivation is posed in particular about its relation to the chief virtue of ren, define neo conventional family.
In the Analects 3. This implication about the role of ritual is consistent with passages of the Analects in which Confucius shows flexibility on the question of whether to follow established ritual practice, define neo conventional family. The implication is that the contemporary practice expresses the wrong attitude toward the ruler—presumptuousness in assuming permission to ascend. However, in other places of the Analectsdefine neo conventional family, ritual seems to take on a more central role in the achievement of ren.
Indeed, it seems to be presented as the key. A very common translation of If for one day you managed to restrain yourself and return to the rites, in this way you could lead the entire world back to ren.
The key to achieving ren lies within yourself—how could it come from others? Obviously the instrumental and definitional interpretations cannot both be true. Perhaps Confucius believes that Yan Hui should be focusing on disciplining himself through observing the rites, but his advice should not be be taken as an intended generalization about the relationship between ren and li.
Perhaps the remarks that suggest more of an instrumentalist construal of the relationship are similarly context and audience bound. Such interpretation, of course, leaves open the question of what that relationship is, or indeed, define neo conventional family, whether Confucius ever had in mind a generalization about the relationship that informed his remarks, define neo conventional family. Define neo conventional family have argued that such serious conflicts within the text constitute reasons for thinking that the Analects is an accretive text, i.
To some extent, viewing the Analects as accretive is nothing new, but Bruce and A.
12 Family Diversity (Modernist Perspectives)
, time: 14:28Convention (norm) - Wikipedia
Oct 23, · A common family of arguments, inspired by Wittgenstein’s famous remarks about games (Wittgenstein ), has it that the phenomena of art are, by their nature, too diverse to admit of the unification that a satisfactory definition strives for, or that a definition of art, were there to be such a thing, would exert a stifling influence on Jan 10, · The tradition of Chinese ethical thought is centrally concerned with questions about how one ought to live: what goes into a worthwhile life, how to weigh duties toward family versus duties toward strangers, whether human nature is predisposed to be morally good or bad, how one ought to relate to the non-human world, the extent to which one ought to become involved in reforming the A convention is a set of agreed, stipulated, or generally accepted standards, norms, social norms, or criteria, often taking the form of a custom.. In a social context, a convention may retain the character of an "unwritten law" of custom (for example, the manner in which people greet each other, such as by shaking each other's hands).Certain types of rules or customs may become law and
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