319 | Bryan Van Norden on Philosophy From the Rest of the World

It is common to refer to philosophy as "a series of footnotes to Plato." But in the original quote, Alfred North Whitehead was more careful: he limited his characterization to "the European philosophical tradition." There are other traditions, both ancient and ongoing: Chinese philosophy, Indian philosophy, Africana philosophy, and various indigenous philosophies. For the most part, these do not get nearly as much attention in European and American schools as the European tradition does. Bryan Van Norden argues for expanding philosophy's geographical scope, to the benefit of philosophy in general. Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/06/23/319-bryan-van-norden-on-philosophy-from-the-rest-of-the-world/ Support Mindscape on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll. Bryan Van Norden received his Ph. D. in philosophy from Stanford University. He is currently James Monroe Taylor Chair in Philosophy at Vassar College and Chair Professor in the School of Philosophy at Wuhan University. Among his books https://www.bryanvannorden.com/new-page are Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy and Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto. He is a recipient of Fulbright, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Mellon fellowships. Web site https://www.bryanvannorden.com/ Vassar web page https://www.vassar.edu/faculty/brvannorden PhilPeople profile https://philpeople.org/profiles/bryan-van-norden Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_W._Van_Norden Amazon author page https://www.amazon.com/stores/Bryan-W.-Van-Norden/author/B001HMYZT2

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:57Sean Carroll?

  Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. In many ways, the modern world lives in the shadow of the Enlightenment. That period from the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries when it was sort of a philosophical movement, intellectual, political, cultural movement that shaped what we think of as reason and rationality and empiricism and science. And a lot of the Enlightenment was about rejecting authority or dogmatism, right? You don't believe ideas just because they've been handed down by ancient texts or authorities.

• 1:39Sean Carroll?

  You don't accept government controls just because there's a monarch that has been there for many years. You test ideas, right? You think about them, you test them if they're scientific ideas against experiments. If they're purely philosophical ideas, you test them against other ideas. There might be a free market of ideas where these ideas battle each other out with the idea that the best ones will rise to the top. Now, these are standards that can be hard to live up to, right? We are not all very good at being open to ideas we don't already agree with, but that's kind of part of the ideal of the Enlightenment, is that you should think about lots of different ideas and compare them to each other rather than just accepting certain ones blindly.

• 2:24Sean Carroll?

  Now, it's been pointed out many times that modern philosophy, as taught in departments like Johns Hopkins, my own department, but also throughout the United States, throughout Europe, etc., doesn't always live up to this ideal of being open to other approaches. Philosophy has, like every other area of academic inquiry, its favorite ways of doing things, its foundational texts, what it considers to be the most important ways of doing things, the most important tradition in which to discuss ideas. Maybe, some people would argue, philosophy could use some expanding into other traditions.

• 3:06Sean Carroll?

  In particular, the particular tradition that we generally work in, in most Western universities, is handed down from the ancient Greeks. Now, the ancient Greeks didn't just appear out of nowhere, they got their philosophical impetus from other places, but we tell a story of ourselves. It starts with roughly Plato and Aristotle, goes through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in Europe, and ends up in modern universities. It doesn't talk a lot about the philosophies that are discussed in India, or China, or indigenous cultures, or Africa, or elsewhere. So some people have been pushing against this, and saying, "Maybe we should, in the best Enlightenment tradition, be more open to these other traditions."

• 3:51Sean Carroll?

  Of course, you have to show that there's something useful, something worthwhile, in these other places, but to make that judgment, you have to know something about them first. So today's guest, Brian Van Norden, has long been one of the loudest voices in saying that philosophy should be open to traditions besides the Western one, besides the one handed down from the ancient Greeks. Not because that particular tradition is not super interesting and useful and important, but because maybe others are too, and maybe they even have something to add. Brian is an expert in Chinese philosophy, which is probably one of the most thoroughly developed alternatives, along with Indian philosophy. And so we're going to talk About kind of two things at once.

• 4:36Sean Carroll?

  We're going to talk about specific philosophical ideas from China and India and elsewhere, but also the idea, the meta idea, that philosophy should be more open, that we should let in traditions that have been excluded from modern philosophical discourse. And, you know, I'm convinced, I think it's a very, very persuasive case. And both because, you know, the fascinating thing to me is there are similarities and differences between Indian and Chinese philosophy and European philosophy. They're not completely disjointed. Many of the questions that they address are very similar. Many of the methodologies they use are very similar. So for those reasons alone, it's worth letting them in. But their answers aren't always exactly the same.

• 5:20Sean Carroll?

  And for that reason alone, it's worth taking these ideas seriously, if only to make our own confidence in our own ideas as strong as it can be. So this is a mind expanding one, like all the best episodes of Mindscape. We're trying to think outside of our usual boxes. Let's go.

• 5:54Sean Carroll?

  Brian Van Norden, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 5:58Sean Carroll?

  I always like to start just, you know, if people are only going to listen to the first few minutes or seconds of the podcast, let's get the message out there. So you have a very compelling message. There's of course details that we'll get into, but philosophy as taught in at least the Anglo-American sphere is neglecting a whole bunches of the world and we should do better than that. I mean, how would you, what's your sales pitch for this message?

• 6:26Speaker 03

  Well, exactly. I mean, it's clear that China and India and Africa are increasingly important in the world today. And how is the next generation of senators and presidents and diplomats and just policymakers and just educated voters, how are they going to understand how to interact with the rest of the world unless they know something about the thought that informs the lives of people in other parts of the world and how it's different from our own?

• 6:57Sean Carroll?

  So what are, what's the vocabulary words that I should use for, is it Western philosophy and non-Western, or is there an accepted set of lingo here?

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, there, there really isn't. It's kind of tricky because for, just to give you a sense of the complexity, Islamic philosophy is fascinating and actually had a lot of influence on the development of mainstream Anglo-European philosophy. But some Islamic philosophy was done in what is now Europe. So if you say Western versus non-Western, it's kind of complicated. And of course, when we get into the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, many philosophers in places like China are very influenced by Western thinkers like, you know, Marx and Lenin. So the phrase I like to use is the less commonly taught

• 7:48Speaker 03

  philosophies. And I kind of borrowed this from language teaching where people who teach languages group together languages like Swahili and Japanese that are not even in the same language groups, but they have in common the fact that they tend to get neglected in mainstream language education. And so the less commonly taught philosophies are things like East Asian philosophy, including Chinese philosophy, South Asian philosophy, including Indian philosophy, Africana philosophy, which is a sometimes useful label for both philosophy done in Africa, but also philosophy done by philosophers in the African diaspora.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  So people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. And then finally indigenous philosophy, like the philosophy of the indigenous people of the Americas, both like Mayan and Aztec, but also Navajo and other, you know, contemporary living cultural traditions in the US.

• 8:49Sean Carroll?

  So I guess, I'm actually a professor in a philosophy department, believe it or not, these days. I guess this traditional thought in most American philosophy departments is that philosophy kind of began in ancient Greece. And it grew up since then through Europe, and now we're doing it. And there's also some things happening elsewhere in the world. But was that always the story? I mean, certainly it seems like a thousand years ago, there was a lot more interaction, in particular, between the Islamic Golden Age thinkers and the European ones.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's interesting, because if you look at early philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, it really doesn't occur to them that philosophy was invented uniquely in the West. And so in many ways Aristotle is the first comparative political philosopher, because he collects constitutions from all around the world to do comparative political thought. And Plato suggests that there was philosophy being done in Africa. In fact, when Europeans first encountered, for example, Chinese philosophy, as late as, say, the beginning of the 18th century, the most common views in Europe were that

• 10:09Speaker 03

  philosophy began in either South Asia, and so from, say, India, philosophy was given as a gift to the ancient Greeks, or philosophy began in Africa, and from Africa, philosophy was imported by the Greeks. And I'm sure you can imagine the third major view in European philosophy textbooks at the time, the view was that philosophy began independently in both Africa and India, and both of them gave it to ancient Greece. It was actually not a common view in European sources that philosophy began uniquely in ancient Greece. It only began to be a common view, that philosophy began in ancient Greece, and only in ancient

• 10:54Speaker 03

  Greece, with the rise of pseudo-scientific racism.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  And Western imperialism because people needed a way to rationalize their dominance of other civilizations. And one way of doing that was by saying, well, they don't even have philosophy. They have thought or they have religion, but they don't have philosophy like we do. And we're intellectually superior to them for this reason.

• 11:19Sean Carroll?

  And some of that pseudoscientific racism came from philosophers.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  That's that's quite true. I mean, people like, for example, Kant has a, you know, although in many ways I admire Kant as an epistemologist and as a as an ethician. The fact is, he bought into ideas of racial superiority of the white race. And we now know that in his lectures, he said things like, the race of the whites contains all talents and motives in itself. And he said that people in India and China, you know, he said that of people in India, they look like philosophers. But but they're incapable of abstraction. And anybody who's actually looked at Indian philosophy knows that utterly ridiculous.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  And then he said, the people in Africa can only be trained to be servants. And the people of the indigenous cultures of the Americas, he said, are not fertile. Which is weird for the people who inhabit the Americas before Europeans showed up. They don't talk much and they're just not capable of any kind of serious thought. Now, people don't study these lectures where Kant says this. You might say, well, why do we have to even bring this up? But Kant's students rewrote the history of philosophy textbooks in Europe. And they rewrote all of the history of philosophy so that it all goes back to ancient Greece.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  And it's, you know, groping more or less successfully towards Kant's transcendental idealism. And anything that's not part of that story just isn't philosophy. And so that's why contemporary philosophers often take it for granted without any argument. And in fact, resisting evidence to the contrary. That there is in fact, philosophy outside the tradition that goes back to Plato and Aristotle.

• 13:14Sean Carroll?

  And so now we're in a position where a typical, I'm going to keep talking about American philosophy departments because those are the ones that I know, but you're going to have more people who are experts in the work of Immanuel Kant than people who are experts in the entire non-European world.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Exactly. And so in every mainstream philosophy department in the English-speaking world, not just in United States, in Canada, Australia, but also in many parts of Europe, you're always going to have somebody on staff who's willing to passionately debate whether the statement "the present king of France is bald," is that statement false or is it neither true nor false? One of my classmates from graduate school wrote a whole book on this topic. And they're like, oh, this, you've got to have somebody who's an expert on the Strauss and Russell debate, you know, on definite descriptions. But they have nobody on staff who can teach the philosophy that has had a deep influence on the more than

• 14:14Speaker 03

  a billion people in East Asia and the more than a billion people in South Asia, not to mention people in Africa or influenced by the African diaspora or the indigenous people of the Americas. It's just crazy.

• 14:26Speaker 04

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• 14:47Sean Carroll?

  Well, how should philosophy be? I mean, I think, and I honestly don't know the answer to this question, but I know that, you know, in physics, which I also do, or economics or chemistry, you know, we don't study Chinese physics or Indian physics. But of course, we do study, or at least have courses, in Chinese literature, or Chinese history, or things like that. So in the humanities, it's much more common to kind of divide up into areas of studies like this. And the sciences, it's not. And philosophy is kind of in between. I mean, what do you envision it should be like? Should we have special specialties in Indian philosophy and Chinese philosophy, et cetera? Or should those thinkers be appearing in ordinary courses in logic and metaphysics and ethics?

• 15:34Speaker 03

  Well, just to give you a sense, when I started teaching Chinese philosophy, I was a little optimistic and maybe a little naive. Because I knew that Chinese philosophy was really interesting and I thought, all I need to do is to show my colleagues in philosophy how interesting Chinese philosophy is and how it can inform debates on so many topics. And they'll be receptive to it, they'll want to include it in their courses, you know, so you'll be teaching Descartes side by side with, you know, Nagarjuna on the nature of the self. And you'll be teaching, you know, the Confucian philosopher Mungsa side by side with Aristotle, Huang Zhongxi side by side with Hobbes. I thought it's going to be so easy.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  And then, I just ran into this kind of structural racism where people feel like they can say, well, there is no such thing as Chinese philosophy. And then, and this has happened to me many times, I'll say, well, of the famous, you know, Chinese philosophers, which ones do you not regard as genuinely philosophical? And they'll admit, oh, I've never read any of it, but I know there isn't any. And they just, they can say this with just a straight face. And so, I became kind of pessimistic about the future of multicultural philosophy. And so, I kind of, I said, I'm enjoying teaching it to a handful of students, but things are never going to change.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  About 10 years or so ago, I noticed a change in the field, where all of a sudden undergrad, not just undergraduates, but graduate students in philosophy and, you know, beginning assistant professors, and a handful of senior professors, all of a sudden were much more receptive to the idea that there's philosophy outside the tradition that goes back to Plato and Aristotle. And so now, I'm beginning to be more optimistic and some of my colleagues are beginning at Vassar and other institutions are beginning to teach non-Western philosophy side by side with Western philosophy. And people still teach Descartes when they're

• 17:43Speaker 03

  Talking about, you know, epistemology or the mind-body problem. His arguments are still considered relevant, doesn't mean people accept them, but they're worth discussing. And so why shouldn't they also be discussing figures like Nagarjina or Nagasena, who have really interesting arguments on the nature of the self? And some of them are starting to do that. So that's the future I envision. And I, and I think it's worth keeping in mind, I always like to tell this anecdote, that a few years ago, there was this young upstart professor at this European university. And he wanted to introduce into the curriculum some figures who had not

• 18:26Speaker 03

  been in the curriculum of European universities for centuries. And students almost rioted because some conservative students said, well, this is watering down the curriculum and it's not part of our tradition. And then I point out the professor I have in mind is Saint Thomas Aquinas. He was teaching at the University of Paris, now the Sorbonne, and he wanted to reintroduce Aristotle back into the curriculum when Aristotle's works had mostly been lost in the West, but fortunately had been preserved in the Islamic world. And people were just like, this is not part of our tradition, there's no way to incorporate it. It's not as sophisticated as the Christianized Platonism that we've learned.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  So the canon has always been in flux. And so changing the canon to include things from the non-Western traditions is not some radical thing that we haven't done before.

• 19:21Sean Carroll?

  And in some sense, uh, you know, we, today it's hard to imagine Aristotle being an outsider to philosophy, but he was a pagan, right? You know, if you're, uh, in the Middle Ages or whatever, the early Middle Ages, then you, you could easily say that he was not part of your tradition.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  Exactly, and he was, Plato had been, the expression historians use is baptized, because Augustine had been so influenced. And, and again, that, that's an interesting, you know, why should we study the history of philosophy? You know, some Christians think, well, it's great that Augustine read Plato because that helped us understand the Christian tradition better. Other people who are faithful Christians will say, no, Augustine went completely the wrong direction for understanding Christianity because of the influence of Plato. And that's why the introducing Aristotle was controversial, because Aristotle and Plato have very different metaphysical orientations. And so it led to a different way of understanding things like the incarnation.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  So, and likewise, I always tell my students, you are a philosopher. You might not know it, but you're a philosopher before you step into a philosophical class, because you have opinions about what is truth? How do we arrive at the truth? What kinds of things exist in the universe? And anything you say, that's something that some previous philosopher said, and you picked it up from popular culture. And the question now is just, are you going to be self-conscious about the fact that you're a philosophical thinker, defending ideas developed by earlier thinkers? Or are you going to be unself-aware about the background of your own ideas?

• 21:03Sean Carroll?

  I do have to mention, just parenthetically, when you bring up Augustine, that I was an undergraduate at Villanova University.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 21:11Sean Carroll?

  Same as our new pope. And so we're thinking that Augustine and his Augustinians are going to have a resurgence in popularity now with the Augustinian pope for the first time.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and that's another interesting example, because there, this goes back to an earlier point you made, there are people who want to do philosophy ahistorically.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  Um, I think that's a, it's a less common view but today, but I, you do sometimes see it. And this is a little controversial, but I think part of what happened was that uh, the, there's the, what became the analytic tradition in philosophy, which is, as you I'm sure know, is the dominant tradition in the English speaking world and places like Scandinavia for various historical reasons. Uh, originally had a real political bent, so Bertrand Russell, who's kind of the paradigmatic figures in the analytic tradition, was very political and comparatively very left wing by US standards. Yeah.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Um, and even G E Moore, G E Moore wasn't conventionally political, but people often forget that his work Principia Eptica, which, you know, I was trained to focus on things like the naturalistic fallacy and these technical arguments about definition he gives. But that had a huge influence on the lifestyle of people in the Bloomsbury Group. Yeah. And so it really, you know, these were things that really were very influential. But then, when this came to the US, especially because of the McCarthy era in the United States, where a lot of people were being persecuted for their perceived left wing political views. I think, I don't think it was conscious, but I think people thought, you know, if

• 22:58Speaker 03

  we make philosophy like natural science and we tell them we're doing something that's purely formal and logical and mathematical, it, it doesn't, it deals with formal structures, it's not politically relevant, it was safe. And so I think people lost touch with the fact that philosophy has always traditionally been concerned with how you should live and political issues. Um, I, I read this, this fascinating book, uh, The Murder of Professor Schlicht.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  Which is about, yeah, if you haven't heard, it's a great book. I have not heard it. Yeah, maybe you could have the Edmonds, I think, is the author. You might want to have him on. But anyway, I'm prompting, I'm praising someone else's book instead of my own. I'm a bad author. But, but the, it's about the murder of a member of the Vienna Circle, which if for our readers don't know, was a movement to try to purify philosophy by basing philosophy on direct observations and the methodology of natural science and pure math and pure set theory. And I learned about logical positivism as course as a graduate student, but I learned it as, well, it's a, logical positivism is a movement in the philosophy of science. Mm hmm.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  It's a theory about how science works. And also, it's a, it's a theory about meaning, about which phrases are meaningful and which ones are meaningless. It turns out the original logical positivists were extremely political. And they were defending logical positivism as a way of combating what they saw as the obscurantism of fascism. And a member of the Vienna Circle was murdered, Professor Schlicht, by one of his students. Probably the reason was that the student believed rightly or wrongly that the woman he was in love with was in love with Professor Schlicht. And so he killed her as part of a love tri- killed him as part of a love triangle.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  But at his trial, he said, his defense was, my mind was warped by the perverted Jewish philosophy of logical positivism. And the, the court was actually pretty sympathetic and he got a very light sentence. But it just shows you how deeply political all these things were. And then when this movement came to the United States, because people were afraid to be outspokenly political and some of these guys were actual communists, all of a sudden logical positivism began to be treated as this purely semantic theory and a theory about the philosophy of science. And its role in trying to combat fascism was forgotten. So I think we forget a lot of these things, that philosophy has always been political.

• 25:41Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, but the sort of self-image these days of Western analytic philosophy is as this bloodless analytic logical structure, right? And I would not be surprised if that's a big part of resistance to other kinds of philosophy, because there's definitely a stereotype out there that, you know, in Western philosophy, we prove theorems; in Eastern philosophy, you write poems and tell stories.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, and but it's interesting, because the more I learn about the history of both Western philosophy and Chinese philosophy, the more I'm struck by the similarity. So, you know, it is true that if you read the sayings of Confucius, which we know them in English as the Analects, or the Tao Te Ching attributed to Lao Tzu, so these are two foundational documents, one of Confucianism, one of Taoism, they seem very different from a lot of Western philosophy. But the Analects of Confucius is written in the form of aphorisms. The writing structure in many ways is like Wittgenstein, either of the Tractatus or the

• 26:53Speaker 03

  Philosophical Investigations. And, you know, a lot of Chinese philosophy is in the form of dialogue, like Plato wrote dialogue, or like, you know, Berkeley wrote dialogues, or, you know, Hume wrote dialogues. And of course, there are essays in Chinese philosophy, just like there are essays in Western philosophy. And there's philosophy done in the form of commentary on classic works, like Aquinas, the Summa Theologiae is, it's a very systematic work, but a lot of it is citing classic texts and giving you a commentary on what they really mean, and you find similar things in the Chinese tradition. Uh, another, I mean, you, I know you had my friend Edward Ted Slingerland on.

• 27:38Speaker 03

  And, you know, he was talking about u way or non-action. You know, and the, you know, the, it is true that in a lot of Chinese philosophy, both Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, you find an emphasis on spontaneous correct action, sometimes called non-action, where you spontaneously do the right thing without having to think about it. Whereas people like Socrates in the Western traditions say, well, look, you can't even be courageous, or you can't be a good friend if you don't have a conscious definition of friendship or courage. And so it seems like they're very different.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  On the other hand, in both traditions, you find it very clearly in thinkers like Aristotle, that the highest virtue is ultimately something that you become so habituated to, that you do it spontaneously.

• 28:32Sean Carroll?

  Hmm.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  You know, it's the person who's truly just gives you the correct change, even if they know they could get away with giving you the incorrect change and ripping you off, and they don't have to think about that, like, ooh, should I give them the right change or not? They just do it. Well, that's u way. That's non-action. That's spontaneously doing the right thing. So I'm saying, when you get into the details of the thinkers, I find there's a lot more, there's what my teacher Lee Yearley referred to as similarities in differences and differences in similarities. So you see things that look kind of different, but then when you dig into them, you find these interesting similarities. Or you find things that look similar, but then when you dig into them, they're interestingly different.

• 29:18Sean Carroll?

  I guess that was what I was getting at, and maybe you just put it as well as it could be put, but I'll sort of ask in a slightly different way, just in case. Um, there's a set of things we think of as the foundational subfields in Western philosophy. Metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, aesthetics, maybe. Are there the analogues of all of those in Chinese philosophy, Indian philosophy elsewhere?

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Well, I think you find the closest analogues actually in Indian philosophy. And so anybody who bothers to look at Indian philosophy, it's stunning. You find epistemology, you find metaphysics, you find philosophy of language, you just need to look for it. In the case of Chinese philosophy, I think there's less interest in the philosophy of language, but there is some interest in it. And so there's this ancient school called the School of Names. And they're interesting because they defend these weird paradoxical statements like white horses are not horses. Or, and it's, you know, only recently, because

• 30:27Speaker 03

  one big issue is, is the School of Names like a serious philosophical school? I mean, are they just, are they, you could compare them in some ways to the Greek sophists, right? So the sophists, on the one hand, clearly you have sophists, and probably Gorgias was like this, who were just like, I will teach you to defend anything, no matter how crazy it is. That's my job. I'm a rhetoric teacher, and I'll let you defend, I'll teach you how to defend anything. Then you had thinkers like Protagoras, who I think had serious philosophical views, and recent thinkers like Richard Rorty have tried to resurrect the reputation of thinkers like Protagoras and say they're serious thinkers. So the

• 31:10Speaker 03

  analogous question for the School of Names is, were these guys just like messing around, like I'll defend anything, or were they making a serious point? I ended up thinking they were making a serious point. And just to give you an example, I recently translated for the third edition of Ivanhoe and Van Norden Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, some more selections from the School of Names. And there's this one work, it's very Wittgensteinian, I think, in its format. It's just a series of kind of propositions that you're asked to think about and examine how they relate to one another. And it begins by saying,

• 31:52Speaker 03

  anything you can refer to is a referent, but reference is not a referent.

• 32:01Speaker 03

  So anything you can refer to is a reference. So it, a book, well, a book, I can refer to a book, or I can refer to you, I can refer to me. But the act of referring itself, how do I refer to that? Because I need to use the mechanism of reference in order to identify anything. But then it looks like I can't refer to reference, because I need to already know how to use reference to identify reference. And I think when you read this in the light of some of the other things the School of Names says, I think they're making a deep point that was also made by both Wittgenstein and Quine in different ways, which is that there's no way to fix the reference of terms,

• 32:45Speaker 03

  because you already need to have the mechanism of reference settled in order to use the mechanism of reference. But then you can't use the mechanism of reference to clarify reference. It's already got to be deployed. And so it's only in language that you can refer to things, but then it's too late to clarify ultimately what the reference of terms is. And so this would explain where Taoist thinkers like Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi come from. Because the opening of the Tao Te Ching, the classic of the way and virtue, which is attributed to this thinker Lao Tzu, it begins by saying, "A way can be spoken of, but it won't be a constant way.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  A name can be named, but it won't be a constant name." And what does that mean? It could just be developing this point the School of Name came up with, that you can't ultimately pin down the reference of terms. Why is that so important? Well, think about our society. Is abortion murder? Is a fetus a human being? What non-question begging way do we have of deciding that? Or Socrates' question, what is piety? What is courage? What is justice? Assumes you can pin down the meaning of these terms. What if you decide, well, you can't? But you have to philosophize anyway, but without a way to precisely pin down the

• 34:12Speaker 03

  meaning of terms. So you get this debate between Confucians and Taoists, which is actually influenced by the philosophy of language. But again, if you just pick up the Tao Te Ching and it says, oh, a way that can be spoken of is not a constant way. Ooh, groovy, man. Oh, wow. Let's get high and groove on that. But then you read it in the light of this interesting, you know, debate in the philosophy of language. It turns out to be a very sophisticated philosophical statement.

• 34:37Speaker 04

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• 34:58Sean Carroll?

  So it's kind of prefiguring a kind of Russellian, Godelian self-referential paradox situation?

• 35:04Speaker 03

  I think so. Yeah, that's what I'm starting to think. And again, it does make sense. I think the, a traditional account of the history of Chinese philosophy presents the, sorry, my cat just got on me and I'm like, what were you just, what were you just in, cat?

• 35:21Sean Carroll?

  We're all in favor of that. That's okay.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, cat. We like cats, even if they're a little smelly like my cat. So, but a traditional account of the development of Chinese philosophy presents Confucius and Lao Tzu as near contemporaries who founded respectively Confucianism and Taoism. Now there's a bunch of problems with that view, not the least of which is that Taoism isn't an organized movement until long after Lao Tzu is gone, if he existed at all. But another problem with it, I think, is if you read the Tao Te Ching, it's really a work that is responding to this later crisis in the philosophy of language raised by the School of Name. Names and you can't understand what they're doing unless you read it in that

• 36:07Speaker 03

  context. So but that ends up being a little controversial because when I was doing a documentary in China a couple of couple of years ago, everybody kept saying, well, doesn't Lao Tzu start the Chinese philosophical tradition? And I would say, no, I don't think it comes much later. So so sometimes you end up in this weird situation where you're arguing with people in China who have a more traditional interpretation of the tradition. But then you're also arguing with people in the West who don't even want to acknowledge that this stuff is philosophical.

• 36:40Sean Carroll?

  I like that example. It's sort of a worked example of the Chinese tradition and the Western tradition at dealing with similar problems in similar ways. Another example I really wanted to get out there that you cover in your book is Rene Descartes versus Nagasena, I guess it is, on the notion of the self. I'm just going to leave it to you to explain this because I loved it and I realized that, you know, maybe there's a little bit of Buddhist in me.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I think it's fascinating. One of the works that people often suggest if people say, oh, come on, give me something that I'm supposed to think is philosophical from the Indian tradition or the South Asian tradition. And the questions of King Melinda is often an example people will give. And in particular, there's what's called the chariot simile or the chariot argument. And so it the the questions of King Melinda is this purported dialogue between a Buddhist monk, usually called Nagasena, and a Greco

• 37:48Speaker 03

  Indian king, Melinda, or sometimes his name's written as Menander. And I always joke with my students that kings used to be much smarter back in the day. It's hard to imagine, no offense to the British royal family, but it's hard to imagine, you know, what is his name, King Charles, engaging in this philosophical debate, or any king, I'm not just dumping on the British royal house. But anyway, they get in this philosophical debate and the king politely greets the monk, Nagasena, and he says, what's your name, Reverend sir? And he says, well, I'm called Nagasena. But that's just a name. There is no self as such to be found.

• 38:29Speaker 03

  And the king cleverly responds by, oh, listen to this, everybody. There's no self here. Well, who have I been giving alms to when I donate to the Buddhist monastery? And I guess if I murdered you, if I killed you, it wouldn't be a murder. Because there's no self there. You know, is that right? Fair enough. Which is kind of, yeah, kind of a clever argument. And Nagasena replies, so, King, I'm sure you didn't walk here. You're very wealthy. You came in a chariot, right? And the king says, yeah, I came in a chariot. He says, what is the chariot? Is the chariot the wheels? Is the chariot the goad? Is the, the chariot, the, I forget what it's called, the part that attaches the seat to the horses?

• 39:14Speaker 03

  Uh, and the king is clever enough to say, well, no, it can't be any of those things. Because if you say it's the wheels, well, so if I replace the wheels, it's not a chariot anymore. Or if I replace the goad, it's not a chariot anymore. And then he says, is it all those things taken together? And the king is smart enough to know, well, it can't be that either. It's a tempting answer. But you think about it, you realize, well, the chariot can't be all the parts taken together. Because then if any one part changed, the chariot would be gone. And we don't think that either. And so, eventually Nagasena, then, then of course Nagasena asked, well, is the chariot something besides any of the parts?

• 39:59Speaker 03

  Well, of course not. What would it be? And so the Nagasena says, so you lied to me. You said that you came here on a chariot, but you can't tell me what a chariot is. And the king says, well, it's just that we use the word chariot in, when a certain collection of parts are present. And he said, so likewise, we use the name Nagasena when a certain collection of parts is present, but there is no thing that is Nagasena. And it's a very clever way of thinking about the self. And so it's just we have this linguistic convention of identifying certain things in certain contexts, but that doesn't mean that

• 40:37Speaker 03

  there's a self thing that is the identity. And later in the dialogue, the king says, "Well, isn't there a a perceiver that is the thing that has the experiences, that hears sounds, that sees sights?" And Nagasena gives this clever argument and he says, "Well, so you mean like, is there something in a person that sees out the eyes like we see out a window?" And the king says, "Yeah, yeah, kind of like that." He says, "Okay, wouldn't you see better if we ripped the windows out?" You know, "So what, wouldn't you see better if you rip your eyes out?" "Well, no, of course not." He says, "Well, then it doesn't seem

• 41:21Speaker 03

  like the perceiver's doing anything. It seems like the eyes interacting with visual forms create the phenomenon of vision, but that phenomenon of vision is analogous to like a wheel. It's just a one of those parts that we label Nagasena or we label King Melinda." So it's a really powerful to read this in conjunction with Descartes, say, Meditations I and II, because you read them together and you realize, you know what, maybe the arguments that Descartes are giving for the existence of the self aren't as compelling as we thought they were. And this work written in a different culture actually makes that very explicit for us when we bring them into dialogue.

• 42:06Sean Carroll?

  Could you remind us of the dates of Nagasena and Descartes respectively?

• 42:10Speaker 03

  There, well, yeah, Descartes is one of the, as you know, one of the founders of modern Western philosophy. So we're talking like 17th century. And the, one of the, the interesting but puzzling things about a lot of South Asian philosophy is they're not that interested in dates. And so there's some dispute about exactly, you know, when this work was around. But it was, we're talking about something that, you know, would have been in existence certainly by third or fourth century of the common era. So and it may, it may date much earlier than that, but again, it existed, you know, hundreds of years before Descartes and we're seeing a sophisticated philosophical argument. It's hard, and if somebody looks at the questions of King Melinda and says, eh, I don't think

• 42:55Speaker 03

  it's philosophy. It's like, well, you don't know what philosophy is. I don't know what to tell you besides take an intro level philosophy course and learn what philosophy is.

• 43:03Sean Carroll?

  Is it, is there any fairness to the idea, or am I just warped by having read some Descartes, that Western philosophy really loves to find unshakable foundations for things? And Eastern philosophy is maybe a little bit happier, living in, uh, motion and blurriness?

• 43:23Speaker 03

  I, I think there's something to that. I mean, the, uh, I mean, this gets into really big issues about the history of Western philosophy, but I, what I often tell my students is a major trend in early modern Western philosophy was the effort to find foundations for knowledge.

• 43:44Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  Maybe that foundation is going to be something that's a, a, almost like a geometric truth, like, or that's, or that just you know, without having to know anything else about the world, like, I think, therefore I am, you know? Or maybe it's going to be some direct reports of sense data, like Hume's, uh, impressions which lead to ideas. But either way, we're going to find firm foundations for knowledge. And I think part of the reason for that was that people like Descartes and even a few centuries later, Hume, are living in eras where so much has been called into question. You know, there, it's at the beginning of the modern era. Aristotelian science has been, by the time

• 44:28Speaker 03

  of, of Hume, it's been overthrown completely by Newtonianism. Uh, the divine right of kings is increasingly called into question. And so people are looking for some firm foundations for knowledge so they can never be deceived again. But again, similarities within differences, differences within similarities. When you look at, I think, both Plato and Aristotle for all their differences, I think they take it for granted that not everybody is going to be able to understand the foundations of knowledge. You know, I think that Aristotle says you really aren't qualified to study ethics unless you've been raised in the right habits.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  And unless you're like in middle age, you know, that's the point at which you could do it. And I think that's something that you also find in Chinese philosophy. So, um, I mean, like, what would we say to someone, for example? You know, suppose we give an example and we say, well, like, for example, it would be wrong to, you know, punch your mother or father just because you're angry with them as an adult. And somebody said, I don't see what's wrong with that. Do we really need to continue the argument at this point? Like, if this, but we're like, well, you know, you're a barbarian and, you know, you don't understand basic claims about ethics. What would be the point of continuing the discussion?

• 45:53Speaker 03

  And it's interesting because I think this in some ways is similar to natural science. I mean, it's, you know, there are people today who are like, well, you know, I know better than epidemiologists about the safety of vaccines.

• 46:07Sean Carroll?

  Ah, yes.

• 46:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, well, did you spend, you know, four years studying biology and then six years getting a doctorate in epidemiology? I don't need any of that stuff. Like, you know, I, I just, you know, I know this. Or there, there's, there's a great documentary on Netflix, Be, uh, Behind the Curve, about contemporary flat-earthers.

• 46:27Sean Carroll?

  Oh, right, right.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, and there are people who, uh, literally believe the earth is flat and they think the belief the earth is spherical is, uh, some kind of conspiracy. And at a certain point, they're just not responsive to, you know, evidence and arguments.

• 46:42Sean Carroll?

  Sure.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  I, I say that, although ironically. In the documentary, it ends where they could come up with a really good and actually quite reasonable experiment for proving whether the earth is spherical and their own results show the earth is spherical. And they end it like they're just baffled, like, wait, wait, why is the laser not going through the hole? That would only happen if the earth were curved. That doesn't make any sense. But, but anyway, but the, but the point is, in both science and ethics, at a certain level, you have to accept basic facts like one plus one equals two. You know, or, you know, here's a Petri dish, you know, here is the, the bacteria dying in the presence of penicillin. You can see it.

• 47:26Speaker 03

  If you don't accept these things, we can't have a scientific discussion. It's the same thing in ethics. There are certain basic things you have to accept. And so I think there are Western philosophers who are like, you gotta prove everything. There has to be an absolute foundation. But I think we've kind of learned that project or trying to prove everything hasn't been that successful.

• 47:45Sean Carroll?

  Yeah. I'm certainly on board. And I'm wondering if the Buddhists were on to emergence long before the Westerners were. This is something I'm very interested in understanding better myself right now, but the idea that more is different in some way, that, you know, a collection of things has a essence to itself that is not to be found in the simple collection of individual things.

• 48:06Speaker 03

  Well, I think you find in the Buddhist tradition, a, a vast variety of perspectives. And so the earliest view, which I think is a view you find in the questions of King Melinda, is they give this view of the five skandhas in Sanskrit, which you just translate as aggregates or heaps. And it's just a theory about what are the five most fundamental kinds of things that exist? And they say, well, there's material form, and then there's four kinds of mental states. And we could go into what they are, but it's not crucial to the, if you found a sixth one, they wouldn't be like, oh, no, our theory's falling apart. They're like, okay, great, there's a sixth one, or, or maybe there's only three. Okay, so what?

• 48:48Speaker 03

  But the point is, there are just these transient physical and mental states, and there are no cells that have. The transient physical or mental states. It doesn't explain anything to add a self on top of the transient physical and mental states, which is interesting because Descartes says in the meditation, if you ask him like, well, why does there have to be a substance that has properties or qualities? His response is, well, nobody doubts that. Well, actually, they do.

• 49:18Sean Carroll?

  Especially Descartes, who is very good at doubting things.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, but he doesn't. He says, well, we can't doubt that. But then in other parts of the Buddhist tradition, especially in the Chinese Buddhist tradition, that you get in Hua Yan Buddhism, this notion that things are defined by their relational qualities. And in a sense, it's turtles all the way down. In the sense, they're just things in relation to other things, but those things are defined by their own relational qualities. And there's no ultimate substratum, which is the reality that everything else is a quality of or is dependent upon. And so one way to think about this, I know that's kind of abstract, but

• 50:07Speaker 03

  one way to think about it, I use to explain it with my students is, what am I? I'm like, well, I'm a professor at Vassar. That's a relational quality. Okay, but I'm also, I'm a husband. That's a relational quality. I'm a father relational quality. I'm an American relational quality. Well, well, well, come on. But you're, if nothing else, you're a human being, right? Like, yeah, and that's a relational quality. It's because I relate to a species that I'm a, a human being. Like, well, but you're mass energy. Yes. And what we know in physics is that any two particles that have interreacted have this spooky quantum entanglement. And so, and I exist as a physical object only because I'm in an atmosphere

• 50:49Speaker 03

  and I've got a gravitational field pulling me down on the earth. And there's this causal history that connects me to the big bang. Even as a physical object, it seems like my mass energy, as mass energy, my qualities are relational. So the Buddhists would say, see, we told you. There's nothing to things besides it's relational qualities and it's relational qualities all the way down. They and again, there's an interesting dialogue. You can find this if you're curious in T. Wald and Van Norden readings in later Chinese philosophy. It's called a rafter dialogue. And it's a dialogue where someone ends up defending the claim that a rafter

• 51:29Speaker 03

  is the building, that it's the rafter of, but the building also is the rafter. And why do they say this? The idea is, well, what makes the rafter a rafter is the role it plays in the building. But the building, what is a building besides the parts that make it up? And if you take away one rafter, it's not the same building anymore because you you've changed its identity. And I say, like, what's the identity of the building supposed to be? Are we supposed to imagine this ghostly, you know, building spirit that kind of floats around all the parts? No, the building is just the parts. But then the building's identity depends on the parts. But what makes a rafter a rafter instead

• 52:11Speaker 03

  of a bench, or a teeter totter, or kindling, is the role it plays. And he goes the in the dialogue, this is from the Buddhist philosopher Fadzong, he goes through various objections and answers them. It reminds you a lot of, in style, of something like the Parmenides of Plato. Yeah. Because very detailed metaphysical dialogue requires a lot of thought to understand. And my my friend Nicholas Jones has a book coming out, I think it's coming out from Oxford on the philosophy of Fadzong, where he he talks about this.

• 52:44Speaker 04

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• 53:08Sean Carroll?

  Well, you're bringing up a point which I think might be a kind of lowbrow but important reason that people don't embrace non-Western philosophies, just because there's too much of it. And there's a lot of little subdivisions of it. So, you know, within Chinese philosophy, I think the big three are supposed to be Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. But like you say, even Buddhism, you know, has many, many little sects. And there's a lot more than those three, right? There's Moism and Legalism and so forth. Can you help out the novice who sort of wants to start thinking about these in terms of, is there an overarching

• 53:49Sean Carroll?

  organization that they can try to grasp onto some small pieces of?

• 53:55Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I've written, and colleagues of mine have written a lot, to try to make things more accessible to people. So I mentioned earlier, PJ Ivanhoe and I have written readings in early Chinese philosophy, which is now in its third edition. I've written a secondary book to go with that, Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy. Justin T. Wald and I did an anthology, Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, which covers the later tradition. And Justin T. Wald and Steve Engel wrote a book on the Neo-Confucian philosophical tradition, explaining

• 54:35Speaker 03

  it. So these are some of the places you could get started. And you've also, I think, indirectly referred to my recent book, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto, where I both kind of lay out the case for including the less commonly taught philosophies in the Western philosophy curriculum, and also for answering some of the tedious but, you know, continually repeated arguments against doing this, and then giving some examples of interesting ways that other kinds of philosophical traditions can be brought into dialogue. And we talked about some of these, like bringing Descartes into dialogue with Nagasena. One thing...

• 55:20Speaker 03

  I think it might be, you know, I always like to mention to my students is I say, I'm looking out in this classroom of students and somewhere, maybe not in, maybe in this classroom, but maybe not, there's gonna be the next Plato and the next Hypatia and the next Malcolm X, you know, and the next Nagasena. And how do I know that? Because philosophy develops in times of crisis. When people say, what is going on in the world? How do I fix it? And there's this stereotype, I'm sure you've encountered it too, where, oh yeah, philosophy's okay, but it's just something you BS about when you have nothing better to do.

• 56:03Speaker 03

  But people like Plato says explicitly in the seventh letter, which I think is either authentic, or at least I think it's a view that people regarded as a plausible interpretation of the Platonic tradition, this seventh letter of Plato. He says, "I was led to philosophize by the corruption I saw in Athens and trying to figure out, how do we solve this problem? How do we get people to be virtuous?" And Confucius and Lao Tzu and the Daoists like Mengzi and Zhuangzi, they were led to philosophize because their society was in a state of crisis in the spring and autumn and the warring states period. And likewise, the Buddha famously started to philosophize

• 56:44Speaker 03

  because he discovered the problem of human suffering and wanted to address it. So I'm looking forward to the next generation of philosophers who I think are going to be really impressive because they're gonna be dealing with all these real life issues.

• 56:58Sean Carroll?

  Well, this, that's a great point. It is something I wanted to touch on anyway, which is the tendency in modern Western philosophy, you know, analytic philosophy is the dominant school of thought. They don't even wanna read continental philosophers, right? Much less philosophers from other countries. I mean, there, there has been this urge to make it a little bit dry and almost mathematical. But you're one who is encouraged not only reaching out to other cultures, but also just sort of a re-engagement with big questions of meaning of life and our purpose for being here.

• 57:33Speaker 03

  Exactly, and this is why the title of my book, Taking Back Philosophy, it's taking it back in two senses. Taking it back to the earlier periods when philosophy was openly multicultural, when people like Leibniz read Chinese philosophy and were very excited about it and wanted to include it in the curriculum. But it's also taking back philosophy to its roots as something that is deeply political and also deeply concerned with, you know, how one should live. I heard a really interesting talk a few years ago where someone was talking about the philosophy of mind and it was related to the issues that are raised by Descartes. But, you know, why is Descartes doing what Descartes is doing?

• 58:17Speaker 03

  Well, for one thing, Descartes wants to make the new science politically safe by explaining it's different from theology. It's not a threat to theology because the new science studies extended reality, that is to say, matter, whereas theology is about the soul and, you know, there's an opening letter, I think it's in, it's either the Meditations or the Discourse on Method to the professors at what is now the Sorbonne, asking for their support and saying, you know, nothing I'm saying is contrary to the teachings of the Church. And as I was saying earlier, Descartes also wants a firm foundation for knowledge

• 58:58Speaker 03

  so we can never be tricked again and make mistakes about physics. So there's a real clear agenda here. But anyway, a few years ago, I heard that it's a really impressive talk in the philosophy of mind and it was almost dizzying in the level of like, argumentation. And at the end, I said, well, this is fascinating. I think I understand it, but could I ask, what do you, why is it so important to understand what mind is, right? So you're arguing that, you know, terms like consciousness are non-referring. Are you concerned about obscurantism, um, leading to bad consequences of life or anti-scientism or something like that? Why is this important to you?

• 59:41Speaker 03

  And the very brilliant philosopher said, well, the basic point I was trying to make is that the best referent of the phrase mental state is non-referring. That's all I'm arguing.

• 59:54Speaker 03

  And you know, if that's what philosophy is, I can totally understand why people are like, "Well, why should I take a course in this?"

• 1:00:00Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:01Speaker 03

  And why should we be funding this? But this is not what philosophy has been for most of its history. And yeah, I want to take philosophy back to what it's always been traditionally across cultures. It's concerned with how you should live, how you should organize society.

• 1:00:16Sean Carroll?

  I remember one of my senior colleagues, quite senior, in the philosophy department, telling the story of when he was in graduate school, which must have been late 60s, early 70s. And he and his fellow graduate students were really interested in liberation, right? It was that era. And one of their senior professors was chastising them and saying, "You're all wasting your time. Why don't you work on something serious and important like proper names?"

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly, exactly. There's an anecdote, maybe you've heard this, and I'm afraid I'm going to blank on which famous figure this was. But some famous philosopher of language said, "In this course, we're going to be dealing with the nature of pronouns and reference and also the meaning of life." And at the end of the course, one of the students said, "You said we're dealing with meaning and reference and the meaning of life. We never got to the meaning of life." And he said, "Oh, so here's the word life. And so the meaning of life will be the Frigayen sense that connects this to its reference." There you go.

• 1:01:23Sean Carroll?

  Yep, okay.

• 1:01:24Speaker 03

  And I never knew whether that was intentionally like a spoof of like, "That's all there is to the question of the meaning of life is a question in the philosophy of language." Or whether he thought, "This is a really serious answer. We solved the problem." But either way, it's kind of sad.

• 1:01:41Sean Carroll?

  I have to tell you yet one more anecdote, because I think I've never told this anecdote. But my first ever philosophy course as an undergraduate, just Philosophy 1, very good teacher who gave us Plato, Aristotle, etc. At the very last class meeting at the end of the semester, one of the students, kind of as a little teasing joke, wrote on the blackboard, "What is the meaning of life?" And we were waiting for the professor to sort of notice this and tell us what the meaning of life was. But for the whole class, the last meeting of the class, he never noticed the question. And I kind of think that maybe that's a metaphor for something.

• 1:02:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Sean Carroll?

  I'm not sure.

• 1:02:19Speaker 03

  Well, I was giving a talk and I won't mention which doctoral program it was, but it was a top doctoral program in the United States. I gave a tour, a lecture tour of top doctoral programs a few years ago. And it's a sign of progress that people were interested in having me come to talk to places like Harvard and Yale and other top doctoral programs like Rutgers. But anyway, one of them I was at and a bright graduate student in the audience said, "I was really interested in this thing you said about how philosophy can be relevant to how you live your life. Can you tell me some more about that? Because I'd never heard about this before." And, you know, she was dead serious. She was like, "That's really fascinating. Philosophy can be relevant to your life."

• 1:03:00Speaker 03

  And so, yeah, and it's, again, there's, uh, if there's, probably if you're listening to this, you're not a hardcore skeptic about philosophy, but if you, if you want an argument for addressing people who are or relatives or things, you're like, "Wow, why is that important?" It's like, you have opinions about what kind of things exist in the universe. You have opinions about what kind of things are right and wrong, or whether there's any facts about what's right and wrong. And I'll guarantee you, your reasons for believing this are just recycling something some philosopher said a few centuries ago. And the question is whether or not you're going to be self-conscious about that.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  Uh, one of my, my siblings, um, got a degree in math and, you know, he's always telling me like, "Well, philosophy really, you know, is, there's nothing to philosophy that isn't covered by natural science." And I said, "Yeah, the reason you're saying that is because in graduate school, you had some professors who encountered logical positivism. And you're just repeating arguments that were given by logical positivists." And by the way, my, my brother is very conservative. Most of those guys were communists. Which doesn't make them wrong, but I'm just saying, you might want to think about like whose ideas you're repeating, and most people think that logical positivism has the distinction

• 1:04:23Speaker 03

  of being one of the few philosophical positions to have been definitively refuted.

• 1:04:27Sean Carroll?

  Not everyone does, but yeah, that is a position. You know, it brings me to something where I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you make a great point that you can elaborate on maybe, that both, it's true that both philosophy is especially good at interrogating presuppositions. And if you believe that, then it should follow that philosophy itself should welcome alternate perspectives to be brought into dialogue with it so they can improve its own knowledge of itself.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  Exactly, and it's surprising how few people, even philosophers who really emphasize dialogue, take this point seriously. So I'm a big fan, we were talking a little bit about, you know, the way people in the English-speaking world often ignore continental philosophy. But I think Gottinger and Habermas are really fascinating thinkers, and I'm influenced by, you know, Gottingerian hermeneutics in a lot of ways. But Gottinger really showed no interest in learning about other philosophical traditions. Rorty was very influenced, I admitted he was very influenced by Gottinger, but again, you know, didn't show much interest in learning about non-Western traditions.

• 1:05:43Speaker 03

  Alistair McIntyre, who just passed away, was one of the few people who really emphasized the importance of philosophy as a dialogue through a tradition. But McIntyre made clear, you have no reason for believing in your tradition unless it has engaged in dialogue with other traditions, and can articulately explain why these other traditions are not superior to your tradition. And sometimes when one tradition encounters another, and his favorite example is Christianity and both Platonism and Aristotelianism in the form of Augustine and Aquinas, the tradition is actually improved by...

• 1:06:26Speaker 03

  Producing a synthesis with another intellectual tradition. So one of the things I always admired about McIntyre is he's one of the few philosophers to emphasize dialogue, who actually took this seriously when it comes to engaging with other philosophical traditions. And I think we can learn an awful lot. You know, I've, one of the things I have, I have a lecture, video lecture series on Chinese philosophy online. If you just look up my name on YouTube, you can find it. And one of my lectures is about the problem of weakness of will. And I think that the Chinese later Confucian philosopher, Ju Shi, has a really sophisticated interpretation of how weakness of will occurs.

• 1:07:07Speaker 03

  And I find it much more clear than the view I find in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. But in fairness, when I've explained Ju Shi's views to some audiences, they said, I think that's what Aristotle's saying. And I said, well, maybe you think it now.

• 1:07:24Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:24Speaker 03

  Because you've had it clearly explained by Ju Shi, but that's okay if now you think, oh, maybe that's what he was saying all along. But that's just interesting to me that people could hear an exegesis of Ju Shi, which is clearer in my mind than Aristotle and decide retroactively, you know what? I think that's what Aristotle was trying to say, just not very clearly.

• 1:07:44Sean Carroll?

  Well, maybe this is a good place to wrap up. I wanted to give you a chance to talk about, I think the listeners might be surprised to hear this, but the geopolitical implications of these ideas. We did have a conversation a couple of years ago on the podcast with Shadi Barch, who wrote Plato Goes to China.

• 1:08:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:04Sean Carroll?

  And it was a wonderful point that she made about how there's all these people in China reading Western philosophy, because they think that they need to understand Western philosophy to understand modern Westerners, because you would need to understand Chinese philosophy to understand modern Chinese people. So they presume the West is like that, even though maybe it's not.

• 1:08:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I, I think there is something, I mean, if...

• 1:08:33Speaker 03

  You wanna understand Western thought, I think an important point to realize is, and I know there are exceptions, but by and large, what you find in the West is an assumption that what's real is in some way individual. And so Aristotle in the metaphysics, you can tell he's puzzled by the, this notion of what an individual is, but he seems committed to thinking, well, but there has to be something that's an ultimate individual. And he, in metaphysics, he kind of wrestles with it and says, well, maybe it's things like, you know, dogs and cats and tables and chairs, but then he's like, well, but then these things are just matter that has a form, but if a matter doesn't have any

• 1:09:18Speaker 03

  form, it's prime matter, but what would that be? If it didn't, what would matter be without any form? And how could a form exist unless it was a form of something? But he just keeps thinking it has to be individuals out there. And the, again, there are exceptions in the Chinese tradition, but the most common view is to say, well, things are interconnected. Things are part of an interconnected whole. And there are different, we saw one extreme view you get in Huayan Buddhism, which is like, things are just, you know, relations relating to other relations and it's relations all the way down. But that's one extreme view. You could have less extreme views, but still a common view is we're all interconnected and that's kind of our starting point.

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  And I think some of the differences we see between Western philosophy in the, or Western thought in the contemporary world and Chinese thought is a difference in assumptions about, are we radically separate individuals? And so the problem is to explain why we should care about anybody else at all, since we're all fundamentally metaphysically distinct. Or do we, as our starting point, well, no, of course, you're part of a community. That's the kind of creature you are. And then the question is to explain, like, why should we allow you any deviations from what's good for the community? Because after all, you only exist as a part of the community. And so, and I think that's a, a really interesting difference that does influence how people see the world in a really fundamental way.

• 1:10:45Sean Carroll?

  Well, and it goes back to yet another interview that we did with Joe Henrick. You know, he's the psychologist at Harvard who talks about weird societies, Western educated, industrial. And we are not only different from the rest of the world, but we're different sort of systematically in one direction. You know, we're outliers, and I think this individuality, stress on individuality is one of them, and that might be something where it's an obstacle for us to understand other people who don't quite think that way.

• 1:11:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, and even things like, you know, the nature of democracy is something that, you know, it's hard to realize that democracy has only been taken seriously as a way to run a nation state for a few hundred years. And many people have pointed out that in the republic, Plato gives a frighteningly prescient account of how a democracy will transform into a tyranny because a rich person will come along and present himself as the person who's going to be the hero who will represent the interests of the masses.

• 1:11:57Sean Carroll?

  That would never happen.

• 1:11:59Speaker 03

  Right. And it's just, I mean, I'm not even close to the first person to point out how scary it is that Plato, you know, predicted this. And in China, it's interesting, you get different views. And so on the one hand, you get some people who are actual big fans of Trump in China. And I think part of what's going on is Trump presents himself as attacking the radical left. And so in China, if you say you like Trump, it's a way of identifying yourself as opposed to communism without coming out against the Chinese government.

• 1:12:41Speaker 03

  But on the other hand, you also get people in China who say, well, look, this just shows why we don't want to have a Western-style liberal democracy. And even people who are unhappy with the Chinese government in China, there are some of them who are like, oh yeah, I want to have exactly what the United States, the United Kingdom and France have, you know, a contested, multi-party democracy. Most of them are like, no, we don't want to have that. You know, we just want to have, you know, intellectuals should be able to speak more freely about the problems in society. And Huang Zhongxi, who is a political, Chinese political philosopher, writing at the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, when China was conquered

• 1:13:26Speaker 03

  by the Manchus and is trying to diagnose what went wrong with government in his era. He basically says, what's really important is that intellectuals have to have a way of freely telling the government what's going wrong. And so that's a, that it vision of how government's supposed to work as opposed to a democracy, you know, where you have the average person, you know, voting on issues about geopolitics or economics they don't understand, like, oh, I like tariffs because that means I won't have to pay any taxes. That sounds great. You know, this, some people in China are like, see, this is why we don't want to have this kind of democracy.

• 1:14:02Sean Carroll?

  Well, I think you've done a good job in giving us the idea that perhaps on its best days, philosophy might have something to do with the meaning of life and how to be good people. So Brian Van Norden, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

• 1:14:14Speaker 03

  Thank you for your great questions. I enjoyed being here.

• 1:14:41Speaker 00

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