History of Philosophy | Open Access Articles

Tian As Cosmos In Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianism, Stephen C. Angle

Stephen C. Angle

“Tian” is central to the metaphysics, cosmology, and ethics of the eight-hundred-year-long Chinese philosophical tradition we call “Neo-Confucianism,” but there is considerable confusion over what tian means—confusion which is exacerbated by its standard translation into English as “Heaven.” This essay analyzes the meaning of tian in the works of the most influential Neo-Confucian, Zhu Xi (1130-1200), presents a coherent interpretation that unifies the disparate aspects of the term’s meaning, and argues that “cosmos” does an excellent job of capturing this meaning, and therefore should be adopted as our translation of tian.

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Language And The Structure Of Berkeley's World, Kenneth L. Pearce

Kenneth L Pearce

Berkeley's philosophy is meant to be a defense of commonsense. However, Berkeley's claim that the ultimate constituents of physical reality are fleeting, causally passive ideas appears to be radically at odds with commonsense. In particular, such a theory seems unable to account for the robust structure which commonsense (and Newtonian physics) takes the world to exhibit. The problem of structure, as I understand it, includes the problem of how qualities can be grouped by their co-occurrence in a single enduring object and how these enduring objects can bear spatiotemporal, causal, and other relations to one another. I argue that Berkeley's …

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Posibilidad Y Principio De Plenitud En Tomás De Aquino, Santiago Argüello

Santiago Argüello

No abstract provided.

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Full-Text Articles in History of Philosophy

Tian As Cosmos In Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianism, Stephen C. Angle

Stephen C. Angle

Language And The Structure Of Berkeley's World, Kenneth L. Pearce

Kenneth L Pearce

Posibilidad Y Principio De Plenitud En Tomás De Aquino, Santiago Argüello

Santiago Argüello