Written by the Han philosopher Xu Gan (A.D. 170-217), Balanced Discourses is an inquiry into the causes of political breakdown. It provides a unique contemporary account of the social, intellectual, and cosmological factors that Xu Gan identified as having precipitated the demise of the Han order. This edition of Zhonglun (or Balanced Discourses) contains the original Chinese text with annotations and, on facing pages, an English translation also accompanied by annotations. This collection of essays spans a range of topics, from (...) Confucian cultivation to calendrical calculation. Xu's perspectives are of not only historical but also philosophical interest, for they reveal his belief in a special correlative bond that should exist between names and actualities and his understanding of what happens when that bond is broken. The translator, John Makeham, argues in his introduction that the essays display the same quality of balance that Xu Gan sees as essential to social and political equilibrium. (shrink)

The doyen of living English philosophers, by these reflections, took hold of and changed the outlook of a good many other philosophers, if not quite enough. He did so, essentially, by assuming that talk of freedom and responsibility is talk not of facts or truths, in a certain sense, but of our attitudes. His more explicit concern was to look again at the question of whether determinism and freedom are consistent with one another -- by shifting attention to certain personal (...) rather than moral attitudes, first of all gratitude and resentment. In the end, he arrived at a kind of Compatibilist or, as he says, Optimist conclusion. That is no doubt a recommendation but not the largest recommendation of this splendidly rich piece of philosophy. (shrink)

This paper discusses the problem of destructive emotions by comparing Eastern and Western assumptions about emotions. In the case of anger, for example, Eastern thinkers straightforwardly posit that it is entirely possible to cultivate attitudes in which anger is naturally absent. In the West, by contrast, it is generally assumed that anger is a “basic” emotion that can be suppressed or managed, but not eliminated from one's basic emotional constitution. Thus, in the Eastern way of thinking, emotion is a force (...) that more easily harmonizes with rational approaches to life and to the specific problems in life. (shrink)