Topic
28 readings
Language and interpretation
Topic · 28 readings
How do words, texts and practices become intelligible?
A place to begin
Guided course · Module 1 · Lesson 3
How do we know what earlier thinkers thought?
Papyrus Prisse shows how a work’s setting, its composition and its surviving copy can belong to different times. What can such a witness, or a translation of it, establish about what people once thought?
Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 63
Does language always work like a picture?
Wittgenstein’s early account treats a sentence as a picture of a situation; his later work looks at words in use, where requests, reports and corrections do different jobs. The lesson connects meaning with use without concluding that words can mean anything.
All readings
28 readings · Title A–Z
Guided course · Module 4 · Lesson 16
Action without forcing
The Daodejing questions fixed names and praises wuwei, acting without forcing. When does a ruler’s restraint give others room to act, and when does it become neglect or paternalism?
Guided course · Module 12 · Lesson 71
Can a tradition be reconstructed rather than preserved unchanged?
Hu Shi and Liang Shuming disagree about how a tradition should be renewed and what science, democracy and inherited moral resources contribute. The lesson also separates a philosophical proposal from state policy.
Guided course · Module 14 · Lesson 87
Can people understand one another without sharing a final answer?
Catholic teaching and British Quaker reflection give different accounts of sacramental life. The lesson keeps their disagreement real and distinguishes understanding a claim from endorsing it.
Guided course · Module 7 · Lesson 36
Debate, commentary and liberation in Tibet
Tsongkhapa and Gorampa disagree about what emptiness denies. What does their disagreement mean for ordinary objects, and what remains disputed about conventional and ultimate understanding?
Guided course · Module 8 · Lesson 42
Destiny, character and interpretation in Yoruba thought
A recorded Ifá poem and Segun Gbadegesin’s questions about destiny raise a problem about responsibility. How can choice, effort and character matter without making success or misfortune a measure of moral worth?
Guided course · Module 7 · Lesson 40
Devotion, equality and religious practice
Kabir and Guru Nanak criticize words and signs that stand in for devotion. How can communal practice express equality without proving that inequality has disappeared?
Guided course · Module 3 · Lesson 12
Does emptiness mean that nothing exists?
Nāgārjuna replies to the objection that emptiness would make change impossible: intrinsic nature, he argues, is what would rule change out. Denying intrinsic nature leaves ordinary distinctions, actions and their consequences in place.
Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 63
Does language always work like a picture?
Wittgenstein’s early account treats a sentence as a picture of a situation; his later work looks at words in use, where requests, reports and corrections do different jobs. The lesson connects meaning with use without concluding that words can mean anything.
Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 8 of 8
Does the argument undermine itself?
If the claim that everything is empty is itself empty, can it refute anything? The lesson reads the Vigrahavyāvartanī’s dilemma and Nāgārjuna’s replies, compares three readings of “I do not have any thesis” and ends with the study’s final checkpoint.
Guided course · Module 6 · Lesson 32
How can we speak about God?
For Maimonides, divine unity rules out treating God as the bearer of distinct qualities; he teaches through negation and through descriptions of divine action. Scriptural language still needs careful interpretation.
Guided course · Module 1 · Lesson 3
How do we know what earlier thinkers thought?
Papyrus Prisse shows how a work’s setting, its composition and its surviving copy can belong to different times. What can such a witness, or a translation of it, establish about what people once thought?
Guided course · Module 7 · Lesson 39
How inherited ideas become new arguments
Toegye and Yulgok debate how the Four Beginnings relate to the Seven Feelings, and what makes a feeling morally good. Itō Jinsai’s criticism of inherited vocabulary shows another way of transforming Confucian learning.
Guided course · Module 8 · Lesson 45
Human learning and the struggle over authority
Erasmus and Luther disagree about textual authority, human choice and grace. What can a command in scripture establish about the ability to obey it?
Guided course · Module 8 · Lesson 43
Living well on an unstable earth
A Nahua mother’s advice, preserved in the Florentine Codex, teaches balance on an unstable earth. How do colonial mediation, social hierarchy and living interpreters qualify what her discourse can establish?
Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 62
Logic, meaning and a new ideal of clarity
Frege distinguishes an expression’s sense from its reference to explain how an identity can be informative. The lesson also shows why substituting one name for another can change what a belief report says.
Guided course · Module 2 · Lesson 5
Mortality and the limits of achievement
Grief sends Gilgamesh in search of a way past death, and he returns to Uruk without one. Do mortal limits make achievement worthless, or change what we can reasonably ask of a human life?
Reference article
Sources and interpretation
A source can answer one question well and another hardly at all. This article keeps the date a work was composed apart from the date of its surviving witness, and separates historical influence from sequence and comparison.
Reference article
The Teaching of Ptahhotep: a reading guide
This guide locates the passages of the Teaching of Ptahhotep read in lesson 4 and sets out their attributed setting, their surviving witness and the limits of the translation.
Guided course · Module 6 · Lesson 29
Translation as philosophical creation
Hunayn ibn Ishaq revises a translation, and al-Kindi defends the pursuit of philosophy. The lesson shows how translation transforms an inheritance and asks what evidence separates real reception from a resemblance later readers notice.
Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 67
Understanding is not reading without assumptions
Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle moves between part and whole, and between a text and its reader’s assumptions. A changing interpretation shows how a text can correct what a reader brings to it.
Guided course · Module 13 · Lesson 81
What can art disclose that an argument may not?
Kant separates aesthetic judgment from private liking, and Tagore asks what a copied style loses. What do rhythm, sequence and silence contribute beyond a work’s paraphrased message?
Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 61
What difference would an idea make in practice?
Peirce and James tie meaning and truth to practical consequences. How can consequences clarify a claim without making comfort the test of truth?
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 6 of 9
What do we encounter when we perceive?
Whitehead separates presentational immediacy, a thing’s clear appearance, from causal efficacy, its felt influence, and joins them through symbolic reference. How does that joining make perception useful, and how can it mislead?
Guided course · Module 3 · Lesson 11
What gives a sacred text authority?
Mīmāṃsā defends the authority of the Veda’s injunctions; Vedānta asks what its words teach about brahman. Accepting scriptural authority still leaves meaning, knowledge and action to be argued about.
Guided course · Module 5 · Lesson 19
What stays the same when things change?
Heraclitus finds order in change, and Parmenides asks whether being could ever begin. Their surviving words are kept apart from the later reports that frame how they are read.
Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 10 of 12
When art opens a world
In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger describes a temple that opens a world, where world and earth stand in strife. The lesson also compares his accounts of language and shows why shared meanings still leave factual and ethical questions to be answered.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 7 of 9
When expression helps a thought take shape
Merleau-Ponty argues that expression can accomplish a thought rather than record a meaning already complete. The lesson distinguishes acquired language from emerging meaning, and both from truth.
Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 68
Who makes the categories by which we live?
Foucault describes productive power, which shapes categories and knowledge; Derrida brings a different question about meaning. What do an institution’s assessments reveal, and what do they help to create?
Study this in sequence
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world
An experience receives a world it did not make, yet becomes something that was not there before. How can both be true? Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality builds a philosophy around that difficulty, asking us to begin with occasions of becoming and to explain enduring things, perception, judgment and value through their relations.
Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits
Begin with familiar encounters and follow Heidegger’s questions about being, a finite life, truth, art, dwelling and technology. Examine what the arguments explain, what they leave open and how they fare under political and ethical criticism.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world
Follow Husserl and Merleau-Ponty from the appearance of a familiar thing to time, bodily skill, expression and other people. Test what their descriptions establish, where their methods differ and what still needs evidence or an ethical argument.
Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths
Follow Nāgārjuna’s arguments that nothing has an intrinsic nature of its own, from causes and motion to persons, the two truths and the charge that the argument undermines itself. Ask what the arguments leave standing: can things exist, change and matter without such a nature?