Daily Archives: October 4, 2011

Is "Besire" Really Bizarre?

A few weeks ago, I posted “Is There Something More than Knowing-How and Knowing-that?,” where I promised a follow-up, and here it is.

In the previous post, I argue that Confucian moral knowledge has something more than knowing-how and knowing-that, and the extra thing is its ability to incline the knower to act according to the knowledge. From the Humean point of view, Confucians must be either confused or confusing (or both) in holding such a view of moral knowledge, since this inclination or motivation is not knowledge and does not belong to knowledge, whether it is knowledge-that or knowledge-how, but something other than knowledge: desire. According to Humeans, in order for an action to take place, both belief and desires are needed: belief tells one what to do, and desire motivates one to do it. Without desire, one’s belief will not incline a person to act; without belief, one’s desire will not tell one what action to take and how to take the action.

Although there are some contemporary philosophers of action who are not Humeans and even are claimed (either by themselves or by others) to be anti-Humeans, most of them still agree that belief and desire are separate mental states. They are anti-Humeans only in the sense that they try to provide different explanations of action than the Humean one. On the one hand, we have those anti-Humeans who, as cognitivists or rationalists, claim that knowledge or belief alone can motivate a person to act and there is no need for desire in our explanation of action (Scanlon). On the other hand, we have those anti-Humeans who, as noncognitivists or emotivists, claim that all that is involved in our action is desire or emotion (Ayer). Continue reading →

On-line Review of "Reading the Dao"

A review by Ellen Zhang of Keping Wang’s Reading the Dao: A Thematic Inquiry has been published at the Notre Dame review site. Here is an excerpt:

Reading the Dao: A Thematic Inquiry has its own agenda. As Wang suggests in the Acknowledgement, the book is meant to be read by those who are interested in Chinese language and “the Chinese way of thinking,” and as such it defines the frame of reference for non-specialists in the English-speaking world rather than Daoist scholars or Laozi scholars who are looking for a more substantial and original scholarly work. That being said, the book has a virtue of its own. It is a comprehensive overview of Laozi’s Daoism for anyone unfamiliar with the DDJ and Daoism. It is clearly written, thematically formulated, and supplemented with helpful commentaries.