10.19: Prof. Michael Beaney Lecture Series-3
Lecture 3:
Putting the Analytic Cart before the White Horse
The white horse paradox (白马非马) is one of the most famous paradoxes in ancient Chinese philosophy and a wide range of different explanations and ‘resolutions’ have been offered of it. Many of these in the English-language literature have offered quick ‘analytic’ responses, anachronistically putting an interpretive cart before the textual horse. So it provides an excellent case study of the dangers of approaching Chinese philosophy analytically. Any such approach must be embedded in a genuine understanding of the Chinese language and historical context. I will revisit Chad Hansen’s 1983 account (in Language and Logic in Ancient China), sifting out what I regard as his key insight (concerning the role played by the ox-horse (union) and hard-white (intersection) models of name-combination) from his mass-noun hypothesis, which was widely criticized but which obscures, and is strictly separable from, his key insight. Riding the white horse correctly teaches us a lot about the concerns of ancient Chinese logic and philosophy of language.
讲座信息
题目
Putting the Analytic Cart before the White Horse
主讲人
Michael Beaney毕明安教授
主持人
Xing Taotao 邢滔滔教授
时间
10月19日（周四）19:00-21:00（北京时间）
地点
燕园22楼212室
主讲人简介
es
Michael Beaney（毕明安），德国柏林洪堡大学“分析哲学史”教席持有人，清华大学客座教授。现有职务包括国际分析哲学史学会（Society for the Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy）会长、英国哲学史协会（British Society for the History of Philosophy）常任理事、《英国哲学史杂志》（British Journal for the History of Philosophy）主编。毕明安教授生于1959年，自1990年从牛津大学取得博士学位以来，先后任教于约克大学、曼彻斯特大学、耶拿大学、纽伦堡大学和洪堡大学等，曾担任北京大学及北京师范大学客座教授。出版关于弗雷格哲学和分析哲学史研究专著3部、编著9部，在Philosophical Studies和Mind 等顶级哲学刊物上发表论文20余篇。
Michael Beaney (毕明安) is Professor of History of Analytic Philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Regius Chair of Logic at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and Visiting He Lin Chair Professor of Philosophy at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Educated at Oxford, he taught at various universities in London and Yorkshire before taking up his current posts. His books include Frege: Making Sense (London, 1996), The Frege Reader (edited, Blackwell, 1997), Imagination and Creativity (Open University, Milton Keynes, 2005), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy (edited, OUP, 2013), Analytic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2017), and a new translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in the Oxford World’s Classics series (OUP, 2023). He was Editor of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy from 2011 to 2020, and remains on the Editorial Board. He is General Editor of the series on history of analytic philosophy published by Palgrave Macmillan (40+ volumes), and one of the General Editors of the British Society for the History of Philosophy series New Texts in the History of Philosophy published by Oxford University Press (10+ volumes). As well as the history of analytic philosophy, his research interests include Chinese philosophy (especially ancient Chinese philosophy of language and logic), creativity, philosophical methodology (especially analysis), historiography, and philosophical translation.
His recent paper on Chinese logic is available at:https://doi.org/10.1093/arisoc/aoab010; and his paper on ‘Open-mindedness and Ajar-mindedness in History of Philosophy’ is available at:https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12614.
主持人简介
es
后续讲座信息
10.27
Talking with Zhuangzi
11.17
Pulling and Pushing Mohist Logic
