Bücher von Michael Slote

The book is a much-expanded version of the Kuang-Yi Liu Lectures in Chinese Philosophy the author delivered in Taiwan in December 2022. The book brings together essays on Chinese philosophy, Western philosophy, and the proposed interaction between them. The purpose is not mainly exegetical or descriptive; the book seeks to expand our philosophical understanding in various directions. Philosophical Essays East and West shows how Chinese thought can help Western analytic philosophy develop further and can even serve as a corrective to certain central aspects of traditional and contemporary Western philosophical thinking. We Western analytic philosophers don't think we have much if anything to learn from Chinese philosophical ideas. But we do, we do, and much of the present book seeks to show how. Studying topics in ethics, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and aesthetics, this book puts Chinese philosophy in conversation with traditional problems in Western analytic philosophy. It also proposes aphorism as an important method in both traditions.

It is argued that the Chinese notion of a heart-mind is superior to the Western concept of mind, but then, more even-handedly, the relative strengths and weaknesses of Chinese and Western thought overall are critically examined.

This book begins with a discussion of the human life cycle and then uses that discussion and other ideas to paint a general picture of what human lives are like. While the first part looks at human development and change, the second part of the book explores what all human lives are like. Philosophical ideas and methods are central to this book, although it is difficult to subcategorize it into any familiar subdiscipline of philosophy. It draws on modern concepts from psychology and social science in order to portray an image of human life and lives and to enable readers to easily understand the notion of human development in a very specific and directed way. Although cognitive development and the development of motor skills are two examples of forms of human development, this book homes in on a particular, and arguably more synoptic, way of seeing our development, which is in relation to and occurs within the human life cycle. This book isan enlightening read for a broad range of philosophy scholars, articulating and defending a view that is neither as pessimistic nor as optimistic about human life as previous views have been.