SOME PERSPECTIVES ON CHINESE PHILOSOPHY

The Chinese philosophical tradition is one of three great traditions going back to the Sixth Century B.C. It inherited a branch of the Indian tradition, Mahayana Buddhism, and gave it a unique development. The two native Chinese schools, Taoism and Confucianism, were strongly contrasting and to some extent mutually corrective. The third great tradition, the Western, began in Greece and developed, in Europe, the near East, and America into Jewish, Islamic, and Christian forms.     

LANGUAGE AND THE TAO: SOME REFLECTIONS ON INEFFABILITY

Confucius withdrew and told his disciples, "I know a bird can fly; I know a fish can swim; I know animals can run. Creatures that run can be caught in nets; those that swim can be caught in wicker traps; those that fly can be hit by arrows. But the dragon is beyond my knowledge; it ascends into heaven on the clouds and the wind. Today 1 have seen Lao Tzu, and he is like the dragon!"     

MICHAEL POLANYI ON ART AND RELIGION: SOME CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON MEANING

This paper is a critique of the theory of meaning in art and religion that Michael Polanyi developed in his last work entitled Meaning. After giving a brief summary of Polanyi's theory of art, I raise two serious difficulties, not with the theory itself, but with the claims Polanyi makes about the relation of meaning in art to science and religion. Regarding the first difficulty, I argue that Polanyi betrays an earlier insight when in Meaning he attempts to dissociate meaning in art from meaning in science; instead I argue that both science and art are aesthetic enterprises. Regarding the second, I argue that Polanyi's account of religion is an aesthetic reduction, that meaning in religion, at least in the Western tradition, is not so much an aesthetic as it is an existential matter.