Philosophy

Posted by: Keren Wang Before you start this lesson, please READ: Berger, Arthur Asa. 2024. Media and Communication Research Methods: An Introduction to Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. 3rd ed. Chapter 4, “Rhetorical Analysis.” Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781071939017. 1. Overview What do you think of when you hear the word “artifact”? In rhetorical scholarship, the term “artifact” is not limited to historical objects or museum pieces. Instead, it encompasses various texts, speeches, symbolic objects, and events produced by humans. In communication research, one key difference between rhetorical and critical methods and other qualitative research methods is that, while qualitative methods such as interviews, observations, and focus group studies revolve around studying human subjects, rhetorical scholars analyze rhetorical artifacts, or “texts” that have already been produced. ...

We begin by asking a deceptively simple question: What is media? At its core, media is any technology that enables the storage, organization, transmission, and dissemination of information. When we hear the word today, we tend to think of “mass media” — newspapers, television, the internet — technologies that spread information rapidly across wide distances. Commonly, people imagine the story of media beginning with the invention of the electric telegraph in the early 19th century. But is that really where media begins? ...

Dasein, ChatGPT, and the Ritology of AI: Special lecture at East China University of Political Science and Law, June 18, 2023 What philosophical mischief might we unleash if Plato’s Cave or Zhuangzi's Well suddenly became inundated by algorithms, with the sound and fury of GeForce RTX™ GPU fans, insisting they’ve seen the light? Extended Abstract: This WIP paper builds off a guest lecture I have presented at the East China University of Political Science and Law (ECUPSL) in Shanghai, June 18, 2023. In this lecture, I had the privilege of sharing some of the preliminary research questions for my ongoing transdisciplinary survey, focusing on the intricate interplay between artificial intelligence and phenomenology. I will be highlighting the potentially profound implications of AI and its existential entanglements, particularly revolving around the context of Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, and problematize some common ethical and ontological issues connected to being-AI-in-our-world. The relentless acceleration of innovation in large language models (LLMs) and artificial neural networks (ANNs), embodied by transformative technologies like ChatGPT, deepfakes, and AI-generated art, has ignited a dual fire of awe and trepidation among technologists, ethicists, policymakers, and the broader public. As a vast body of literature explores the societal, ethical, and epistemological ripples of this ongoing technological upheaval—particularly within the fields of Information, Science, and Technology (IST)—this project seeks to offer a novel contribution by bringing into focus the lens of phenomenology: an intricate branch of philosophical inquiry renowned for its profound and methodical examination of the fundamental structures of human consciousness. By advocating for a phenomenological perspective, the project aims to illuminate how AI’s disruptions reshape not only our daily lives but also our understanding of what it means to be. In doing so, it offers critical insights into the interplay between human and supra-human consciousness, reframing our relationship with emerging technologies and their implications for the future of sentient existence. ...

 Class PowerPoint slides for CHN375W: Chinese Political Thought/Propaganda (Emory University, Fall 2023): covering the historical evolution and contemporary implications of “The Hundred Schools of Thought” in Chinese governance and political practices.

The Warring States and the Hundred Schools of Thought The core of classical Chinese philosophical tradition emerged during a tumultuous period of ancient Chinese history, during which the civilization transitioned from a decentralized feudal system into a unified empire. We begin this section with a brief and high-altitude overview of the historical background for those who are not familiar with ancient Chinese history. The time frame would be the Chunqiu-Zhanguo era (lit., “Periods of Spring and Autumn and the Warring States”) which lasted from c.770 to 221 BCE The Spring and Autumn period of Classical Chinese history, from approximately 771 to 476 BCE. The nominal seat of dynastic power, Zhou Tianzi (lit “Son of Heaven”) had rapidly declined, and in Confucious’ own words, that the “ancient feudal rite and hymns have crumbled （禮樂崩壞）.” It was a time when former Zhou feudal domains became de-facto independent sovereign states. Larger states swallow smaller ones. Rapid land reforms and power restructurings took place across major Chinese states in order to claim economic and military supremacy over their peers. Various great powers rose and fell throughout this period, constantly at war against one other for achieving hegemony over Tianxia. The Warring States period is also when the coin-based cash economy rapidly took off throughout China-proper. Of course this did not happen overnight, but based on ample material evidence, the cash economy did intensify within a relatively short period, as major states began to implement similar types of sweeping bureaucratic governance reforms and centrally managed crop buy-out policies to remain competitive. By the time of the late Warring States era, your “average” peasant say in the state of Wei or Zhao or any major power, not only was paid by the central government, in cash, to purchase his grains for strategic reserve, he is also likely to be drafted every so often, for a fixed term, to perform infrastructure labor or serve in the military, and paid a stipend at least in part in the form of cash coins. Consequently, old feudal aristocratic powers were displaced by an emerging class of scholar-officials, many of whom came from humble, non-noble backgrounds including Confucious and his disciples. Members of this new literati class often traveled throughout China and offered their knowledge and service to the most promising state sponsor. Because of the intense interstate competition and the increasing demand for scholar-officials, philosophies flourished throughout the Chunqiu-Zhanguo era. Early Han historian Sima Qian used the term zhūzǐ bǎijiā (諸子百家), or “Hundred Schools of Thought” to describe this unprecedented expansion and diversification of Chinese intellectual outputs. Many philosophical texts from this historical moment – such as the Analects, Tao Te Ching, and Sun Tzu’s Art of War have become widely known outside of China. See the timeline in figure 2 below for a partial list of key figures from the Hundred Schools of Thought (top row). The timeline also includes contemporaneous Indo-European thinkers at the bottom row for clearer time reference: ...

This presentation highlights a few key excerpts from my doctoral dissertation research: “The ritual taking of things that are of human value, including the ritual killing of humans, has been continuously practiced for as long as human civilization itself has existed. Sacrifices in the form of state-organized rituals have been observed in many societies throughout history. Existing scholarship also observed an interdependent relationship between ritual sacrifice and the maintenance of political power in a broad set of historical cases, ranging from Shang dynasty China in 10th century BCE to the witch-hunts in early modern Europe. Sacrificial rituals of the past should not be considered fundamentally divorced from our modern world: whereas the formal elements of sacrifice of the past may no longer be recognizable, their substantive political functions do remain, with rhetorical overtones that carry into the politics of the present time. The goal for this project is to give due consideration to the politics of sacrificial rites across a broad set of political-theological traditions, hopefully paving the way to a new unifying understanding of sacrificial rhetorics. This research goal revolves around two primary research tasks that are intimately connected. The first is to provide a working interpretative framework for understanding the politics of ritual sacrifice – one that not only accommodates multidisciplinary, intersectional knowledge of ritual practices, but that can also be usefully employed in the integrated analysis of sacrificial rituals as political rhetoric under divergent historical and societal contexts. The second conducts a series of case studies that cuts across the wide variability of ritual public takings in late-capitalism.” ...

“Ritualism and the Ethos of Chinese Legal Order,” presented at International Conference: New International Trade and Investment Rules between Globalization and Anti-­Globalization, Penn State University, University Park, PA (April 22, 2017) 倬彼雲漢 昭回于天 王曰於乎 何辜今之人 天降喪亂 饑饉薦臻 靡神不舉 靡愛斯牲 圭璧既卒 寧莫我聽 Majestic is that Milky Way, brightly afloat in the firmament of the heaven. The King said, O! What crime is chargeable on us now? That Heaven thus sends down death and disorder, unrelenting famine and hunger grapple us! ...

(Posted by Keren Wang | Feb. 3, 2017) Per Dr. Alan Sica’s request, this post is written as a follow-up to a peculiar topic brought up during our Social Thought seminar yesterday – it concerns the “Elephant (象)” glyph in the Chinese term for “Phenomenology (现象学)”. Long story short… During our regular seminar discussion on the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (French phenomenologist) yesterday, Dr. Sica asked what is the Chinese term for “phenomenology”. Luckily, there is an official Chinese translation available for this particular philosophical term – 現象學 (pronounced “hsien-hsiang hsueh”). For easier viewing, please see the enlarged picture-file below, which also includes the standard phonetic notation for each character: The facile explanation of phrase “現象學” is that it combines 现象 (hsien-hsiang, lit. “phenomenon, materialization”) + 學 (hsueh, lit. “study, learning”). By “facile explanation”, I am referring to the fact that the Chinese writing system doesn’t follow an alphabet-word system, so any direct “word-to-word” translation between Chinese and English would be at best a “metaphorical approximation”. Unwilling to settle for the easy explanation, Alan of course pressed for more precise meaning of each individual character in 現象學, and thus going further down the impossible linguistic rabbit hole… So here’s when the “elephant” came in… The Chinese term for phenomenology, 現象學, consists three characters (or more accurately, three logograms). Here is a detailed break-down of the characters in 現象學: Indeed, for a Chinese reader, the term 現象學 does not appear as a singular, self-contained “word” per se. Rather, like most Chinese vocabularies, the nomenclature would appear as a loosely-grouped logographic cluster that reads something like “(the) study (of) manifest shape(s) and symbol(s).” Those parenthetical parts are grammatical features absent in the Chinese writing system. Indeed, concepts such as definitive articles, plurals and grammatical tense may not apply to written Chinese…at all! Chinese characters group together in ways that’s very different from English vocabularies. When used together, they do not form a new “word” in ways English alphabets would. Thus, unlike English “words”, meanings are not “encoded” into Chinese phrases and characters. Each logograph in a phrase or sentence merely defers and refers its signification in terms of its relation with those other characters in the sentence, and the final “meaning” of a phrase or sentence is obtained as the sum aggregate of signification of all the characters in the phrase. This might sound confusing, but it is worthwhile to keep in mind that even the most basic grammatical and syntactical principles in English do not apply in written Chinese. And now I regress… Most notably, the second character of the phrase, 象 (pronounced “hsiang”) , indeed means “elephant” in Chinese. Yes, when used with other characters, 象 can be used broadly to signify ideas relating to “shape”, “symbol” and “representation”. However, those are derivatives or its “ordinary” meaning of “elephant” Indeed, when the character “象” is used alone, it almost always refers to non other than those massive land mammals with long trunk and pillar-like legs. In fact, the “elephant“ in 現象學 is among the oldest Chinese characters still in common use. As shown in the figure below, the glyph “象” first appeared in Oracle bone script (c. 1,200 BCE) as an elephant pictogram. The basic shape and composition of “象” remained surprisingly consistent across its three-thousand-plus years of continuous usage: So what does “elephant” has anything to do with symbol and elephant? While it is impossible to get into the heads of Shang dynasty kings (who first used this letter during sacrificial rites), I did found a compelling explanation by searching around Chinese Classical texts. Han Fei (韓非, c. 280 – 233 BC), an influential political philosopher from the Warring States period (475BC - 221BC), wrote the following in his Han Fei Tzu: ...

Fig. 1: Floor mosaic in Beit Alfa Synagogue (c.5th century CE, Israel) depicting the Binding of Issac (public domain art available via Wikimedia Commons) Human sacrifice refers to the practice of ritual killing of human beings as offerings to divine patrons, ancestors, or other superhuman forces. Early comparative studies on human sacrifice were heavily influenced by theories of historical relativism and social evolutionism. [1] Such theory approach is exemplified by the works of nineteenth century cultural-anthropologists Edward Tylor and Marcel Mauss, both of whom framed practices of human sacrifice as specific iteration of a general social feature, developed relative to various stages of human historical development. [2] ...