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23392
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The Dao (Way) first means the road, and comes to mean the right way to live [Norden]
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Full Idea:
The 'Dao' (tr 'Way) has five meanings: 1) path or road, 2) mode of doing something, 3) account of how to do something, 4) the right way to live, and 5) the ultimate metaphysical entity responsible for nature, and how it should be.
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From:
Bryan van Norden (Intro to Classical Chinese Philosophy [2011], 1.III)
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A reaction:
[compressed] So it is essentially metaphorical, just like the English 'way to do a thing'. Number 5 seems a rather large leap from the others, and most discussion seems to centre on number 4. The Chinese hoped for consensus on the Dao.
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23408
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The hermeneutic circle is either within the text, or between text and biased reader [Norden]
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Full Idea:
The first type of hermeneutic circle operates inside the text, studying relationships between sentences. …The second type is between the text and the reader, …who brings assumptions about what it means.
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From:
Bryan van Norden (Intro to Classical Chinese Philosophy [2011], App A.I)
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A reaction:
The first kind is an essential aspect of reading well. Readers are biased, but I get very tired of those who do nothing but search for bias, and ignore the truth a text has to offer. If everything is bias, intellectual life is dead.
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14238
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A class is an aggregate of objects; if you destroy them, you destroy the class; there is no empty class [Frege]
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Full Idea:
A class consists of objects; it is an aggregate, a collective unity, of them; if so, it must vanish when these objects vanish. If we burn down all the trees of a wood, we thereby burn down the wood. Thus there can be no empty class.
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From:
Gottlob Frege (Elucidation of some points in E.Schröder [1895], p.212), quoted by Oliver,A/Smiley,T - What are Sets and What are they For?
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A reaction:
This rests on Cantor's view of a set as a collection, rather than on Dedekind, which allows null and singleton sets.
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