Corpus evidence — top 10 passages

Most-relevant passages from the entire indexed corpus (67,286 paragraph chunks across YouTube transcripts, PubMed, arXiv, archive.org, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, OpenAlex, and more) ranked by semantic similarity (bge-small-en-v1.5).

1. 01 · blog0.802

   Yet some argue that a great many of the Daoist objections one finds in the Zhuangzi are motivated more by a general skepticism about the possibility of identifying invariable standards of discrimination in language than about ineradicable defects in the very human capacity for reason. One can be a skeptic, for instance, about the role of necessity in reference without having anything disparaging to say about our ability to evaluate the consistency of a theory on logical grounds or reject it by the method of reductio ad absurdum . A number of scholars have even claimed that Daoism, in particula…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/logic-and-language-in-early-chinese-philosophy.md

2. 02 · yt0.767

   Because if there's no private if you had a private language, there's no way you can be right or wrong because you can't be corrected in any fashion. And And it doesn't make any sense. And then if you if you really seriously think that you're that right? That language is is an illusion for you, think of how much of your cognition and your science and your rationality become illusory. And then if you commit to it, you're committed to the fact that interpersonal dialogue is especially privileged at disclosing the fact that there are minds other than yours, and they can make meaning other than you…

   yt/1Lm3y_4a--0-wolfgang-smith-and-john-vervaeke-the-perpetual-promise-inexh/transcript.txt

3. 03 · blog0.764

   Normally, an inference is conceived as a rule-bound transition of some kind from one sentence-like structure—a proposition, statement, or sentence—to another, and is considered valid if it preserves truth. However, there is some dispute about whether early Chinese philosophers were preoccupied with truth as a semantic concept, and even whether they considered sentences to be units of linguistic significance. On the other hand, contemporary developments of logic have opened up new vistas in the study of ancient ideas. Our primary concern in logic need not be the preservation of truth, and diffe…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/logic-and-language-in-early-chinese-philosophy.md

4. 04 · blog0.762

   In what follows, we will examine what we consider to be the most salient features of Dharmakīrti’s philosophy, bringing out inter alia the importance of this causal stance. It is, however, impossible to discuss all the major themes that were traditionally commented upon by Buddhist scholastic writers on Dharmakīrti. Choices and exclusions had to be made. For readers who seek a comprehensive treatment of the historical development of Dharmakīrti’s positions in his seven works, the best references to date are Eltschinger (2010) and Franco (2017). Detailed summaries of Dharmakīrti’s works are fou…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/dharmak-rti.md

5. 05 · blog0.761

   Zen questions this standpoint when it is used as the paradigm for daily living, including philosophical thinking, for this standpoint accepts as its foundation an individual’s discrete “I” with a belief that “I” am self-contained and self-sufficient, and therefore am distinguished and isolated from other individuals and things of nature, “I” am “here” and things, including others, are “over there,” creating both a psychological and physical distance between them. Epistemologically speaking, Zen observes that this renders opaque, or at best translucent, the experiential domains beyond the sensi…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/japanese-zen-buddhist-philosophy.md

6. 06 · blog0.760

   Sometimes they disagree so profoundly on this matter for so long a time that they see themselves as members of schools or parties in a conflict, or as part of larger historical trends that play themselves out over and over in the history of ideas. For example, some philosophers tend to argue for all kinds of invisible metaphysical structure in the world – that numbers, properties, causality, free will, etc., are all entities in their own right, somehow existing independently of our grasp or use of them, as real in their own way as the ordinary physical objects we seem constantly to rely on in …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/walter-chatton.md

7. 07 · gutenberg0.758

   To several of the arguments which have been urged against me, I have thought it useful to reply with some degree of minuteness; not from any taste for controversy, but because the opportunity was favorable for placing my own conclusions, and the grounds of them, more clearly and completely before the reader. Truth on these subjects is militant, and can only establish itself by means of conflict. The most opposite opinions can make a plausible show of evidence while each has the statement of its own case; and it is only possible to ascertain which of them is in the right, after hearing and comp…

   gutenberg/PG-27942-a-system-of-logic-ratiocinative-and-inductive/PG-27942.txt

8. 08 · yt0.758

   [Music] thus far like a typical philosopher I've been trying to explain what Zen and Buddhism is and others it may seem this is really quite the wrong thing to do and stranger still if in these talks I succeed in giving you some sort of impression that you understand that the whole problem has been made clear in words I shall really have deceived you because you can see part of the whole reason why life seems problematic to us and why we go in for philosophies to try and clear it all up is that what we are trying to do is we are trying to fit the order of the universe to the order of words and…

   yt/5scxrMeYNc0-alan-watts-lectures-discipline-of-zen/transcript.txt

9. 09 · blog0.756

   The first difficulty may not be as serious as it seems, given that the Buddha’s discourses were probably rehearsed shortly after his death and preserved through oral transmission until the time they were committed to writing. And the second need not be insuperable either. (See, e.g., Cousins 2022.) But the third is troubling, in that it suggests textual transmission involved processes of insertion and deletion in aid of one side or another in sectarian disputes. Our ancient sources attest to this: one will encounter a dispute among Buddhist thinkers where one side cites some utterance of the B…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/buddha.md

10. 10 · yt0.756

    Everybody knows this but nobody knows how you must love. You see that's what the preachers are saying. And if history tells us anything, it tells us that preaching doesn't work. Nobody ever listened to it, though they love being scolded. A colorful scolding by a good preacher is a great thrill. But by and large, our standard brand religions, so far as leading one to a real deep and experiential discovery of who and what you really are, what your situation in this universe is, they don't go very far. You can of course read deeply in theology and go quite a long way but so far as the fair is con…

    yt/56yLoF-PGbk-alan-watts-philosophy-of-the-tao-pt-1-flow-balance-and-the-c/transcript.txt