I thought I would start this thread to see if we could together construct the history of thought both Eastern and Western.
So who is first?
Anonymous.
… aka… ‘moresillystuff’…
No, whatever those early tidbits of wisdom were they were not written by moresillystuff.
My post was a little flip. But I also meant it seriously: we don’t know who the first ‘great thinkers’ were. ‘What is first’ allows us to start somewhat earlier.
I don’t know whether, by asking this question, you intended to bankrupt the historical project before it began.
But I reckon it has done just that.
Well I can see that you guys won’t be easily fooled…
… lets try another angle…
What was first?
Now you are getting somewhere. I would say it was “Ugh” the philosophic ape who said “UGH! UGH! OOO! OOO! GRRRRRR RAAAAWR!”
Oh yes the little known primate philosper ‘Ugh’.
How does memory persist.
Particles flit in and out of our percieved existence. The bus , the school children in it, and the oil in it are flitting. That is to say the particles that compose them(and everything) exist only right right now. They are not in the past nor they will be in the past. If there is no past then where is history. If a wave (particle) exists in no particular place until made to appear; then the history of the bus, of the children and of the oil is made at that very instant as well.
What do you think.
Right now? Obviously you’re an Ugh-ist too. Ugh was a buffon, I say! He mis-vocalized Zork, who got it correctly to begin with, namely: “OOO! OOO! UGH! UGH! GRRRR RAAAWR”, for as we know, OOO precedes UGH. Just as the children precede the particulation.
I think that what you have said ties in very nicely with current debates in ‘postmodernism’.
Frederic Jameson states in, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, that, ‘It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place’.
So we have forgotten how to think about history due to our rejection of the immediate past in the same way you have rejected the idea of it.
In the West, you’ve got Thales as the traditionally recognized ‘first philosopher’. So, we can go with him.
In the East, well, it depends on how you want to conceive ‘philosophy’ since ‘philosophy’ is a western phenomenon. But most modern scholars think that the basis of what would become the Yijing was created sometime in the late 9th century BCE, so we can go with that as ‘ground zero’ in China.
Not sure about India.
'Thales had a profound influence on other Greek thinkers and therefore on Western history. Some believe Anaximander was a pupil of Thales. Early sources report that one of Anaximander’s more famous pupils, Pythagoras, visited Thales as a young man, and that Thales advised him to travel to Egypt to further his philosophical and mathematical studies.
Many philosophers followed Thales’ lead in searching for explanations in nature rather than in the supernatural; others returned to supernatural explanations, but couched them in the language of philosophy rather than of myth or of religion.
Looking specifically at Thales’ influence during the pre-Socrates era, it is clear that he stood out as one of the first thinkers who thought more in the way of logos than mythos. The difference between these two more profound ways of seeing the world is that mythos is concentrated around the stories of holy origin, while logos is concentrated around the argumentation. When the mythical man wants to explain the world the way he sees it, he explains it based on gods and powers. Mythical thought does not differentiate between things and persons and furthermore it does not differentiate between nature and culture. The way a logos thinker would present a world view is radically different from the way of the mythical thinker. In its concrete form, logos is a way of thinking not only about individualism, but also the abstract. Furthermore, it focuses on sensible and continuous argumentation. This lays the foundation of philosophy and its way of explaining the world in terms of abstract argumentation, and not in the way of gods and mythical stories.’
So next I suppose it would be Anaximander, then Pythagoras…
How did the Yijing influence the East/West Xunzian?
While the Yijing/I Ching/Classic of Changes is more famous for its use as a divination tool, it is actually a text dealing with a system of cosmology and philosophy that would serve as the basis for much of Chinese thought. The cosmology centers on the ideas of the dynamic balance of opposites (this is most commonly represented in the form of the taijitu, or yinyang with which you are no doubt familiar), the evolution of events as a process (the combination of trigrams to form hexagrams, as well as the ordering of trigrams and hexagrams), and acceptance of the inevitability of change (the idea of ‘moving lines’).
During the Hundred Schools period, notable schools to embrace the Yijing would be: the school of numbers, the yinyang school, the Mohists, the Confucians, the Daoists, and Legalism. Since the state orthodox philosophy became a fusion of Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism after the Han synthesis, the role of the Yijing in Chinese thought is pretty much self-explanatory. Indeed, the three major postulates of the Yijing would remain an important part of Chinese philosophy until the collapse of the Empire in the early 20th Century.
After the Yijing, I’d probably move to the Hundred Schools period. I think current archeology suggests that the Huang-Lao school, an early form of Daoism, was first.
Is Yijing logocentric in your view?
That is a good question and not one I had really considered before. If we accept the commonly used translation of “Dao” for “logos”, I think that it could be considered logocentric, yes. It is a little tricky, since the logos here is constant change, but if a dynamic process can be considered a logos. But I don’t see that as necessarily being problematic in terms of analysis.
But can a text be logocentric if it deals almost exclusively with correlative thinking as opposed to causal thinking? I generally associate logocentricism with causal thinking but I’m admittedly not as up on my post-modernism as I could be. Can logocentricism be applied to ars contextualis? I’m honestly not sure. Here is a blog that discusses teaching the Yijing and I think it does obliquely touch on some of the themes discussed here.
The first philosophers to think and navigate on a planetary scale were the pirates. Arrg.
History ( the past) did not and does not exist in the probability. All 15 or so billion years that it took for the children to get here intantly happened upon the wave collapse.
Sorry for taking so long to get back to you!
Hey, are you calling my mother an instantaneous past participle? Why, I otta detach ya!!
How old is that theory, now, anyway?
And what is this “quantum decoherence” of which the great Wiki speaks, anyway?!
…sophrosyne sings, Apollo on the harp…
I do not know what term best describes your mom, but she was entangled and now she is collapsed and “spatially extended”- Einstien .