Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-wzw2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-08T23:47:45.150Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Zoetology’: A New Name for an Old Way of Thinking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2023

Roger T. Ames
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The classical Greeks give us a substance ontology grounded in ‘being qua being’ or ‘being per se’ (to on he on) that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for the human experience. With the combination of eidos and telos as the formal and final cause of independent things such as persons, this ‘substance’ necessarily persists through change. This substratum or essence includes its purpose for being, and is defining of the ‘what-it-means-to-be-a-thing-of-this-kind’ of any particular thing in setting a closed, exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for it to be this, and not that.

In the Yijing 易經 or Book of Changes we find a vocabulary that makes explicit cosmological assumptions that are a stark alternative to this substance ontology, and provides the interpretive context for the Confucian canons by locating them within a holistic, organic, and ecological worldview. To provide a meaningful contrast with this fundamental assumption of on or ‘being’ we might borrow the Greek notion of zoe or ‘life’ and create the neologism ‘zoe-tology’ as ‘the art of living’. This cosmology begins from ‘living’ (sheng 生) itself as the motive force behind change, and gives us a world of boundless ‘becomings’: not ‘things’ that are, but ‘events’ that are happening, a contrast between an ontological conception of the human ‘being’ and a process conception of what I will call human ‘becomings’.

Type
Paper
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 93: Expanding Horizons , May 2023 , pp. 81 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This essay is excerpted from a draft of a book-length manuscript presently in progress tentatively entitled Zoetology: A New Name for an Old Way of Thinking.

References

Austin, J.L., Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).Google Scholar
Dewey, John, The Later Works of John Dewey (1925–53), Boydston, Jo Ann (ed.), (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
Dewey, John, The Middle Works of John Dewey (1899–1924), Boydston, Jo Ann (ed.), (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977).Google Scholar
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, 2nd ed. (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Corporation, 1997).Google Scholar
Hegel, G.W.F., The Encyclopedia Logic (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991).Google Scholar
James, William, Essays in Radical Pragmatism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).Google Scholar
Johnson, Mark, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keightley, David N., ‘Shang Divination and Metaphysics’, Philosophy East and West 38:4 (October 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malpas, Jeff, ‘Hans-Georg Gadamer’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/gadamer/>..>Google Scholar
Putnam, Hilary, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
Putnam, Hilary, The Many Faces of Realism, (La Salle, Ill: Open Court, 1987).Google Scholar
Sivin, Nathan, ‘Forward’ to Manfred Porkert, The Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Medicine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974).Google Scholar
Tingyang, Zhao 趙汀陽, 惠此中國 (The Making and Becoming of China: Its Way of Historicity) (Beijing: CITIC Press, 2016).Google Scholar