Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments with Tiantai BuddhismBeing and Ambiguity is a brilliant work of philosophy, filled with insights, jokes, and topical examples. Professor Ziporyn draws on the works of such Western thinkers as Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, and Hegel, but develops his main argument from Tiantai school of Chinese Buddhism. This important work introduces Tiantai Buddhism to the reader and demonstrates its relevance to profound philosophical issues. Ziporyn argues that we can make both of the claims below simultaneously: This book is about everything. It contains the answers to all philosophical problems which ever shall exist. This book is all claptrap. It is completely devoid of objective validity of any kind. These claims are not contradictory. Rather, they state the same thing in two different ways. To be objective truth is to be subjective claptrap, and vise versa. All interchanges of any kind - conversations, daydreams, sensations - are not only about something but also about everything. Thus, this book concerns itself with no less than the nature of what is and what it means for something to be what it is. It provides a new approach to the basic Western philosophical and psychological issues of identity, determinacy, being, desire, boredom, addiction, love and truth. |
Contents
PART | 35 |
Intersubsumption | 55 |
Setup and Punch Line as the Basic Categories | 91 |
Categories and Inherent Entailment | 109 |
PART | 155 |
Being as Cunning Cunning | 168 |
Cant Get NoSatisfaction | 179 |
Subject and Object Punch Line and Setup | 193 |
Sive | 300 |
PART THREE | 313 |
Atomicity Otherness and Violence Costarring | 322 |
Eroticism and Continuity with Bataille | 350 |
Oneself as Ones | 360 |
Beauty Harmony and the Mystical | 369 |
Humor | 381 |
Sex and Drugs | 393 |
The Good as the Intersection of Two Impossibilities | 215 |
Freedom | 234 |
More about the Will | 251 |
The Intersubsumption of Self | 271 |
Ethical Layering | 286 |
The Limits of Sublimation | 405 |
A Critique of Critique | 417 |
Proof that All Previous Errors Have Spoken This | 428 |
Invitation to a Recantation | 439 |
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Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments with Tiantai Buddhism Brook Ziporyn Limited preview - 2015 |
Common terms and phrases
actual occasions All-pervasion as All-pervadedness already ambiguity applies asness aspects become Bodhisattva Buddha Buddhahood Buddhist claim classical Tiantai coherence consciousness constitutive impossibility contingent contrast definition desire determinacy determinate doctrine doctrine of inherent Emptiness ence entity equally eternal objects everything example excluded existence experience experienced expression fact finite function Global Incoherence habits harmony Hegel hence holism Huayan humor identity impermanence implications inherent entailment intersubjectivity Intersubsumption Local Coherence Lotus Sūtra Mahāyāna manifest means merely mind Möbius strip moretoitivity mutual Nāgārjuna nature necessary negation Neo-Tiantai ness never Nirvāna non-X notion omnicentrism one's oneself particular perhaps pleasure position possible precisely prehended present principle provisional punch line question realm recontextualization relation revealed reversibility rience seen sense setup simply śrāvakas structure subsumption tertium quid thereby things Three Truths tion transcended true ultimate universal upāya vice versa Whitehead whole Xness Zhili