Talk:Mohism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I don't know much about Mohists, but in "The Open Empire - A history of China to 1600" by Valerie Hansen, "jian ai" is expressly explained to be "impartial caring" often mistranslated as "universal love" (chap 2). Impartial caring is not the same as loving without qualification, it means that that one had to consider others' well-being when acting, not just one's family's well being (in contrast to Confucianism). Since this seems very different compared to the current article on Universal Love, I think that it would be appropriate to remove the link until the matter is cleared up.
 |
This article is within the scope of the Philosophy WikiProject, which collaborates on articles related to philosophy and the history of ideas. Please read the instructions and standards for writing and maintaining philosophy articles. To participate, you can edit this article or visit the project page for more details. | |
| ??? | This article has not yet received a rating on the Project's quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article. | |
Move here
- Mohism was the closest of China's philosophic schools to western religious traditions with its belief in a single spirit of the heavens, a strict moral code, and universal love.
That's not obvious at all. I don't know of many Western religious tradition that uses universal love in the same way that Mohists do.
- Seconded! These one-sentence/paragraph/essay east-west comparisons really don't make sense to me ...
- --prat
-
- What may make sense is to say that Jesuits, when discovering Chinese thought, did like much mohism and found many links to their own religious beliefs. (But they made the same links with many other masters...) gbog 17:33, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
It seems that the link to agape is provided without noting the difference between the two - the Mohists suggest that universal love is an impulse, whereas Christianity seems to suggest that agape is a choice. User:Anon
[edit] Mohist's scientific theory
From this referenc article:
- 2400 years ago, the Chinese Mohist philosophers collected their writings in a book called the Mo Ching. Mohism disappeared, but we can still read this in the Mo Ching:
-
- The cessation of motion is due to the opposing force ... If there is no opposing force ... the motion will never stop. This is true as surely as an ox is not a horse.
- Here's a perfectly clear a statement of Newton's first law of motion, 2100 years before Newton's Principia. The Principia was part of a scientific revolution, while the statement in the Mo Ching is largely forgotten.
