Homework Assignment #1

This homework assignment is a warm-up, designed to lead you to look closely at the texts we'll be reading, and notice what may be of interest in them.  For this assignment, whether statements you make are 'correct' or 'incorrect' is not important -- the point is to read closely and notice what you read.  Please follow the instructions closely.

Examine the two passages below.  One comes from an early Greek source, the other from and early Chinese source.  Both have to do with the pursuit of knowledge.  Note what seem to you to be the most important differences between them in terms of their general approaches to issues of knowing -- list at least three respects in which you find they differ, indicating both what the differences are, and also which specific phrases indicate those differences to you.  Select the three aspects that seem to you most intellectually significant.  (Don't worry if you feel you don't fully understand the passages -- the important exercise here is close reading, not analysis.)

Prepare your response as a one-page double-spaced paper -- do not go beyond one page (be sure your name is on it).  Conclude the assignment by indicating which of the two passages you think comes from Greece and which comes from China.  (It does not matter at all whether you're right or wrong.)

 

1.  I shall tell you the only two paths of inquiry there are for thinking:  The one: that it is, and it is impossible for it not to be. This is the path of persuasiveness, for it accompanies objective truth.  The other: that it is not, and it necessarily must not be.  This, I point out, is a path wholly unthinkable, for neither could you know what-is-not (for that is impossible), nor could you point it out.

2.  Shall I teach you about knowledge?  To know when you know something, and to know when you don’t know, that’s knowledge.  Do you take me for one who studies a great deal and remembers it?  It is not so.  I link all on a single thread.  If even a bumpkin asks a question of me, I am all empty.  I simply tap at both ends of the question until I exhaust it.

 

The assignment is due at the beginning of class on Wednesday, September 14.