Compositionality in Language Compositionality is a concept in the philosophy of language. A symbolic system is compositional if the meaning of every complex expression E in that system depends on, and depends only on, (J’ai) E’s syntactic structure and (Ii) the meanings of E’s simple parts. If a language is compositional, then the meaning of a sentence S in that language cannot depend directly on

Liar Paradox The Liar Paradox is an argument that arrives at a contradiction by reasoning about a Liar Sentence. The Classical Liar Sentence is the self-referential sentence: This sentence is false. It leads to the same difficulties as the sentence, I am lying. Experts in the field of philosophical logic have never agreed on the way out of the trouble despite 2,300 years of attention.

Mozi (Mo-tzu, c. 400s—300s B.C.E.) Mo Di (Mo Ti), better known as Mozi (Mo-tzu) or “Master Mo,” was a Chinese thinker active from the late 5th to the early 4th centuries B.C.E. He is best remembered for being the first major intellectual rival to Confucius and his followers. Mozi’s teaching is summed up in ten theses extensively argued for in the text that bears his

Zhu Xi (Chu Hsi, 1130—1200) A preeminent scholar, classicist and a first-rate analytic and synthetic thinker, Zhu Xi (Chu Hsi) created the supreme synthesis of Song-Ming dynasty (960-1628 CE) Neo-Confucianism. De plus, by selecting the essential classical Confucian texts–the Analects (Lunyu) of Confucius, the Book of Mencius (Mengzi, the Great Learning (Daxue) and the Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong)—then editing and compiling them, with commentary, as the Four Books

John Rawls (1921—2002) John Rawls was arguably the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century. He wrote a series of highly influential articles in the 1950s and ’60s that helped refocus Anglo-American moral and political philosophy on substantive problems about what we ought to do. Son premier livre, Une théorie de la justice [TJ] (1971), revitalized the social-contract tradition, using it to articulate and defend

Modern Chinese Philosophy The term “modern Chinese philosophy” is used here to denote various Chinese philosophical trends in the short period between the implementation of the constitutional “new policy” (1901) and the abolition of the traditional examination system (1905) in the late Qing (Ch'ing) dynasty and the rise and fall of the Republic of China in mainland China (1911-1949). As an ancient cultural entity, China