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Why Are Hundreds of Harvard Students Studying Ancient Chinese Philosophy?
- einhverfr 13y agoThe courses which changed my life the most were those which covered history, literature, and philosophy. The courses may have been easy in many ways, but they left a profound mark on me.
- hydralist 13y agothey want to know what their future boss's next move will be
- Sagat 13y agothanks for the lel
- objclxt 13y agoI can offer you an alternative, rather more cynical, explanation as to why it's such a popular class: it's rated as one of the easiest. Not only, as the article mentions, does it fulfill a core requirement, but it's also rated as one of the easiest courses going in the student evaluations. It scores a 1.58/5 for workload, and a 2.43/5 for difficulty, both below the benchmark for the Gen Ed department (which itself is pretty low). I'm sure many people taking the class have a genuine interest, but from my experience a significant number of students spend a lot of time finding core/gen-ed classes that are light on work (this is especially true if you've left your requirement to the last minute to complete). (I'd link to the evaluation data, but you need a harvard.edu login, so you'll have to take my word for it). Edit: Turns out the student paper backs this theory up - http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/10/9/hey-atlantic-5-real-reasons-to-take-er-18/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/10/9/hey-atlantic-5-r...
- nostromo 13y agoWhen I was in college, I noticed that I was allowed to use 3 credits of physical education towards my elective credits. However, none were offered at the school, so I took yoga at a community college and transferred the credits in. Turns out I discovered I really like yoga. :)
- Moto7451 13y agoI did the same thing. I could take Chicano studies, Asian American studies, African American Studies, or three Karate classes to fulfill a requirement. The first three options were known to be difficult but not particularly deep and students alleged that you would get a bad grade if your political views didn't match the professors' views. I took the latter most option and had way more fun.
- auctiontheory 13y agoExcellent example of Occam's razor.
- eruditely 13y agoIt definitely wasn't an application of Occam's razor. Sigh, what is everyone's obsessions with retrofitting a small amount of logical tools everywhere?
- NoPiece 13y agoConfirmation bias?
- kaoD 13y agoI see what you did there.
- trentmb 13y ago> Sigh, what is everyone's obsessions with retrofitting a small amount of logical tools everywhere? It makes them feel smart. I'm going to put my head through a wall next time I see someone type 'fallacy.'
- Sagat 13y agoWow, what's up with the ad hominem, bro?
- steveklabnik 13y agoNot ad hominem, they didn't say they were wrong because they feel smart. Sigh.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
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- 001sky 13y agoDidn't they just have a huge cheating scandal? I mean why kind of journo is on the prowl (of his own volition) poking around these kind of corners in a university? If the body leads, the mind will follow. The smallest actions have the most profound ramifications. Decisions are made from the heart. Seeing how they just launched another $6B fundraiser...perhaps they were getting pushback from the type of students that were making the press for all the wrong reasons.
- shuzchen 13y agoHere's another theory (not saying yours isn't possibly right): the Chinese government has an agenda involving more and more people studying Chinese language, culture, and traditions. I'm not insinuating any malicious intent here; as any sensible country would they want to promote trade with other nations, and trade goes a lot smoothly if the other party speaks your language/knows your culture/has a connection. One manifestation of this agenda is the Confucius Institutes that have spawned hundreds of branches around the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Institute http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Institute). They're pretty nice organizations: they run programs, give funding for projects, give scholarships (heck, my web development job during college was paid partly through the local CI). All in all promote Chinese language/culture, though all pretty much funded by the PRC.
- Ygg2 13y agoIt makes sense. They have dominated the culinary world by making their food ubiquitous! Now they want to dominate the philosophical world. The fiends. I knew it! Palpatine's behind it all.
- Sagat 13y agoOne advantage of this policy for foreigners is that it's remarkably easy to get into the best Chinese universities (even Tsinghua) compared to the effort the average chinese student has to expend to achieve the same goal. Source: a visiting professor from China
- notahacker 13y agoThere's no shortage of Chinese overseas students at Western universities, many of which have a strong financial incentive to accept more overseas students (they can usually charge higher fees) even if their ability to read and write English lags behind the average European student. The resulting cultural cross-pollination is usually likely to be a good thing...
- mhurron 13y ago25 years ago you would have written the above, but with simply replacing Chinese with Japanese. Lets fast forward to now and see how that worked out. Nope, still speaking English.
- cylinder 13y agoWhy would someone kill themselves in order to get into Harvard only to slack their way through it doing the easiest rated classes?
- GuiA 13y agoHave you ever been 18?
- phaus 13y agoQuite a few people believe that general education requirements are a waste of time. Therefore, they pick easy classes for the things that have nothing to do with their major.
- objclxt 13y agoBecause Harvard awards degrees based on a GPA cut-off that ensures only 50% of the graduating class get Latin honors. So if you were a Harvard student who wanted to get Latin honors (...of which there are more than a few) it's in your best interests to take the easiest general-education (core) courses to ensure you have more breathing space for studies in your major. I Head TA'd a core curriculum class at Harvard, and you would be amazed at the number of seniors who e-mailed me once grades came out begging to be bumped up as it meant their GPA would be pushed over the honors cut-off. This was one reason why the Harvard cheating scandal last year was so widespread: the course fulfilled a core requirement, and it had a reputation for being very easy, hence hundreds of people took it.
- gcb0 13y agoalso, answering the grandparent post and expanding on the parent answer... the fact that person is in Harvard already proves he/she understands how to play with grade averages to begin with. gpa is not always directly proportional to hard work.
- judk 13y agoNot really, high school GPA means taking all the AP/advanced classes -- not the easiest ones, ALL the ones.
- mlchild 13y agoI took the class because it was supposed to be easy and satisfied (then-core) requirements. But I still regularly consider Confucian, Mohist, and, heck, even Han Feizi(an?) philosophy and their applications to daily life. Chinese philosophy nails the importance of the quotidian (to quote the article) in shaping one's world view. It's akin to PG arguing that what you think about in the shower matters or that living with your cofounders is optimal. I found it enriching. In the end, isn't the point of a good education—to get you to see the world differently, even if it's more superficial lures that draw you in?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- corin_ 13y agoIt's fine to think that of him, but at least have the balls to say it from your normal account.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Sagat 13y agoBe honest. Are you actually going to use those diluted feel-good aphorisms to shape your life?
- ogig 13y ago"One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself" You can shape an awesome life for you and others using this "diluted feel-good aphorism".
- Sagat 13y agoThat's not a feel-good aphorism. That's a principle that is at the core of religions and philosophies practiced by billions. It's not universally applied, but people are actively trying to teach it.
- oskarth 13y agoWhile that is more likely the correct answer to the question posed in the headline, the article itself is more about what the students learn and how it affects them. Putting The Analects into practice is pretty remarkable, but a more honest headline would not be as "clicky".
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoHow is that a cynical explanation? Gen-Ed requirements are stupid, particularly in the way they require you to take low-level survey courses marked explicitly as Gen-Eds rather than more in-depth courses. They create people with shallow educations excepting one (maybe two) topics of "in-major" depth rather than graduates with a broad polymathic education.
- juliajuli45 13y agomy classmate's half-sister makes $72 every hour on the internet. She has been without a job for eight months but last month her payment was $16159 just working on the internet for a few hours.Here's the site to read more...... ------------------->http://www.works23.com http://www.works23.com
- omarrr 13y agothe wrong math is what bothers me the most about these spam posts.
- corin_ 13y agoPresumably the claim is that $72 is the minimum but sometimes it can be more? What bothers me more is the logic of spamming HN, which I would imagine must be one of the places least likely to have people falling for that sort of shit.
- moconnor 13y agoSomeone's probably paid per link they create, independent of the value of that link. Perhaps spam generation could be disrupted... :-)
- Skywing 13y agodoes anybody actually give a shit?
- colbyolson 13y agoIs there a way to get the reading list for this course?
- gbog 13y agoShameless plug: search wengu, you'll get a site with Chinese texts ands translations.
- austinz 13y agoThere are different schools of Chinese philosophy that have differing approaches and conclusions, and even then sub-schools with differing beliefs within them (e.g. the Confucianist scholars Xun Zi and Mencius on the innate goodness of human nature). Saying that students should apply something as broadly and uselessly defined as "Chinese philosophy" into their lives is not particularly helpful, and sort of implicitly reinforces the stereotype that Chinese (or East Asian) people all adhere to this rigid, alien way of thinking. Also, it's sort of condescending. No Western professor teaches Heidegger or Schopenhauer by breaking them up into easy-to-digest, feel-good aphorisms for better living.
- cdcarter 13y agoPresumably this intro level course does a survey of major belief systems.
- javert 13y agoThat doesn't seem like a reasonable presumption to me. You can't do justice to major belief systems even at a high level if you squeeze it into part of a course on a different topic.
- opminion 13y agoAlso, it's sort of condescending. No Western professor teaches Heidegger or Schopenhauer by breaking them up into easy-to-digest, feel-good aphorisms for better living. That might explain Hegel's obscurity.
- einhverfr 13y ago> No Western professor teaches Heidegger or Schopenhauer by breaking them up into easy-to-digest, feel-good aphorisms for better living. This is true, but there is comparable treatment in early Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, with multiple schools arguing very different things getting lumped together as if they are the same.
- redthrowaway 13y ago
- knappador 13y agoI studied the Dao in a Chinese History course only briefly and one of the statements that I particularly like is wrapped up nicely here: http://www.myrkothum.com/the-meaning-of-the-finger-pointing-to-the-moon/ http://www.myrkothum.com/the-meaning-of-the-finger-pointing-... It's almost obvious when you think about it that abstraction necessitates containers like memory pointers and that referencing the abstractions is more efficient, but in the magic of our minds, the underlying truth is not guaranteed to still be there. Another quality of what I read in Daodejing is that it basically proclaims itself to only be such a pointer, and that the truth can't be contained and still have a word to call it by. How many other philosophies and religions do you know that try to explain all and -do- claim to have all the answers or have proponents who claim that every truth can be found within their corpus? I did come away believing that Laozi had captured the fact that any all-inclusive truth is ineffable, something that can be logically reinforced by studying paradoxes such as Russel's paradox and self-reference. To sum up the paradox. Define a set of all sets. The set itself is a set, so in order to be the set of all sets, it has to contain itself. Writing a program to create this set will obviously never terminate because any result must be put inside the result, so there can be no final result. Cool resolutions to many problems of natural thought that would otherwise spiral off into infinity. Teaches you to recognize them and terminate the process, freeing memory and mental cycles for other things.
- cliffu 13y agoI shall now interpret the opening sentence to mean "any Dao whose rules can be enumerated is either inconsistent or incomplete." Thanks, that's a fun connection.
- narrator 13y agoI read the Analects of Confucius. It's a good one because like Gilgamesh it was created outside of the constant necessary glorified warfare world of the Old Testament and the Iliad and the Odyssey. There's so much conflict and war culture interwoven into everything in the west it's hard to figure out that that's not all there is to public life. Eastern religion, even Confucius who is seen as more conservative and hierarchical, is far more serene.
- forktheif 13y agoIgnoring the fact that China was at a near continuous state of war during the time of Confucius, with many huge and bloody battles as the various Chinese states tried to conquer each other.
- acqq 13y agoStill the warfare in ancient China didn't result in Chinese thinkers creating "jealous rules-giving God" but something called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven Put that in that western "we invented the resistance to the unjust government" pipe.
- gwern 13y ago> Still the warfare in ancient China didn't result in Chinese thinkers creating "jealous rules-giving God" I would suggest that what they did create to successfully end the constant warfare (which Confucianism failed to do), Legalism, was even more horrifying than any monotheism. Have you ever read, say, the Book of Lord Shang?
- acqq 13y agoI haven't but I've checked: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalism_(philosophy) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalism_(philosophy) Apparently the times of legalism were around 3rd century BCE, and then "In later dynasties, Legalism was discredited and ceased to be an independent school of thought." I don't claim that it was all rosy afterwards, but let's also not forget that it were the British that were literally drug dealers to the Chinese, that even started the war once the Chinese weren't ready to accept it anymore: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
- jhonovich 13y agoI don't know why these students are taking it, but reading Zhuangzi in college was an eye opener, as the philosophy contained within runs almost paradoxical to traditional Western thought. Those reading are very short and contain many fascinating insights http://www.amazon.com/Chuang-Tzu-Writings-Burton-Watson/dp/0231105959 http://www.amazon.com/Chuang-Tzu-Writings-Burton-Watson/dp/0...
- n00shie 13y agoBecause they are all Chinese?
- gbog 13y agoI can relate, having studied by myself Chinese philosophy. But too points in the article sounded untrue: Chinese thought is not abstruse, it is often flat and obvious, once you get it. Also, the things about decision and spontaneity are just a very small superficial part of it. I would add: Founding moral rules without recurrences to a god. The fecundity and importance of emptiness. The non non contradiction: A and not A, yin and yang, etc. The refusal to let words drive thoughts.
- Sagat 13y agoCould you explain what the importance of emptiness is? It sounds mysterious and interesting.
- steveklabnik 13y ago> $PHILOSOPHY thought is not abstruse, it is often flat and obvious, once you get it. I've found this to be very true in general. That journey can often be difficult, though.
- McUsr 13y agoOh well, it is an easy course. My few cents is that it helps improve your life, taking such a course. At my university, we had an "easy" philosophy course, focusing on Sartre and Kierkegaard, existensialism. The course itself, opened up whole new perspectives to me, and way of perceptions. Maybe this is the one greatest enhancement as a person I gained from my years at the University. I'd say such philosphy courses should really be mandatory for everybody. Not the usual Examen Philosophicum, but the mind-bending ones.
- nnoitra 13y agoBecause they have money and want to explore something unique. You don't have to major in CS and believe it or not not everyone needs to know how to code.
- Volpe 13y agoThe word for mind and heart are not the same in Chinese...
- zhemao 13y agoYeah, I was just about to post this. That's some Grade-A orientalist bullshit there, The Atlantic. In Chinese, heart is used in the same metaphorical sense as it is in English, as a center of emotional thought, as opposed to the brain, which is the center of rational thought.
- sarreph 13y agoIf anyone wants access to some of the content, I've found quite a large collection of notes for the course, here: http://karmanotes.org/harvard/ethical-reasoning-18-classical-chinese-ethical-and-political-theory http://karmanotes.org/harvard/ethical-reasoning-18-classical...
- mknits 13y agoIf you really want to learn something, learn Ancient Indian culture (not the one distorted by stupid American professors).
- kriro 13y agoIntro to CS is a top 3 class. Good news and my major takeaway from the article.
- jacques_chester 13y agoBased on my experiences of being an undergrad during the first tech boom, the reasoning runs as follows: You know what's cool? A billion dollars.
- judk 13y agoGoogle: David j malan cs50. Cs50 collapsed in the first tech boom, and then Malan reinvented the course in 2007, drastically increasing enrollment (including women, relatively) ahead of the current/recent boom
- jacques_chester 13y agoThanks, looks like they did some great work. That said, lots of schools saw enrolments climbing again in the late 2000s as the boom reached its onramp.
- hackernewsguy 13y agoI'm from China and lived in the US for years. I think that Chinese people are way more practical and result driven, and instead Americans tend to follow their hearts more. I agree that there are many different ways to interpret ancient Chinsese philosophy that can lead to totally different conclusions. I disagree that this has anything to do with Chinese government or the increasing amount of Chinese students.
- arvinjoar 13y ago> For one thing, the class fulfills one of Harvard's more challenging core requirements, Ethical Reasoning. According to http://www.registrar.fas.harvard.edu/courses-exams/courses-instruction/ethical-reasoning http://www.registrar.fas.harvard.edu/courses-exams/courses-i... so does Michael Sandel's Justice course, which can be viewed here: http://www.justiceharvard.org/ http://www.justiceharvard.org/ It's one of the most amazing lecture series I've seen. I can't see how the one given by Puett could possibly be any better... But then again, Harvard is supposed to be one of the best schools in the world, maybe Puett really offers a better course...