Critical Inquiry

Summer 2002
Volume 28, Number 4

Did Philosophers Have to Become Fixated on Truth?
by François Jullien, Trans. by Janet Lloyd

Philosophy

  1. Becoming attached to an idea
  2. Philosophy is historical
  3. Progress is made through explanation (demonstration)
  4. Generalization
  5. A level of immanence (cutting through chaos)
  6. Discourse (definition)
  7. Meaning
  8. Hidden because concealed
  9. To know
  10. Revelation
  11. Saying
  12. Truth
  13. The category of Being and of the subject
  14. Freedom
  15. Error
  16. The way leads to Truth

See Also

Stephen Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels: Against Theory (Summer 1982)

Jacques Bouveresse: Philosophy from an Antiphilosopher: Paul Valery (Winter 1995)

Bernard Harrison: 'White Mythology' Revisited: Derrida and His Critics on Reason and Rhetoric (Spring 1999)

Wisdom

  1. Having no particularly valued idea, no definitive position, no particular identity, treating all ideas on the same footing
  2. Wisdom has no history (it is not possible to write a history of wisdom)
  3. Pronouncements vary (wisdom needs to be mulled over, "savored")
  4. Globalization (every pronouncement of a sage always says everything that wisdom can produce, but from a different angle each time)
  5. A store of immanence
  6. Remarks (suggestion)
  7. The manifest
  8. Hidden because manifest
  9. To realize: to become aware of what one sees and what one knows
  10. Regulation
  11. There is nothing to say
  12. Congruence (the congruent is whatever is perfectly fitted to a particular situation)
  13. The category of process (the course of the world, the course of behavior)
  14. Spontaneity (sponte sua)
  15. Partiality (when blinded by one aspect of things, one no longer sees any other; one only sees one corner, instead of the overall picture)
  16. The way is viability (the way things go along, the way they are possible).

    François Jullien is the director of the Institut Marcel Granet at Université Paris 7ĞDenis Diderot. He is the author of, among other works, The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China (1995) and Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece (2000). His latest book is entitled Du 'Temps': Élements d'une philosophie du vivre (2001). Janet Lloyd is the translator of over fifty published works and has twice been awarded the Scott Moncrieff prize for translation, the first time for Marcel Détienne's The Gardens of Adonis (1977) and the second time for Philippe Descola's The Spears of Twilight (1996). Most recently she has been translating John Schied's The Religion of the Romans, Bernard Fauré's Buddhisms, Religions, Philosophies, Marcel Détienne's The Writing of Orpheus, Francois Hartog's Memories of Odysseus, and Eric Michaud's An Art for Eternity. She has just begun work on Enzo Traverso's Nazi Violence.

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