PHILOSOPHY, SOPHISTICS AND DIALECTICS IN WESTERN AND CHINESE PHILOSOPHIC PARADIGMS

Abstract

An analysis of what the concepts and practices of philosophy, dialectics, sophistics are in the context of Western and Chinese paradigms of philosophy, is suggested in the article. Western philosophic tradition is based on the so-called Antique paradigm that exceeds from the idea of attaining happiness and avoiding suffering before the face of alien threatening reality, then it passes through the so-called Abrahamic paradigm in its Christian version with its ideas of monotheism and creationism and achieves the modern scientific paradigm at last based on nature science.

Dialectics appeared in the frame of the Antique paradigm; three levels may be pointed out in it: Socratic where dialectics is a method of reasoning or teaching by means of oral conversation, Platonic as an approach that considers opposites not as excluding but supplementing each other, Hegelian and later Marxist where dialectics becomes an approach based on the principle of development. They correspond approximately to the according paradigm transitions in the Occident philosophy.

Traditional Chinese philosophic paradigm is organismic and its organismism is conditioned with clan structure of the traditional Chinese society where all relations between people are subdivided clearly into inner (inside of one’s clan) and outer (outside of it) ones. Traditional Chinese ethics blames anything that can break piece and harmony inside of their own group. Disputes can convince nobody, they can only affront and destroy agreement inside of the group. From here the aphoristic character of the traditional Chinese philosophy comes, that supposes using of separate aphorisms and stories in place of logical arguments and systematical expound. These aphorisms and stories fall down into one’s memory and make one to come to one’s own conclusions.

If intellectual gap at transition from the Antique to the Medieval Abrahamic paradigm was connected with rereading and reinterpretation of the corresponding philosophic texts, then in China it represented only a finishing of the same, existing paradigm through its narrowing. They were different historical conditions and cultures which determined different algorithms of development but nevertheless demonstrate some conceptual parallels. Though in quite different contexts.