Week 14 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 14 — Four Traditions in Their Own Terms — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Philosophy Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 13 of the term — correct a post that misattributes and misreads Confucian and Daoist ideas, state Confucian ethics and Daoism at their strongest with their objections, reconstruct the chariot argument, state the Four Noble Truths and ubuntu fairly, compare one tradition with a European view without ranking either, and explain no-self to someone new to philosophy.

This week you learned Confucian ethics (ren, li, xiao, and the junzi), Daoism (the dao, wu wei, and ziran), the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, the chariot from the Questions of King Milinda, and ubuntu with relational personhood. In Week 2 you learned standard form, validity, and modus ponens; in Week 7 you met the ship of Theseus, Locke's memory theory, and no-self; and in Weeks 12 and 13 you met Kant, Aristotle, and social contract theory. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Philosophy Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles; this assignment is where you put them together.

The task

You will use this week's sources: Dataset I (the course's world philosophies set of 12 concepts, 3 from each of 4 traditions), the chariot (the Week 14 case on the course's roster), and the comparison of each tradition with a European view. Each tradition is philosophy with its own arguments; present each one in its own terms, never as exotic, mystical, or lesser, and rank none of them. The course quotes nothing from the Analects, the Daodejing, or the Questions of King Milinda, so describe them in your own words. The everyday cases below were written for this assignment; they are illustrative and describe no real person or place.

Part A — get the Confucian and Daoist sources right, then test the views. A post on a study-group forum reads: "Confucius wrote the Daodejing, which teaches wu wei: the wise person does nothing. Li means following whatever customs your culture has. It's all Eastern wisdom, not real philosophy." Do four things:

Correct the post. Say what the Analects are and to whom the course says the Daodejing is traditionally attributed; give the course's gloss of wu wei and say why it is not doing nothing; give the course's gloss of li and say why fitting is not the same as customary; and say how the course presents these traditions instead of as "Eastern wisdom".
State Confucian ethics at its strongest. Define ren, li, xiao, and the junzi, state the view as its best defenders would, then give the conformity objection and a reply from the Confucian side.
Apply xiao. Choose a decision a family or community you know has had to make together (not the grandmother at the kitchen table from Chapter 14), and reason through it with xiao and li in 4–6 sentences.
State Daoism at its strongest. Define the dao, wu wei, and ziran, give the passivity objection and a reply from the Daoist side, and end with one plain sentence saying where li and ziran part.

Then work this problem, showing your reasoning:

Dataset I sorts its concepts into 4 traditions, with 3 concepts in each. How many concepts does Dataset I contain?

Part B — the Buddhist and ubuntu views, then one comparison without ranking. Work this problem first, showing your reasoning:

Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan dates from 1651, and Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals dates from 1785. How many years separate them?

Then do three things:

State the Buddhist views fairly. Give the Four Noble Truths in order, gloss dukkha, and give the pessimism objection with a reply from the Buddhist side. Then write the chariot argument in standard form with its added premise marked, name its form, judge its validity with a one-sentence reason from the definition of validity, say why the course does not key it as sound, and give the unity objection with a reply.
State ubuntu fairly. Give the Zulu maxim umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu with its common English gloss and say why the English words are a gloss, not the maxim's own; apply relational personhood to a change in your own life or one you have watched; and give the override objection with a reply from the ubuntu side.
Compare without ranking. Choose one of the course's four shared questions (what is a self, what makes a person good, how should one act, how do people live together), set one tradition from this week beside the European view the course pairs with it, state both at their strongest, and end with one plain sentence naming where they part, without saying which is better.

Explain it to a non-expert

A friend who has never taken philosophy says, "I read that Buddhists believe nobody exists. That's ridiculous." Write a 3–5 sentence message in everyday words that explains what the teaching of no-self denies and what it does not deny, uses the chariot to show why persons can still be real, and names one honest limit of what you can claim. Explain any term your friend might not know.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a coworker who asks what "joie de vivre" means and whether "joy of living" is exactly what the French says. Model answer: "Joy of living is a common English gloss of a French phrase, a short rendering in our words. The French words are the phrase itself; the English line is someone's way of carrying the idea over. A gloss is handy, but it can lose shades of meaning, so it is fair to treat it as a guide to the idea rather than as the original. One limit: I can tell you how the phrase is usually rendered, not every way French speakers use it."

Use that pattern for your message to your friend, with your own explanation of no-self.

Revise and reflect

Put your first draft away for a few hours, then reread it against Chapter 14. For the correction, check the glosses of wu wei and li word for word against the chapter and confirm that you wrote "traditionally attributed" for the Daodejing; for each tradition, ask whether its best defender would sign your statement of it; for the chariot argument, check the form's name against Week 2's list and confirm that the added premise is marked; for ubuntu, confirm that you called the English line a gloss; for the comparison, confirm that your plain sentence says where the views part and not which one wins; and check that your message to your friend says what no-self does not deny. Make at least one change and keep both versions. Then answer one of these two options in 2–4 sentences; they carry the same weight:

(a) Which change made your sourcing or your reconstruction more exact, and which course definition showed you it was needed?
(b) Which change made your statement of one of the traditions stronger or fairer, and what had you left out or weakened at first?

Deliverables

Submit one document or recording that contains, in this order:

your Part A forum-post correction with the first count, Confucian ethics with its objection and reply, xiao and li applied to your own case, and Daoism with its objection, reply, and plain sentence;
your Part B year gap, the Four Noble Truths with their objection and reply, the chariot argument reconstructed and judged with its objection and reply, ubuntu with the gloss, your own case, and its objection and reply, and the comparison with its plain sentence;
your message to your friend;
your first and revised versions of the part you changed, and your reflection.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about five minutes with a transcript. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the correction, the statements of the views, the reconstruction, the comparison, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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