It was a message addressed to bamboo but meant, of course, for all of us. Another important 17th Century French Rationalist (although perhaps of the second order) was Nicolas Malebranche, who was a follower of Descartes in that he believed that humans attain knowledge through ideas or immaterial representations in the mind. The meditation begins with a call to think very carefully every morning of a particular individual with whom one tends to get irritated or to whom one feels aggressive or cold and – in place of one’s normal hostile impulses – to rehearse kindly messages like ‘I hope you will find peace’ or ‘I wish you to be free from suffering’. Accused and convicted of corrupting the youth, […] The main theme of postwar Continental philosophy was the enthusiastic reception in France of Nietzsche and Heidegger and the consequent rejection of metaphysics and the Cartesian rationalism inherited by Sartre and his fellow existentialists. It is one of the most important ideas in Buddhism. He thought that happiness could best be achieved by living a balanced life and avoiding excess by pursuing a golden mean in everything (similar to his formula for political stability through steering a middle course between tyranny and democracy). The theory of Pragmatism is based on Peirce's pragmatic maxim, that the meaning of any concept is really just the same as its operational or practical consequences (essentially, that something is true only insofar as it works in practice). The precious veins of gold are there to emphasise that breaks have a rich merit all of their own. The critics of metaphysics argued that only a relentless castigation of such excesses could produce a philosophy that was genuinely open toward Being, “thinghood,” and world. For the Buddha, the wise person should take care to grow completely at home with the ordinary shambles of existence. Bamboo is, surprisingly, classified as a grass rather than a tree, yet it is tall and strong enough to create groves and forests. Unlike most of the Pre-Socratic philosophers before him, Socrates was more concerned with how people should behave, and so was perhaps the first major philosopher of Ethics. is a (Chinese) term at the heart of the philosophy of Daoism. Roger Bacon was something of an exception, and actually criticized the prevailing Scholastic system, based as it was on tradition and scriptural authority. Shifts in the focus and concern of Western philosophy, The Greek Fathers of the Church and Erigena, Literary forms and sociological conditions, Nonepistemological movements in the Enlightenment, The idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, Positivism and social theory in Comte, Mill, and Marx, Identity theory, functionalism, and eliminative materialism, The phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. It is first described in the Tao Te Ching, written by the sage Lao Tzu in the 6th century BC. The third great Rationalist was the German Gottfried Leibniz. Guanyin doesn’t judge. Mettā is a word which, in the Indian language of Pali, means benevolence, kindness or tenderness. Another important philosopher in the Analytic Philosophy of the early 20th century was G. E. Moore, a contemporary of Russell at Cambridge University (then the most important center of philosophy in the world). This idea, known as Dualism (or, more specifically, Cartesian Dualism), set the agenda for philosophical discussion of the "mind-body problem" for centuries after. Buddhism recommends a daily, ritual meditation to foster this attitude (what is known as.