How has eastern philosophy always managed to be so far ahead of western?

How has eastern philosophy always managed to be so far ahead of western?

Is it due to the structure of their language?

it's been pretty far behind western philosophy since the 19th century germans blocked their path, and has remained behind ever since. at the moment, they are currently doing things like toying with utilitarianism, contemporary ego disillusionment concepts, naturalism, and even straight up animism still gets toyed with in japan/china/korea. western philosophy is getting more to the point with a focus on linguistic concept, the roots of logical positivism, phenomenological objectivism, etc. etc.

however, on the topic of their language and mildly irrelevant, I wish the west would adopt logographic symbolism. we don't like to admit it, but chinese/japanese are much more efficient to read, and japanese has the added bonus of being 100% phonetically accurate as well. by every metric other than educational logistics, japanese is a superior written language to english.

>I wish the west would adopt logographic symbolism
oh it has and they're called emoticons sadly

How can philosophy be "ahead"? It's a completely subjective field.

>arguing philosophically that it is objective that the entire field of philosophy is subjective
wew

not surprised that Veeky Forums contradicts itself constantly at this point, just disappointed.

Eastern "philosophy" is not philosophy at all as we understand it in the West. It is inseparable from the religion. The only thing that comes close in the west was scholasticism.

It's not something you can judge objectively like science and technology. Some people think Kant is shit, others think he's good. Some people say the Greek philosophers are the best, others say they're overrated.

science utilizes the scientific method, which is a concept rooted entirely in logical reasoning, which is a branch of philosophy.

>It's not something you can judge objectively like science and technology.
this is a philosophical statement. is it objective? according to you, it can't be. so why are you declaring it as though it is objective?

>It's a completely subjective field.
This is bait but in case you're interested in the actually subjective fields, Veeky Forums is that way.

>chinese/japanese are much more efficient to read
this is an empirically evaluable claim and I have doubts that it is actually true. Other means of quantifying language efficiency (for example, amount of semantic information per second), when tested, suggest that the differences between languages with regards to efficiency are negligible.

Western philosophy got meme'd on by Platonism.
Science isn't objective.
>which is a concept rooted entirely in logical reasoning
No it's not.

you are quoting resources on spoken language, not written. reading is a completely different matter. it's well-observed in academia that logographic languages are the most efficient to read. there's a reason japanese/chinese subtitles are on the screen for shorter periods of time than english subtitles.

point out where I claimed science was objective, I think you lack reading comprehension buddy. not surprising if you're making short claims with no explanation such as "plato memes the west" and "no".

Implied.
>no explanation
top platomeme

explain how it's implied. use quotations.

>explain
top platomeme

>you are quoting resources on spoken language, not written. reading is a completely different matter. it's well-observed in academia that logographic languages are the most efficient to read. there's a reason japanese/chinese subtitles are on the screen for shorter periods of time than english subtitles
maybe reading is a different matter but I've never seen any scientific evidence of it. Do you know of any papers about this? You say it's "well-observed in academia" but I have no idea what that means.

Falsifiability is a concept directly intertwined with the ability to support a claim utilizing logic.

Why? u sed so?

sorry, I've got nothing for you, a shameful display but it's been over a decade since I went to school and I'm speaking from what I learned in linguistic anthropology. I don't like arguments from authority anyway, you can use google if you want, though I question the availability of papers written in english claiming that english isn't as efficient as another language. it's not hard to figure out, though. the same amount of information is stored within a smaller space. a book with 400 pages is quicker to read than a book with 550 pages with the same information. subtitles are on screen for less time. some chinese speed readers can glance at paragraphs and recite most of the information.

the subject scholasticism deals with is religious, but it's substance is just deductive logic and metaphysics.

>same amount of information

I'd argue there are subtleties available to alphabetical systems that logographs can't really touch.

Forget the fact that alphabets are just way easier to learn, write with, and interpret.

>some chinese speed readers

some english speed readers can probably do the same thing

see , I covered educational logistics in the first post.

I was previously fluent in Japanese and am on my fourth year of learning Chinese. For Chinese, I'd have to say it's pretty inferior as a language, mostly because of it's basic expression of thought. First off there is the initial hurdle of learning approx 3000 unique characters, making it so even native citizens need six years of school to be able to read a newspaper (I've heard the official number can reach somewhere like 25,000, but to have proficiency you only need 3000). That also means that you're basing almost all your words (around 200,000) off of 3000 characters, so the language just becomes an extended combination of simple words. That's what Chinese is, simple, direct, and not very malleable to new words (as all words are based off of set in stone characters from something something B.C.). English on the other hand has so many more relevant and nuanced words that can be used and read easily and frequently because of their amiable alphabetical system.

I haven't read anything about your subtitle claim, but you might be confusing the length of time with the length of text. Chinese will have a shorter subtitles because each space occupies a symbol with more meaning than a letter, however I heard somewhere that the Chinese person can compute around 2.5 characters in the same amount of time an English person can compute 11 letters, so the processing of information becomes equal.

>more educational logistics
I already said that that is something that english is superior in.

I am referring to the length of time subtitles are on the screen, not the physical length of a subtitle slide.

furthermore, at least japanese as you should know is extremely flexible like english in adopting foreign words. I doubt the same is true for chinese, but I know much less about the language and excluded it from my claim concerning metrics.

>japanese is a superior written language to english

lol is that why they use latin acronyms now?
Textual compactness isn't always best, I'll bet a few things are lost in the logographic translation.

I have to side with pure alphabetical systems here

the ability to straight up adopt romanized acronyms and have them be understood is part of what makes their language so advanced.

>2457574

I think I agree with the other guy on the topic of the superiority of Japanese. They pretty much take the best of everything with a phonetic alphabet (hiragana), Chinese logographics (kanji) and latin (or any) adaptations (katakana).

Going back to the educational logistics, I think their languages in the fact that it requires extensive and strict rote memorization of ancient characters contributed to the culture and Confucianist philosophy of society over individualism.

>structure of their language
Buddha spoke a language related to English and unrelated to Chinese

what are you talking about?

Whoops only used one >

Why would you starve yourself for spirituality anyway? Isn't a healthy body a healthy spirit?

>isn't the body spirit?

idk man

people who are in poor health tend to be spiritually weak as well, I doubt a peasant farmer with dysentery who can only focus on the pain is close to nirvana

>having to learn a shitton of different logos to be able to speak is a better way of communicauon because subtitles spend 15% less time on sceen
Kys

As someone that speaks Chinese, that's completely untrue, English is the best language I've ever come across, it's easily readable, versatile and well structured grammatically, its only downside is the pronunciation, which can be completely wacky sometimes, especially when accents come into question.

a lot of reading comprehension problems in a thread about language. the irony.

I already said educational logistics are where japanese suffers

chinese wasn't related to my claim concerning metrics.

>close to nirvana

kek

Asian here we hella stupid

>How has eastern philosophy always managed to be so far ahead of western?
Define what you mean by ahead.

>Is it due to the structure of their language?
Sapir–Whorf has no serious support in the world of linguistics, and hasn't had for several decades.

>I wish the west would adopt logographic symbolism
Logograms work for Chinese because of how the grammar works in that language. Words rarely, if ever, conjugate and thus having a single symbol representing each word works pretty well. It does not work that well for Japanese and Hangul, however, which is why they have complemented, or replaced, the traditional Chinese letters with a native syllabry in the case of the former and an alphabet organized into squares in the case of the latter.

>but chinese/japanese are much more efficient to read
Nope. Not to say that the latin alphabet necessarily is more efficient either, just that trying to compare two writing systems like this is silly. A logogram or syllabry would be incredibly ineficient for writing English regardless.

In short it had a head start with optimal socio-ecological conditions while the future of western philosophy was still banging rocks together.

It's was around for thousands of years before, allowed to exist in the stable state societies provided by the fertile River valleys in India, "China", and Mesopotamia(Mesopotamian philosophy destoryed itself with dogma).
It's "lead" has largely been lost since the emergence of western science, but both traditions still have their own strengths and weaknesses

>Sapir–Whorf has no serious support in the world of linguistics, and hasn't had for several decades.

i really liked Arrival but this fact turned me off a bit.

This is underrated. The foundation of Western philosophy was done in Ancient Greek, which is structurally similar to Sanskrit and other Indian languages, but very different from Chinese. English is too divergent though for the shared linguistic ancestry to matter much at all and same for German and any other language used in more recent philosophy. They're just as different now from Sanskrit as the latter is from Chinese but that still supports the point being made here.

The rest of this thread is a pointless tangent on writing.

>15% less time
More like 95%.

>They're just as different now from Sanskrit as the latter is from Chinese
No. If they were we wouldn't be able to tell that the former belongs to the same language family while the latter doesn't.

India for example had a complete linguistic department for more than 2000 years before the west "invented" linguistics. This allowed skilled writers to structure their writings so that it would reach all types of audiences on different levels.

China has a long tradition of literature and a much higher literacy rate than others due to their advances in governing structure. The ability to keep records, have relatively "stable"/safe place to keep their recorded knowledge and shared with others.