Two Roots or One?

Abstract

I stand before you as your president with a good deal of diffidence and humility. Professor Kaplan has just kindly explained who I am to the many of you who may never have heard of me. And while he has had very generous things to say, it is evident to you that I am not a main line philosopher. This being so, I am the more deeply honored that you should have chosen to put me in this position, this year and this evening. A large part of my time is taken in teaching and analyzing the classical Chinese language, and (in recent years) deciphering ancient inscriptions on bronze ritual vessels and on pieces of bone and turtle shell that were used by court diviners. The methodology of working on this material has a real philosophical interest. But for a yet longer time I have been occupied with the history of Chinese philosophy over its whole range, and in particular Confucian moral philosophy. And it is questions that have engaged me in this area that have gotten me part way into what I would like to think is real philosophy. But of this you must be the judges. My title has the grammatical form of a question. But I will make a promise at the outset. I am not going to try to answer the question. Instead, I shall use it as a stalking horse for taking some shots at problems that interest me. In any case, rumors in the halls to the contrary, my title 'Two Roots or One? is, you can see, not likely to materialize in an address on some problem in the philosophy of mathematics.