Zoom: https://umac.zoom.us/ j/ 98172916562 Abstract The Chinese Bronze Age corresponds roughly to two dynasties, Shang 商 (ca. 1600-ca. 1045 B.C.) and Western Zhou 西周 (ca. 1045-771 B.C.).  The name Bronze Age is defensible because these were bronze-using societies whose artifacts evince a high degree of metallurgical skill, and who left behind some of their most important documents as inscriptions on bronze vessels.  Conspicuously, the surviving textual sources derive from the world of the elite, if not the very apex of power in the form of the King and his closest ministers.  One of the major questions is the extent to which they believed what they wrote and transmitted.  How much confidence did they have in their oracles?  Did the King believe that Heaven would reward him for virtue and […]

Zoom: https://umac.zoom.us/j/92060951944 Abstract Temporal ontology is more and more recognized as a crucial part of metaphysics. Nowadays metaphysics textbooks often include a chapter on this topic. These works take for granted that there is substantial disagreement between the different traditional views in temporal ontology such as A-eternalism, B-eternalism, growing block theory, presentism. This seems to be right and yet many philosophers have argued that the disagreement is only verbal or not substantial. Then, in an attempt to clarify the nature of the dispute in temporal ontology new views, such as permanentism and transientism have entered the arena. This however appears to have added additional perplexities, up to the point that the very authors of the entry on presentism of the […]