Thinking Transdisciplinarily on a Country Path: Rooting Enquiry and Pedagogy by Learning from Heidegger and the Zhongyong

Abstract

This is a study of how the notion of thinking that  Heidegger  developed  in  his  writing, especially Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking, can be read through a Confucian text  to  illuminate  transdisciplinarity  and  how  it might be taught. I briefly discuss the eurocentrism of  continental  philosophy,  especially  its  lack  of engagement with and respect for an Eastern philo- sophical perspective, then give the background of the chosen Chinese text.  I next consider Heidegger’s position on thinking and draw insights from how we can both teach and enable transdisciplinary relatedness in university students. Learning  to think is taken as inherent in the essential nature of humans and is a discovery of our own nature, as well as the nature of Being.This discovery, in What is Metaphysics, and Conversation on a Country Path, offers a way to unconcealment in the onto-cosmology of the harmony of all Being. It is essential to Confucian thought and to the fundamental ontology of Heidegger and, I contend, to forms of transdisciplinary thinking and teaching.