1.

Reflect on how you thought about Asian Philosophy before you took this course and
how learning about the concepts involved in the capstone projects affected your view.
Have any of your assumptions or understandings changed? Why? Were any other
assignments, activities, or readings in this course influential in this process?

During this course, my views on how religion and philosophy are related were changed. The
difficulty in separating the two became more evident as each religion or philosophy was
explored. This was particularly clear in trying to define certain philosophies such as
Confucianism, which seemed to express certain philosophical arguments existing for a
metaphysical reason, such as with the mandate of heaven being a means to justify the rules by
which the philosophy existed. This notion being later elaborated on with neo-Confucianism and
its concern with the metaphysical aspects of Confucian philosophy. This course also helped to
de-mystify much of the Asian philosophical works that may be alluded to in western culture, but
not explored in the same way that western philosophy and religion is presented. Asian
philosophy, just like any other, relied on discourse and logical arguments to develop into the
many different schools that may exist in any philosophy or religion. This was demonstrated
through learning about the many schools and philosophies that existed within the Hindu
tradition, as each one would derive from a debate about specific aspects of the tradition, from the
metaphysical to the practices to achieve a greater perspective on the reality that these traditions
are trying to understand. The de-mystification of these philosophies was also helped by the
writings I did which can be seen in this e-portfolio. In writing about some of these specific
debates and even having to argue for one side or another, I was able to better understand the core
of each of these debates and how they came about as these traditions were developing. One
debate that seemed indecipherable was the four-seven debate in Korean neo-Confucianism.
Through writing about it and arguing a position, I felt that I was able to get a more in-depth
understanding of how each of the positions worked in their own reasoning.

2. Reflect on the struggles and successes of learning about the concepts and skills involved in
the course. How did the signature assignments and/or other course elements help you finally
be successful? Be specific.

As previously mentioned, in the practice of explaining the positions of certain debates in

different Asian traditions, I was able to better understand the reasoning of each side of the
debate. In the task of defending one side of the debate there is a requirement to understand what
does and does not work within an argument, and this was made clear often in just picking a side
when I wasn’t sure and just writing about it. The essay on the four-seven debate was one
example of this, as the debate initially seemed very abstract in a way it seemed nearly
indecipherable. I had to pick a side and in doing so it gave me a better understanding of what
both T’oegye and Yi Yulgok were trying to explain in their examinations of metaphysics, human
virtue, and emotions. The four-seven debate response was not the only case, but one where the
information regarding the debate was particularly difficult to understand at first.