Comparative Essay on the topic: “Form” (Socrates) and “Tao” (Chuang Tzu) Compare and contrast how the ideas of the Forms and the Tao are similar and different. Make sure to back up your discussion with textual evidence (quotes from Socrates and from Chuang Tzu). Use examples to explain your point.
Compare two philosophical texts. By doing this, you begin to understand the differences between the positions and approaches, which is important when determining which is the more compelling or better addresses the issue under consideration. Once you begin to be able to explain the difference between positions or arguments, you are beginning to develop a critical capacity. You are establishing a basis for comparing arguments and positions for their relative strengths and weaknesses. For this assignment, however, you do not offer a criticism.
This assignment expositing or explaining what a text means, but now you are expositing with the intent to compare and contrast what different philosophers have to say on a topic. Once again, the ability to do this can be of considerable practical importance. Say, for instance, you are concerned about a proposal by a company to develop a nuclear waste facility near where you live. You discover others who are also concerned about the development. They all declare that they are against the facility. Is that enough for you to feel confident that they are allies in the fight against the development? It may be that one person is opposed to the dump, because it will reduce his property values, while you are opposed to it for health and environmental reasons. In such a case, your apparent ally could very well reverse his position, if the waste disposal company were to convince him that his property value would actually increase, because of new businesses that would be developed to maintain the facility and to serve the influx of workers. As these workers and new businesses arrive, the value of real estate will also rise. So, before declaring this person an ally, you would want to investigate his position more thoroughly to understand his reasons for opposing the development. So, when deciding who is an actual ally and who is not, you need to do the investigative work and compare positions, at least against your own.
It can be practically important to dig as deeply as you can as you interpret and compare the positions people take and why they take them. As you are able to do this, you also begin to see how deeply practical such digging is, because the more deeply you understand, the better equipped you are to anticipate and deal with what people do and how the world works. This comparative essay is further intended to help develop your interpretation and exposition skills, because comparing one argument against another helps you to identify the key concepts and lines of arguments of two thinkers. When you ask, “What is Philosopher 1 saying about a topic, and it is the same as Philosopher 2 or different?”, you begin to see more subtleties in their positions, just as you begin to see subtleties in the positions of your friends when you compare their beliefs. For example, if there are three of you who own houses where the above mentioned nuclear waste company wants to build a facility and all three of you are opposed to the facility, each of you will want to know why the others are opposed.
It could be that the initial differences between philosophers, as between ordinary people, are not as wide as they initially appear. Let’s use the nuclear waste facility example again. Suppose two of you are opposed to the development and the third is for it. Upon digging further, you realize that your seeming ally would be prepared to change his mind if the company convinces him that property values will increase. Further, you find that your seeming opponent supports the development on the false belief that nuclear facilities are completely safe, because she is also unaware of the problems associated with nuclear facilities (e.g., the 2011 Fukushima disaster). It turns out that she actually holds the same values as you do; she is just misinformed. Your truer ally, it turns out, is the one who initially opposes you; but you discovered this fact because you dug further to understand their values and reasons for adopting the position they adopted.
If you look at the process of comparing and contrasting as a process of discovery, it might not seem so much a task as an exploration. But as a philosophical explorer, you are more like the early explorers who carefully developed maps to tell them where they had been (and to guide them later when they returned), than the ones who just wandered around hoping to happen upon something of value.
