Sessions
The twelve-week teaching schedule: what happens in each session, what to prepare, and what leaves the room.
- Framing
- Building the notation
- Historical reception
Signs That Move — Framing the Question
What does a sign system need to represent change, not just categories?
One Splits into Two — Taiji and the Yin-Yang Line
What is the smallest visual distinction that can carry meaning?
Doubling the Line — Bigrams and the Logic of Combination
What happens when you combine binary signs, and how far does combination scale?
Eight from Three — Constructing the Bagua
How do three lines generate a complete symbol set?
Opposites and Neighbors — Relationships Among the Trigrams
How do the eight trigrams relate to each other, independent of how they are arranged?
An Inner Order — The Xiantian Arrangement
How did Shao Yong organize the eight trigrams into a symmetrical order?
An Outer Order — The Houtian Arrangement and Correlative Cosmology
How does a second, different ordering encode a different logic over the same eight trigrams?
Lines That Move — Hexagrams and Changing Lines
How does the notation encode transformation itself, not just a static state?
From Diagram to Text — The Zhouyi and Its Layers
How reliable is what we actually know about this text's origins?
One Symbol, Two Histories — Zhou Dunyi's Taijitu and the Swirling Symbol
How did a change in visual form change how the idea was communicated?
Crossing Worlds — Leibniz, Binary Arithmetic, and Global Afterlives
What actually happened when this notation reached Europe, and how does that compare with the popular version of the story?
Reading Symbols Critically — Capstone
How do you tell a well-supported claim about a sign system from an overstated one, and does the toolkit transfer to a system you've never seen?