Did Confucius think that if one of us has general virtue, or some particular virtue such as courage or filial piety, that general or particular virtue will have a substantial tendency to spread directly to the people around her, even if she holds no government position?
Here I’ll survey Confucius’ statements in the Analects and conclude that the answer is No. Confucius probably did not hold that view. (I gave the opposite reading in both my published papers on Chinese philosophy.)
Call for Papers and Abstracts: ACPA at 2017 Eastern APA
Submission deadline: May 20, 2015
Association of Chinese Philosophers in North America (ACPA) Group Meeting at the 2017 Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association (APA)
January 4 – 7, 2017 at the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel, Baltimore, MD.
Description: We now welcome scholars to submit either (1) proposals for individual papers or (2) proposals for complete panels for ACPA group sessions at the 2017 APA Eastern Division Meeting. The ACPA sponsors a “Dao Best Essay Award” session at the Eastern APA every year, with the participants invited by Professor Yong HUANG and the editorial board of Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy. Beyond the Dao session, ACPA will organize one or two additional group sessions at the Eastern APA (with commentators for each individual paper when possible). In addition to the quality of submission, the selection of papers for presentation will be based on how well they can be worked into a good session.
Info on the Association of Chinese Philosophers in North America (ACPA) is available here: http://www.acpa-net.org
Guidelines for paper/abstract submission:
CALL FOR PAPERS: TRAVELLING THEORISTS/THEORIES
SOAS UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 30 JUNE-1 JULY
SOAS CENTRE FOR COMPARATIVE POLITICAL THOUGHT AND THE LONDON CPT RESEARCH GROUP
This workshop explores the myriad and perhaps mysterious ways in which theory travels. The phrase ‘travelling theory’ already puts both terms under question. What is travelling? How is it travelling? Whence is it travelling? And who produces theory and enables it to travel? The workshop is about articulating critical questions about producers, users, and diffusers of theory as well as the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of intellectual production.
The editors of a volume under contract to be entitled Routledge History of Human Rights are very keen to find potential chapters that deal with Chinese and/or East Asian perspectives on human rights. I attach the call here. Please respond directly to the editors.
In a February 2016 blog post, Bin SONG makes a powerful case for switching from “Confucianism” to “Ruism.” This is not a brand-new idea; for instance, David Elstein has consistently used “Ruism,” including in his posts here at Warp, Weft, and Way, and Robert Eno advocated for such a practice in his 1990 book The Confucian Creation of Heaven (see here for relevant quote). Still, Bin Song raises some new arguments. To some degree, the things that Elstein, Eno, and Song are talking about may not be entirely the same: at least in the first instance, I take them to be referring to a modern philosophical movement, an ancient ritual-cum-philosophical movement, and a modern spiritual or religious movement of potential relevance in the contemporary US, respectively. (Admittedly, the application of these categories to Chinese practices can only be approximate; I just mean to gesture toward some possible distinctions.) Be this as it may, it may be that the arguments for using “Confucianism” in any of these contexts are weaker than many of us have assumed. What do you think: should we abandon the word “Confucianism”?
Issue 9 of 当代儒学 (Contemporary Confucianism) has been published, and the table of contents is available here.
Special Issue of the European Journal For Philosophy of Religion: Tradition, Ritual, and Heaven in East Asian Religious Philosophy
Guest Editor: Philip J. Ivanhoe
Mat Foust has published a review of Stephen C. Angle and Michael Slote, eds., Virtue Ethics and Confucianism (Routledge, 2013) in the Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies. The full text of the review is available on-line here (look for “Book Review 4”). Thanks, Mat!
Dear ISCWP members,
The ISCWP plans to sponsor one or two panels at the 2016 APA Eastern Division meeting (which will take place in January 4-7, 2017 in Baltimore, Maryland, USA).
Please send all submissions Send abstracts and proposals to: xiaoy@kenyon.edu by Sunday May 15, 2016.
SUNY Press has just published Xu Di and Hunter McEwan’s (eds.) Chinese Philosophy on Teaching and Learning: Xueji in the Twenty-first Century. This is a translation of the “Xueji 學記” and several essays on its contemporary significance. More information is available at Amazon here.
