四海为学 “Collaborative Learning“ Lecture by Shirley Chan

On December 4th at 9:00am Beijing time the 四海为学 “Collaborative Learning” Project will host a lecture by Professor Shirley Chan, titled “Conceptualizing Crisis in Early Chinese Texts”. To find details and the Zoom link, please visit the project’s event page. No pre-registration or passcode is required is required for Zoom participation.
A list of the project’s upcoming events can be found at the calendar here.

English-based MA and one-year visiting programs in Chinese philosophy at Fudan

Dear friends,

Thanks to your support, since it was launched in 2011, the MA and Visiting programs in Chinese philosophy (with courses taught in English) at Fudan have been extremely successful. Despite the pandemic that seriously affected the enrollment, 131 students have been enrolled in either the M.A. program (106 students) and the visiting student program (25 students). They are from 38 countries, with student from North America and Europe forming the majority of the student body, and many of them are top students in their classes, majoring in philosophy, classics, and/or East Asian or Chinese studies. The above facts make these programs simply the most successful of their kind (English-based post-graduate programs in Chinese philosophy) in mainland China.

The program boasts perhaps the largest community of English-speaking postgraduate students interested in Chinese philosophy in the world, a community our students have enjoyed greatly.  The comprehensiveness and specialization of our curriculum in Chinese philosophy are unmatched by other programs.  We have also assigned tutors to our students, helping them read classical Chinese texts, in addition to the normal language classes.  Because of the number and the quality of our students, our programs are a “favorite” of the university administration.  As a result, we have been EXTREMELY successful at securing fellowships for students applying for the MA program.  (For the visiting student program, only partial fellowships are available through Fudan, but students can apply through some external channels, like the Chinese Scholarship Council, the EU, Chinese consulates, Confucius Institutes, etc. Indeed, for students already in a doctoral program, they can take a look at this website for applying for a full fellowship to cover their stay in China: http://www.chinese.cn/page/#/pcpage/csp as well as this website (this is for last year’s applications through Fudan, but the requirements should be roughly the same): https://www.ci.fudan.edu.cn/d1/2b/c38778a643371/page.htm )

To continue its success, I ask you to help us to distribute the information about the programs and encourage your students to apply.  If they are already in a doctoral program and wish to spend a year in China, they are also welcome. I’ll attach a flier to this email.  You can also directly go to the following website for more detailed information: https://iso.fudan.edu.cn/isoenglish/bc/7d/c16952a703613/page.htm

NB: the priority (scholarship) application’s deadline is much earlier than usual: Jan. 4.
Thank you, and be safe and well!

Happy Holidays!

Tongdong

Comparative Essays on Hume, Confucianism, and Buddhism

A new issue of Hume Studies (49:2) includes three comparative essays that look at Hume’s moral, aesthetic and epistemological projects on taste, tradition and the self, side by side with Confucian texts such as Mengzi, Analects, and Xunzi, as well as works on Buddhist concepts like the two truths. Please read more to see information regarding the essays: Continue reading

2025 Midwest Conference on Chinese Thought CFP

The Midwest Conference on Chinese Thought was created to foster dialogue and interaction between scholars and students working on Chinese thought across different disciplines and through a variety of approaches. Submissions are invited for papers on any aspect of Chinese thought as well as papers dealing with comparative issues that engage Chinese perspectives.

This year’s conference will be held in-person April 4-5, 2025, at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, in La Crosse, WI. Our keynote speaker will be Professor Richard Kim.

For consideration, please submit a 1-page abstract to Sam Cocks at scocks@uwlax.edu with the subject line: “MCCT 2025 Abstract Submission” by January 15, 2025 for blind review. For more information, visit the conference website here (will be updated soon).

Dr. Kim is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. His core areas of interest are ethics, moral psychology, East Asian philosophy, and comparative philosophy. His research centers on deepening our understanding of the nature of well-being, and relevant concepts including emotion, virtue, and friendship. In both research and teaching, he seeks to employ an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural methodology that integrates traditional philosophical analysis with contemporary psychological research and insights from East Asian philosophical traditions. He is the author of Confucianism and the Philosophy of Well-Being (Routledge 2020) and the co-host with Justin Tiwald of This is the Way: A Chinese Philosophy Podcast. Before coming to Loyola he received his PhD from the University of Notre Dame and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the City University of Hong Kong and Saint Louis University.

四海为学 “Collaborative Learning“ Lecture by Tim Connolly

On November 26th at 9:00am Beijing time the 四海为学 “Collaborative Learning” Project will host a lecture by Professor Tim Connolly, titled ““Sharing Transformative Experience: A Confucian Perspective”. To find details and the Zoom link, please visit the project’s event page. No pre-registration or passcode is required is required for Zoom participation.
A list of the project’s upcoming events can be found at the calendar here.

DECEMBER 6: “An Ethics of Attention”–Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY and the WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE welcome you to an IN-PERSON meeting:

Daniel Stephens (University at Buffalo): « An Ethics of Attention »

With responses from Santiago Mejia (Fordham University)

ABSTRACT: Spurred partly by recent attempts to ethically assess various negative effects of the attention economy, philosophers have begun to pay more attention to the role that attention plays in our ethical lives. This has included some more general discussion of the ethics of attention. In this talk, I add to this recent discussion by outlining a proposal for a comprehensive ethics of attention. On my proposal, an ethics of attention includes norms that stem from the role that attention plays in the formation of our character, in constituting our relationships and social roles, and in our other ethical decision making and behavior. Because of attention’s nature as a finite resource, and because our various roles and relationships involve interpersonal expectations for how others allocate their attention, an ethics of attention should provide norms that govern how we collectively allocate our attention among these morally important purposes. Because these morally important purposes are all competing for our attention, one goal of an ethics of attention should be to find practices that help to synergize how people meet these demands. I call such a set of practices a “social-attentional scheme”, and propose that the ultimate goal of an ethics of attention is to find an optimal social-attentional scheme. I conclude by discussing the various ways in which we can understand early Confucian ethics as providing us with one such social-attentional scheme, and propose some lessons we can take from this Confucian example as we try to continue developing a contemporary ethics of attention.

DATE: December 6, 2024

TIME: 5:30-7:30pm EST

LOCATION: Philosophy Hall, Room 716, Columbia University

                         1150 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027

Continue reading

Call for discussants: APA webinar on comparative philosophy

The APA offers an on-demand webinar series featuring engaging discussions on topics of interest to philosophers. Each webinar typically lasts one hour and brings together three to four philosophers to explore a specific theme from diverse perspectives. The APA strives to include a wide range of topics and viewpoints.

Eirik Harris and Henrique Schneider plan to host a webinar in May 2025, focusing on the contemporary state of comparative philosophy and emphasizing Chinese philosophy. The APA is seeking 2–3 philosophers to join this discussion.

If you are interested in participating, please email hschneider@gmx.ch by January 25, 2025. Include three topics you would like to discuss in the webinar.

CFP: Envisioning Futures: Decolonial and World Philosophical Approaches

The Department of Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong is pleased to announce the international conference Envisioning Futures: Decolonial and World Philosophical Approaches, scheduled for November 21-22, 2025. The university will provide accommodation for all participants for three days. The conference organisers are negotiating the possibility of publishing a selection of the accepted papers in a high-profile philosophy journal.
Continue reading

ISEAP 2024 Conference

The International Society of East Asian Philosophy (ISEAP) will have its fourth international conference on December 14-15, which will be held at the Fukuoka University, Japan. This conference will be open to online audiences. To learn more about the conference, visit this page.

Advance registration for zoom attendance is required. Please register through this form.

Episode 13 of “This Is the Way”: Family Before State

Confucianism is well known for prioritizing familial responsibilities and love over other competing demands such as public interest or duties to the state. In this episode we explore two of the best known passages from early Confucianism that some modern scholars believe makes Confucianism morally problematic. The first passage we discuss is the “Upright Gong” passage, Analects 13.18, which has Confucius advocating mutual “covering up” of crimes by fathers and sons. The second passage is Mengzi 7A35, in which Mengzi is asked what the sage king Shun would have done if his father had committed murder. Mengzi’s answer, briefly stated, is that Shun would have given up his throne and would have fled with his father to care for him for the rest of his life.

Through these passages we explore questions about justice, consequentialist ethics, and the nature of moral dilemmas (and Confucian ways of handling them). Continue reading