Dear colleagues,
if you happen to be in Taipei this week, you might be interested in the upcoming workshop on “Exhortation and Critique in Traditional China” at Soochow University (February 21, 2014, 9:00-18:00). Here are some excerpts from the agenda of our workshop and the schedule:
Here is an interesting piece (though dating back to February 2013) by Walter D. Mignolo on the role of Slavoj Žižek in the global market of ideas and an exchange between the philosophers Santiago Zabala and Hambid Dabashi. All pieces have been published on the website of Aljazeera and can be easily retrieved.
I have always been thinking that the discussion on Chinese philosophy needs to take into account the larger debates about Eurocentrism, colonialism, and the very nature of philosophy which have been going on for decades (with thinkers like Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Enrique Dussel, Kwame Appiah, and others). However, quite often, this is at least my impression, scholars working on Chinese philosophy (both in China and in the West) are not willing enough to engage in these debates. In fact, Western scholars working on Chinese philosophy seem to be quite reticent to address these issues which are fiercely debated not in philosophy departments, but rather in departments of comparative literature or sociology. Or is such an impression one-sided? And might this reticency be due to the controversial legacy of Marxism? What do you think?
Dear Colleagues,
if you happen to be in Taipei this week, you might be interested in the upcoming lecture by Dr. Dirk Meyer at the International Center for Chinese Philosophy (ICCP), Soochow University:
Dear Colleagues,
if you happen to be in Taipei this week, you might be interested in this upcoming lecture by Professor Loy Hui Chieh (黎輝傑) at the International Center for Chinese Philosophy (ICCP), Soochow University:
Dear Colleagues,
if you happen to be in Taipei this week, you might be interested in this upcoming lecture at the International Center for Chinese Philosophy (ICCP), Soochow University:
It might interest some readers of this blog that the “International Center for Chinese Philosophy” (affiliated with the Philosophy Department at Soochow University, Taipei) has a new website.
This week, the famous French sinologist François Jullien is in Taibei for a series of academic events (among others, he participates in a conference at National Central University, see http://ncu33013.blogspot.tw/2012/09/blog-post.html). It is no exaggeration to call Jullien the most famous sinologist in the West. His books have been enthusiastically received by the public, and he is probably the only living scholar writing on pre-modern Chinese thought who has made a visible impact on the field of philosophy – at least in France where philosophers like Alain Badiou and Jean-François Lyotard have endorsed his very particular view of what philosophy should be. But also, to some extent, in Germany where, in 2010, he has received the prestigious Hannah-Arendt price for political thinking.
During this and next week, a series of academic events is taking place at Soochow University in Taipei that might be of interest to you.
In memoriam Chen Cheng-po…
Yesterday we had a day off in Taiwan and I spent a rainy afternoon visiting the 2-28 Memorial Museum in downtown Taipei. I have been there before, but this time it was quite different, especially since I had the chance to look at some new documents. In particular the biography of one person was deeply moving: the Taiwanese painter Chen Cheng-po 陳澄波 (also known as Chin To-Ha). He was born in 1895 in Chia-Yi, studied arts in Tokyo and went on to become a famous painter in Taiwan and the broader Chinese-speaking world (especially oil paintings). After the liberation of Taiwan from the Japanese occupation, he got involved into politics and was elected into the local parliament at Chia-Yi. After the 2-28 Incident, he tried to negotiate between the Guomindang and the local population. However, he was executed without any particular reason in broad daylight on March 25th of 1947.
I think it might interest you that the Taiwanese Research Council has just sent a research team to Germany (including Lee Ming-huei, Fabian Heubel, me, and a couple of other Taiwanese scholars) that will be involved in a series of workshops and discussions with German sinology and philosophy departments during this week and next week (see the schedule below). I think this is a rare opportunity to foster the intercultural dialogue between the fields of Chinese philosophy and German philosophy (notice that there will be one event at the very prestigious Institut fuer Sozialforschung in Frankfurt). If you are interested in any of these events, please contact me and I will send you more details. Of course you are all welcome to join us if you happen to be in one of these places in the coming days!
