Paula Curtis writes:
I am happy to announce the release of my data report and visualizations for the 2021-2022 academic job market cycle in East Asian Studies. Tracking categories such as desired discipline, desired region of specialization, track, location, and more, I provide a variety of information on the market in EAS for the most recent hiring season.
Jay L. Garfield, Buddhist Ethics: A Philosophical Exploration, Oxford University Press, 2022, 231pp., $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780190907648.
Reviewed by Richard P. Hayes, The University of New Mexico
This book is a contribution to the series “Buddhist Philosophy for Philosophers,” which so far also has a monograph on Buddhist epistemology and one on Buddhist metaphysics. As with the other books in the series, Jay Garfield’s book is written primarily for philosophers who are open to exploring Buddhist approaches to ethics rather than for philologists or historians of Buddhist thought, although scholars in Buddhist studies also stand to benefit from reflecting on Garfield’s presentation. As the author makes clear from the outset, Buddhists have not until recently written much that could be considered metaethical in nature. Ethicists accustomed to…
My article “Confucian Leadership Meets Confucian Democracy” has just been published in the Journal of Social and Political Philosophy (1:2). The abstract is below; full text is available here (through the end of October).
Richard Marshall interviewed Justin Tiwald at “3:16” on the general subject of Chinese Philosophy, discussing Tiwald’s path to studying philosophy, how he understands “Neo-Confucianism,” and so on. Enjoy!
Shepherd.com is a cool website that offers many authors’ recommendations on books somehow related to their own, on a wide range of topics. I’ve recently posted a list there: Five books on how ancient Confucianism tells us to live well today. Check it out!
Update: A reminder that the deadline for abstracts is coming up this Friday!
I’m delighted to announce that this year’s meeting of the North-East Conference on Chinese Thought will be held November 12-13 (Sat. & Sun.) at Yale University. The NECCT annual meeting is an opportunity for students of Chinese thought (broadly defined) from across the northeast (also broadly defined) to share and discuss their work. We are very excited to resume this annual tradition after the disruptions of the last few years.
If you have any questions about the conference, please contact Mick Hunter (mick.hunter@yale.edu). We look forward to hearing from you!
Robert Elliott Allinson is pleased to announce that he has published a single authored monograph, The Philosophical Influences of Mao Zedong: Notations, Reflections and Insights with Bloomsbury Academic Publishers, London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi and Sydney, 2020. It has received endorsements from the following:
Back in April, Marcus Arvan put out this blog post analyzing which specializations were listed in the 2021-22 jobs posted at PhilJobs. He concludes that “Non-Western Philosophy” was the requested specialization in 5.8% of tenure-track jobs in this past year, which is pretty stable over the past several years. Note that if a job lists two specializations, then that counts as 0.5 of a job for each, and so on for even more potential specializations. He adds that another 6% of the tenure track jobs list Non-Western as a desired teaching competence (“area of competence”). We don’t have numbers ready-to-hand for the number of job seekers with one or another variety of “Non-Western” as an AOC, but I suspect that the ratio of seekers to jobs in this area compares favorably to most other areas of specialization. Which is not to say that getting a job in philosophy is ever easy!
Dao has established “The Annual Best Essay Award” since 2007. The editorial board has just finished its deliberation on the best essay published in 2021, and the award is given to:
Benoit Vermander, “Edit by Number: Looking at the Composition of the Huainanzi, and Beyond.” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 20 (2021): 459-498
Via a hermeneutics focused on numerology and concentric arrangements, the essay, which demonstrates familiarity with the germane historiography, literature, and theoretical apparatuses, offers an original construal of a textual universe in early China writings. Instead of taking for granted the organization and configuration, or the absence thereof, of these texts, it argues that there is a structural rhetoric. With particular reference to the Huainanzi, it lays bare the discernible and distinguishable patterns of textual composition while relating them to corresponding patterns of thinking. In so doing, it suggests the possibility and importance of looking beyond the writings’ intertextuality and toward their inter-structure.
The two runners-up are:
Yutang Jin, “Classic Confucian Thought and Political Meritocracy: A Text-based Critique.” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 20 (2021): 433-458, and
Ian Sullivan, “The Need for More than Role Relations: Queer Lives, Social Group Identities, and Confucian Self-cultivation.” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 20 (2021): 269-287
Springer has set the above three essays for free access.
On April 22, the fifth Rutgers Workshop on Chinese Philosophy took place, with six scholars of Chinese philosophy presenting papers that engaged with the work of Ernest Sosa and Linda Zagzebski. The workshop’s website is here. At the workshop, two Rutgers graduate students, Esther Goh and Frederick Choo, served as rapporteurs, taking notes on each presentation and on the discussion. Their reports follow here, to give those who were not present a sense of the day’s richness. Thanks very much to Ester and Fredrick for these detailed reports!
