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 »

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

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THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes you to an IN-PERSON meeting:

Stephen Angle (Wesleyan University): « Mind the Gap: Methodological Pluralism in Comparative Philosophy  »

ABSTRACT: Despite the political polarization that characterizes many of our societies and much of the world, comparative philosophy — which depends on crossing various kinds of boundaries — is intellectually and professionally doing reasonably well. Exciting new work continues to appear and venues for publication and discussion (print and digital, in person and on-line) are proliferating. Another thing that is proliferating, though, is names for what it is we are doing. Are comparative, cross-cultural, intercultural, blended, and fusion philosophy all the same thing? What do they share and where do they diverge, and why? Can we identify a distinctive project of comparative philosophy and say why it is important? Based on a broad survey of approaches, in this essay I offer answers to these questions. I maintain that whenever we do philosophy by drawing on at least two significantly different traditions of philosophy, we are doing comparative philosophy. Unpacking some of the key words in this definition will enable me to clarify some persistent confusions as well as to stress the constitutive gamble that lies at the heart of all comparative philosophy. I identify three different ways to do comparative philosophy well—Comparison Philosophy, Rooted Global Philosophy, and Emergent Intercultural Philosophy—and argue that which method to choose depends both on the values that motivate one’s inquiry and on the pragmatic situation that frames one’s work.

DATE: December 1st, 2023
TIME: 5:30 pm EST
LOCATION: Philosophy Hall, Room 716, Columbia University, 1150 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes you to an IN-PERSON meeting:

David Wong  (Duke University): «Zhuangzi on Not Following the Leader»

ABSTRACT: I begin with identifying Confucian metaphors of leadership for the way the mind (or the heart-mind) should lead the whole person. I then discuss how the Daoist text Zhuangzi criticizes this conception of the mind’s leadership as too fixed and rigid–unresponsive to the fluidity and unpredictability of the world. The text suggests as an alternative a way that the whole embodied person can fluidly respond to the world. This alternative ties into some contemporary work, scientific and philosophical, of how the whole person and not just the deliberating mind processes information from the world. I end by discussing how the critique of the fixed and rigid mind can suggest alternative models of political governance that distribute and integrate guidance throughout the body politic.

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THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes you to an IN-PERSON meeting:

Jing Hu  (Concordia University): « War and Shame –A Debate on the Appropriate Response to Insults between the Confucians and their Interlocutors »

ABSTRACT: What is an appropriate response to humiliating treatments such as insults? This question is not only relevant to today’s discourse but has also piqued the curiosity of thinkers in classical Chinese philosophy. The Warring States period debate regarding whether one’s inner sense of shame can shield one from insulting situations and from experiencing shame is frequently presented as a one-sided narrative that focuses on the Confucian texts. Meanwhile, the views of their rival thinkers, such as the Daoist, legalist, or much-neglected Songzi (3rd century BCE), are rarely the focus of attention. This paper brings Songzi, a key player in the debate of emotions as responses to external triggers, into the picture and restores the historical intellectual discourse over the topic of what constitutes an appropriate response to humiliating situations such as insults. More importantly, I point out the philosophical significance of this debate, namely how Songzi prompts Xunzi to respond to an ambiguity within the Confucian doctrine: The early Confucians appear to think that an individual’s internal virtues can isolate and shield one from hostile external stimuli while also maintaining that the external environment impacts one’s moral cultivation and moral life in significant ways. Xunzi’s strategic move, I argue, is to give credit to both an inner sense of shame and the function of external stimuli in inducing negative emotions, thus making an important philosophical concession compared to Confucius and Mencius.

DATE: September 15, 2023
TIME: 5:30 pm EST
LOCATION: Philosophy Hall, Room 716, Columbia University, 1150 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027

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