Category Archives: Chinese Texts

Is Analects 1.2 about family?

Here are some reasons to think that Youzi did not regard family as the root of humanity or of the Way.  (I used to think he did.)

Most of my argument focuses on defending a view held by Soothill, Leys, Chin, and maybe Lau and Slingerland: that by 弟 in Analects 1.2, Youzi meant elder-respect, a virtue commonly associated specifically with life outside the family.  It would follow that according to 1.2, only one of the two parts of the root of humanity is specifically a family virtue.  If 孝 and 弟 have something relevantly in common for Youzi, family isn’t it.

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Did Confucius think our virtues are contagious?

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.)

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The Princeton Early Text Cultures Workshop

The Princeton Early Text Cultures Workshop will bring together 11 graduate students from the USA and the UK, specialists in Early China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Ancient Rome and Greece, to discuss similarities and differences in the patterns of textual formation and textual practices in early civilizations. These patterns define the social role of texts, the composition of their audience, the repertoire of text types, and the paths towards the development of creative literature.

What: Graduate Workshop

When: April 16 and 17, 2016

Where: 202 Jones Hall, Princeton University

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Doctoral student support for research in historiography

Attached here is a PDF with an open call for six doctoral student positions in a research project on narrative modes of classical, medieval and modern historiography in India, China, and Tibet. The project, which is funded by the European Research Council, is running at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. The positions are in classical Indology, modern Indian studies, medieval Indo-Persian studies, medieval Tibetan Studies, classical-medieval Sinology, and modern Chinese studies. The three-year positions are tuition-free and come with a small stipend. The application deadline is March 31.

Update to MARKUS Chinese text analysis platform

Hilde De Weerdt writes: A belated new year present for all who work with classical Chinese texts.

The MARKUS platform has gone through a major update during the past few months. You can now create an account, upload content, add customized tags and comments and notes of different kinds, select which reference sites you want to display, convert Chinese to western dates, and, last but not least, import text directly from your ctext.org account. We have added new videos to show most of these features under “HowTo.” More will be added and Chinese translations of these will be added as well.

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Shaughnessy on Excavated Texts at Wisconsin

Edward Shaughnessy (University of Chicago) who will be Halls-Bascom Visiting Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in early April 2016 will hold a Workshop on Recently Excavated Texts on 7 April 2016 from 2:30-4:30 p.m. (location on the UW Campus still to be arranged). Zhi Chen (Hong Kong Baptist University) will serve as discussant. It is hoped that scholars from other “neighboring universities” will consider joining the Workshop. Although we have no travel funds, there will be a light-dinner reception following the Workshop to allow the discussion to continue into the evening. For further information please contact Bill Nienhauser (whnienha@wisc.edu).

Junior Research Fellow in Manuscript and Text Cultures

Queen’s College (Oxford) has recently announced a Junior Research Fellow in Manuscript and Text Cultures, and invites applications from graduates of any university for election to a three-year post-doctoral position as a Junior Research Fellow in Manuscript and Text Cultures, with a research specialism in knowledge-production and text-transmission in pre-modern literate societies. See here for more information.

New Book: Jaeyoon Song, Traces of Grand Peace

Harvard University Press has published Jaeyoon Song’s important new book on Song dynasty political thought and the role of the classics (in particular, the Zhou Li) in shaping politics. Congratulations, Jaeyoon!

Jaeyoon Song, Traces of Grand Peace: Classics and State Activism in Imperial China (Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series 98)