Category Archives: Comparative philosophy

Winner of 2024 Dao Annual Best Essay Award

Dao has established “The Annual Best Essay Award” since 2007. In addition to a certificate of achievement, the award comes along with a prize of US$1,000. The award winners will be noted in the website of the journal as well as the website of Springer, the publisher of the journal. The award ceremony is held each year at the American Philosophical Association Annual Meeting (Eastern Division) in early January, where a special panel on the theme of the award-winning essay is held. The critical comments and the author’s responses to them presented at the panel, after review and revision, will be published in the last issue of Dao each year.

The selection process consists of two stages. First, a nominating committee of three editorial board members, who have not published in Dao in the given year, is established. This committee is charged with the task of nominating three best essays from all those published in the previous year. These three essays are then sent to the whole editorial board for deliberation. The final winner is decided by a vote by all editorial board members who are not authors of the nominated essays.

The editorial board has just finished its deliberation on the best essay published in 2024, and the result is:

2024 Dao Annual Best Essay Award
Kevin M DeLapp, “Confucian Ritual and Aristotelian Habit,” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 23 (2024): 173-189 (Free Access to the Paper)

Kevin M DeLapp’s “Confucian Rituals and Aristotelian Habits” goes far beyond the simple comparison between these two ideas. Fully aware of their significant differences, DeLapp reveals what he calls their structural analog: they play a similar role in underwriting their more general ethical frameworks. He debunks the stereotypes of Aristotle as individualistic and rationalistic and of Confucius as parochial and non-rationalistic, and also shows the ways in which virtue ethics and role ethics can be complementary. The paper is textually sensitive and philosophically innovative. It is the type of comparative philosophy Dao aims to promote.

New Book: Green, ed., Doing Metaphysics in a Diverse World

Stephen Green, ed., Doing Metaphysics in a Diverse World: How We Make Sense of Things Across Cultures has been published by Bloomsbury.

In a world increasingly interconnected and fractious, cross-cultural dialogue about metaphysics matters more than ever. Drawing on theories and traditions from China, Japan, the Indic world, pre-colonial Africa, pre-Spanish Meso-America, as well as Islamic and European thought, a team of leading philosophers and historians bring case studies, texts, themes and thinkers of very different worlds into conversation. On the basis of this exceptionally rich and diverse canvas, they reflect on questions of enduring human significance: What is suchness? What do we mean by being, becoming and beyond? What is personhood? How do we name and order our world? How should we live?

For more information, please visit here.

Carleo, Progressive Confucianism: Its Proponents and Prospects

Robert A. Carleo’s thorough and carefully annotated summary of a roundtable on “Progressive Confucianism” has now been published by The Philosophical Forum as “Progressive Confucianism: Its Proponents and Prospects.” See here for full-text read-only access, and below for the abstract. This is as good a compact summary of the idea of progressive Confucianism as any I have seen!

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