Category Archives: Comparative philosophy

CFP: ISCWP at 2017 APA Eastern

CALL FOR PAPER AND PANEL PROPOSALS

2017 Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association

January 4-7, 2016, Baltimore, MD

The Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy welcomes proposals for our panels at the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division meeting. Proposals regarding any aspect of Asian or comparative philosophy are welcome. Paper abstracts should be 150-200 words in length and complete panel abstracts should include a 150 word introduction to the theme of the panel, complete with panel title, along with 150 word abstracts for each of the papers.  Please include presenter’s name(s), email(s), and institution(s). No simultaneous submissions, please.

Please submit these materials no later than May 7 to Sarah Mattice at s.mattice@unf.edu.

Sarah Mattice, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, University of North Florida

Angle: “How Buddhist is Neo-Confucianism?”

I trust that everyone who is interested has heard about the upcoming Rutgers Workshop on Chinese Philosophy (RWCP), “Conversations with Western Philosophers”; more info is here. The prior afternoon, I will be giving a public lecture in which some may be interested:

“How Buddhist is Neo-Confucianism? The Roots and Branches of Zhu Xi’s Epistemology”

Thursday, April 14, 2016, 4:30-6:00pm.  Pane Room, Alexander Library, College Avenue Campus, Rutgers University.  Free and open to the public.

C&CP on Decolonializing Comparative Methodologies

The current issue of Comparative and Continental Philosophy (issue 7:2) has some excellent, provocative material on the methodology of comparative philosophy. I particularly recommend:

  • Amy K. Donahue & Rohan Kalyan, “Introduction: On the Imperative, Challenges, and Prospects of Decolonizing Comparative Methodologies”

and

  • David Haekwon Kim, “José Mariátegui’s East-South Decolonial Experiment”

 

Is There a Pre-Modern Tradition of Rhetoric in China?

A colleague writes:

I do not believe there existed a “Chinese rhetorical tradition” as it did in ancient Athens and Rome–and would like to hear your opinion on this subject.

Rhetoric as an institution whose purpose and goal was to persuade seemed at odds with pre-modern Chinese concepts of language, politics, and law. (Of course, the skills for persuading an emperor to change his ways was important–but such skills never got transformed into a set of institutional practice which one could learn and on which basis one’s performance was judged as it was in 16th and 17th century European universities.)

The absence of a rhetorical tradition in China did not manifest itself simply linguistically, but also in art and music. Statues in China prior to the 20th century were limited to statues of gods but not to heroicize human beings (Gigantic, monumental, and emotion arousing statues in China century appeared only in the 20th century after Westernization–esp. after China had learned the art of propaganda.)

It would be wonderful to hear whether you think rhetoric as an institution existed in China before the 20th century.

With her permission I share these thoughts here. What think you all?

El Amine and Symposium on Bell in Perspectives on Politics

The new issue of Perspectives on Politics (14:1, March 2016), available here, contains several articles of interest:

  • Loubna El Amine, “Beyond East and West: Reorienting Political Theory through the Prism of Modernity”
  • An extended discussion of Daniel Bell’s The China Model, with articles by Baogang He, Victoria Tin-bor Hui, Leigh Jenco, Andrew Nathan, Lynette Ong, Thomas Pangle, and Joseph Wang.

Lecture on Wen (文)

PHILOSOPHIZING THE CONCEPT OF “WEN (文)”: BEGINNING FROM TAKEDA TAIJUN’S SHIBA SEN

APR 5, 12:00–1:30pm

Harvard Yenching Institute Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge

Ishii Tsuyoshi (Associate Professor, Area Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo; HYI Visiting Scholar)

Chair/discussant: David Wang (Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department, Harvard University)

For more information, see here.

Allen’s Striking Beauty reviewed at NDPR

Barry Allen’s Vanishing Into Things (Harvard, 2015) on Chinese epistemology was reviewed at NDPR last June; now comes a review of his other 2015 book:

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2016.03.18 View this Review Online   View Other NDPR Reviews

Barry Allen, Striking Beauty: A Philosophical Look at the Asian Martial Arts, Columbia University Press, 2015, 252pp., $30.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780231172721.

Reviewed by Evan Thompson, University of British Columbia

Striking Beauty is an exciting, groundbreaking work. It is the first Anglophone philosophy book to focus on the Asian martial arts. It sympathetically and insightfully examines the values and presuppositions of these disciplines. It ranges across ethics, aesthetics, action theory, the philosophy of sport, Greek philosophy, Spinoza, Deleuze, cognitive science, and Chinese philosophy. Barry Allen’s experience as a devoted martial arts practitioner shines through the writing. He presents the Asian martial arts not just as a new subject matter for philosophy but also and more importantly as a new setting for doing cross-cultural philosophy. The result is an original and inspiring work that philosophers and martial arts practitioners will read for many years to come.

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