Category Archives: Confucianism

New Book: Anna Sun, Confucianism as a World Religion

Sun_coverExciting news: Anna Sun (Kenyon College)’s book on Confucianism has been published. Congratulations!

Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities

Anna Sun

Princeton University Press | Cloth | 2013 | $35.00 / £24.95 | ISBN: 9780691155579 | 266 pp. | 6 x 9 | 1 line illus. 9 tables

Is Confucianism a religion? If so, why do most Chinese think it isn’t? From ancient Confucian temples, to nineteenth-century archives, to the testimony of people interviewed by the author throughout China over a period of more than a decade, this book traces the birth and growth of the idea of Confucianism as a world religion.

The book begins at Oxford, in the late nineteenth century, when Friedrich Max Müller and James Legge classified Confucianism as a world religion in the new discourse of “world religions” and the emerging discipline of comparative religion. Anna Sun shows how that decisive moment continues to influence the understanding of Confucianism in the contemporary world, not only in the West but also in China, where the politics of Confucianism has become important to the present regime in a time of transition. Contested histories of Confucianism are vital signs of social and political change.Is Confucianism a religion? If so, why do most Chinese think it isn’t? From ancient Confucian temples, to nineteenth-century archives, to the testimony of people interviewed by the author throughout China over a period of more than a decade, this book traces the birth and growth of the idea of Confucianism as a world religion.

Continue reading →

Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy lecture on Confucian and Daoist views of agency April 12 @5:45pm

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes intrepid Warper & Wefter MANYUL IM,  Department of Philosophy, Fairfield University

With responses from Michael Brownstein, Department of Philosophy, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Please join us at Columbia University Department of Religion on April 12, 2013 at 5:45pm for his lecture entitled

Spontaneity, Deliberation, and Valuing in Early China

ABSTRACT: Continue reading →

Moral Exemplars and Moral Connoisseurs

A number of scholars in our field have suggested that the model of connoisseurship is helpful in understanding Confucian moral education and the nature of the Confucian moral exemplar (the junzi or sage). Eric Hutton’s “Moral Connoisseurship in the Mengzi” (in Liu and Ivanhoe, eds., Essays on the Moral Philosophy of Mengzi, 2002) is a classic essay; more recently, Hagop Sarkissian (“Confucius and the Effortless Life of Virtue,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 27:1 [2010]) and P.J. Ivanhoe (“McDowell, WANG Yangming, and Mengzi’s Contributions to Understanding Moral Perception,” Dao [2011]) have also developed related ideas.

I’m going to excerpt here a bit from an essay of mine that is currently unpublished, part of a volume that will eventually wend its way through the review process and see the light of day. My concern in the essay is to further develop some comparisons between Neo-Confucians and contemporary psychological literature that I began in Sagehood and continued in “A Productive Dialogue? Contemporary Moral Education and Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian Ethics,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy (2011). In particular, I refine the idea of “active moral perception” introduced in Sagehood, and as part of that process, find myself arguing against the idea that moral exemplars are best understood as people who have honed their sensitivities to moral reasons or moral properties in a connoisseur-like way. My target here is not, at least explicitly, the interpretations of Kongzi and Menzi suggested in the essays cited above, but rather to argue that a common-sense idea (supported by recent psychological research) of what moral exemplars are like, and what they do, actually fits very well with key elements of Wang Yangming’s picture. I’d love feedback!

Continue reading →

Malik on Confucianism and Communism

Friend of the blog Patrick O’Donnell suggested that Warp, Weft, and Way readers might enjoy this posting by Kenan Malik on the intertwining of Confucianism and Communism in the last hundren years in China. Malik writes that:

What had been a surreptitious nod towards Confucian ideology in Maoist China, became after Mao an open embrace, as China opened itself up to competition and the market, and hence also potentially to greater social dislocation and disorder. The quicker has been the pace of economic reform over the past three decades, the greater has been the desire of the Chinese government to proclaim its commitment to Confucianism…. Alongside the government’s new-found admiration for Kongzi, there has emerged a new cadre of Confucian academics. Many work independently of the state, and many have found themselves at times in conflict with the state.  Nevertheless, the academic renovation of Confucianism and the state’s embrace of Kongzi have become closely intertwined.

Malik ends with some discussion of Jiang Qing, whom he calls “perhaps the most important of the new generation of Confucian philosophers.” I have just finished writing a review of Jiang Qing’s new book in English, A Confucian Constitutional Order, and plan on publishing an excerpt or two here soon. In the meantime, any comments on Malik’s ideas or on Jiang Qing would be welcome.

Virtue Ethics and Confucianism Book Inches Toward Publication


VE&C_cover

I am happy to report that the book that Michael Slote and I have been editing, Virtue Ethics and Confucianism, will see the light of day before too many more months pass. Routledge now has a webpage for the book which includes its cover, table of contents, and so on, and it can even be pre-ordered. For those of you who are neither independently wealthy nor buyers for academic libraries (i.e., virtually anyone reading this), please be assured that a more reasonably-priced paperback edition will be forthcoming in a couple more years.

 

What Would a Confucian University in the US Look Like?

The rather surprising question in my title is inspired by three things. Most immediately, I have just returned from the AAS Conference in San Diego, where I participated in a panel on Elite and Popular Confucianism, presenting a paper called “American Confucianism: Between Tradition and Universal Values.” Second, I have heard some talk about the establishment within one or more Chinese universities of explicitly Confucian-themed academic units. Finally, I recently became aware of Soka University, a liberal arts college in Southern California that was founded by the Soka Gakkai Buddhist organization from Japan.

Continue reading →

Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy lecture on Confucian ethics March 22 @5:30pm

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes ANDREW LAMBERT,  Department of Philosophy, Wester New England University

With responses from Warren Frisina, Dean of Honors College, Associate Professor of Religion, Hofstra University

Please join us at Columbia University Department of Religion on March 22, 2013 at 5:30pm for his lecture entitled

A Confucian Account of Ethical Obligation?

ABSTRACT: The Confucian doctrine of the five cardinal relationships is often taken as a defining feature of the Confucian tradition, with its emphasis on family life and relationships. However, objections arising from more modern ethical ideals threaten to undermine the doctrine, or at least render it irrelevant to contemporary ethics. I present three such objections.

In seeking to deflect the objections, I suggest a different way of understanding the purpose and effects of the five relationships doctrine. Instead of seeing the doctrine as a constellation of concrete practical norms and duties pertaining to individuals occupying certain social roles and positions, I suggest we understand the five relationships doctrine as a kind of training device, which cultivates a certain kind of personal sensibility. This is a sense of obligation to engage with and find a basis for familiarity with those people encountered in the subject’s local social world.

I argue that when understood in this way, the discourse of the five cardinal relationships is not subject to the three common objections noted above, and presents a distinctive form of ethical obligation.

I finish by locating this account of ethical obligation within a larger moral vision, thereby suggesting this is a genuine form of ethical obligation rather than mere etiquette or psychological conditioning.

Time: 5:30-7:30 pm
Place: Rm. 101 in the Department of Religion 80 Claremont Avenue
http://goo.gl/maps/zfUKH

PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE:
http://www.cbs.columbia.edu/cscp/

Review of Rosemont, Reader’s Companion to the Analects

Guest poster Andrew Komasinski offers us a review of Henry Rosemont Jr., A Reader’s Companion to the Confucian Analects (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Please direct any comments to Andrew.

Henry Rosemont Jr.’s A Reader’s Companion to the Confucian Analects is a novel approach in the English-language world. Building on Rosemont’s forty years of professional knowledge and personal experience with the Analects, this text will be of great use for the right type of reader. Containing no footnotes and not structured as an argument, this is not a scholarly monograph and bypasses many issues primarily of interest to scholars. The text differs from the similarly titled Cambridge Companion series which provides a set of scholarly essays highlighting the contemporary debate or Routledge Philosophy Guidebooks that guide undergraduate students through complex arguments.

Continue reading →

New Book: Yong Huang, Confucius

It has just come to my attention that Yong HUANG’s book Confucius: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury 2013) has recently been published [publisher’s site] [Amazon link]. I have only had a chance to take a quick look at it, but it looks to be philosophically sophisticated and yet engaging and accessible. Rather than a systematic overview of Confucius’s teachings, Huang tackles a series of questions that arise “in our everyday life or moral reflection,” and argues that Confucius’s answers are the best — or at least, better than available alternative answers in the Western tradition. Enjoy!

Japan Times Review of Watanabe

Michael Hoffman of the Japan Times reviews the English translation of A HISTORY OF JAPANESE POLITICAL THOUGHT, 1600-1901, by Hiroshi Watanabe (Translated by David Noble. LTCB International Library Trust, International House of Japan, 2012). Hoffman focuses on the “evolution of Japan’s turn away from Confucian ideas.” Looks interesting. Here is some of the review (read the whole review at the Japan Times).

Maybe all ideas are inherently strange, given the nonsense time tends to make of them. Imagine how odd our thinking will seem 100 years from now — or would have seemed 100 years ago. Is “freakish” too strong a word? Whether it is or not, the ideas Watanabe discusses here with such clarity and vigor are the ones that animated two of the most astonishing phases of Japanese and, arguably, world history: the 2½ centuries of peace under the Tokugawa shogunate (1600-1867) and the subsequent national transformation of backwater Japan into superpower Japan.

What were these ideas? You could, simplifying just a bit, divide them into two categories: Confucian and anti-Confucian. For pre-modern Japan, China was civilization itself, and Confucianism was what made it so — “perhaps the most powerful political ideology yet conceived by the human race,” writes Watanabe. To devotees, its “rites and music,” “five relationships” and “five virtues” are what separate us from the beasts and make us human. To doubters — and the doubts grew as Japan’s stagnation became more evident — it was a retarding force. “Ours is a world in which living things are confined and regimented as if dead things,” wrote one exasperated samurai-scholar in 1838. Continue reading →