Anna Sun’s book Confucianism as a World Religion has won two major awards:
Congratulations, Anna!
An interesting Global Times article: http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/892060.shtml
An article by Roger Ames, “儒学与世界文化秩序变革 (Confucianism and the Transformation of the International Cultural Order)” appeared in People’s Daily on Nov. 7.
Xiaomei Yang’s review of Stephen C. Angle (Ph.D, 1994) and Michael Slote, eds., Virtue Ethics and Confucianism has appeared in the most recent issue of Ethics, Vol. 125,# 1, 2014.
Joseph’s Chan’s feature review of my book Contemporary Confucian Political Philosophy: Toward Progressive Confucianism has just appeared in Philosophy East and West, Vol. 64,#3,2014, as well as two follow-ups:
A message from Sébastien Billioud:
A new CHINAFILE article: “What Does China Mean by ‘Rule of Law’? It’s more Confucianism than constitutionalism.” In my view the worries expressed in this article show all the more clearly why it is important to make clear that modern Confucianism needs to be responsive to the conditions of modernity: seeing law as independent from governmental authority is not “Western,” but good modern (progressive) Confucianism.
The inagural conference of the World Consortium for Research in Confucian Cultures will take place this coming week in Honolulu. More information, including conference program, is located here.
An interesting take on Xi Jinping’s frequent expressions of reverence for China’s past.
An interesting article examining the CCP’s motives for promoting Confucianism has been published: Shufang Wu, “The Revival of Confucianism and the CCP’s Struggle for Cultural Leadership: a content analysis of the People’s Daily, 2000–2009,” Journal of Contemporary China 23:89 (2014), pp. 971-991. Abstract follows, with the key line in bold.
This is a rich review of Joseph Chan’s important new book; the review is significant, in part, because it represents an engagement by someone from outside the Chinese philosophy world with contemporary Chinese thought. Wall is himself an advocate of perfectionism, which helps to explain why the cross-tradition engagement here is so fruitful.
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
2014.08.16 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews
Joseph Chan, Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times, Princeton University Press, 2014, 256pp., $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780691158617.
Reviewed by Steven Wall, University of Arizona
This is an unusual book. It is partly an effort to reconstruct and revive an ancient tradition of political thought, partly an exercise in comparing that tradition to western liberalism and partly a contribution to contemporary political theory. It does not fit into any well-defined disciplinary niche. Its unusual aims, in turn, present a challenge to the reviewer. Should the success of the project be assessed in terms of its fidelity to a tradition of thought that has shaped Chinese culture for over two millennia, or should it be assessed in terms of its contribution to contemporary political thought? No doubt the right answer to this question is that it should be assessed along both dimensions, but this answer does not tell us how much weight to give to each measure of assessment. My own assessment will not grapple with this problem, since I am in no position to gauge its success in remaining faithful to traditional Confucian ideas. Accordingly, this review does not offer a verdict on how well Confucian Perfectionism succeeds in its aim of staying true to Confucian political thought (leaving that judgment to others who are better placed to make it). It focuses instead on how well the view of politics that it presents hangs together and how well it contributes to an understanding of the political topics that it addresses.
