THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY
Welcomes you to an ONLINE meeting:
Hannah Kim (The University of Arizona):
« Aspiration, Ambition, and Confucian Debates on Human Nature »
With responses from Timothy Connolly (East Stroudsburg University)
ABSTRACT: A standard introduction to classical Confucianism teaches that Mengzi thought “human nature is good” and Xunzi, that “human nature is bad”. But the exact nature of their disagreement is subject to ongoing debate, with some underplaying the disagreement (they just mean different things by “human nature”) while others take the disagreement to be about the nature of agency, moral education, or dispositions. In this talk, I’ll argue that Agnes Callard’s distinction between ambition and aspiration helps us clarify what the disagreement is about. Mengzi thought humans need to fully pursue the values they already have, while Xunzi thought humans need to aspire towards values they don’t have and aren’t predisposed to. This account has the benefit of capturing Mengzi’s and Xunzi’s respective views on agency and education and providing Xunzi with a picture of moral motivation that even a selfish agent could develop.
DATE: November 8, 2024
TIME: 5:30-7:30pm EST
Zoom info below:
The next session of the Columbia Neo-Confucianism seminar will convene on Friday 2/2 from 3:30-5:30 pm in the Heyman Center on Columbia’s campus. The guest speaker will be Professor Baldwin Wong of Hong Kong Baptist University. Professor Wong will present his draft “To Confucianism, are Perfectionist Policies a Help or a Trap? Lessons from Wang Yangming’s Moral Psychology”. The draft will be circulated a week before the talk. To be on the list, please RSVP to Weiling Kong at wk2363@columbia.edu before 1/31.
The Department of Philosophy at the National Chengchi University is happy to announce that they will be hosting a lecture both in person and virtually titled “The Unfished Project of Miki Kiyoshi”. The speaker for this lecture will be Professor Noe Keiichi alongside discussant Professor Lin Chen-kuo. The lecture will take place at Room 106, BaiNian Building, National Chengchi University on October, 5th, 2023 (1500-1700 Taiwan time) or you can join online by clicking the link here. Read on for more.
How to Produce Learning: Some Preliminary Thoughts on Neo-Confucian Knowledge Culture (1200-1700)
Speaker: Dr. Lianbin Dai, Department of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Victoria
Moderator: Prof. Nathan Vedal, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto
Time: 2:00-3:30 P.M. EST, Wednesday, February 1, 2023
Yale’s Moral Philosophy Working Group and Asian and African Philosophy Reading Group welcomes Professor Bryan Van Norden of Vassar College and Wuhan University for a series of introductory lectures on Chinese philosophy. No previous knowledge of the topic is necessary. Van Norden will speak on four different topics; each is an hour of presentation followed by an hour of Q and A. The University is happy to provide lunch on Saturday so please email harry.lloyd@yale.edu if you plan on joining for lunch. More information is on the poster and below.
An online lecture titled Understanding the Alienated Self: The Interest in and Problemtization of the Village in the Post-May-Forth Period is being hosted by the Centre for Modern East Asian Studies & Department of East Asian Studies, University of Göttingen. The lecture will be given by Luo Zhitian, a distinguished professor at Sichuan University, and is co-organized by Dr. Axel Schneider and Dr. Thomas Fröhlich. Participants are required to register for the event, and it will be held in Chinese.
May 27, 2022, 10:00 AM Amsterdam time; Registration form HERE.
For more information about the conference click HERE.
The University of Göttingen Centre for Modern East Asian Studies is hosting two more lectures on New Perspectives on Modernity in China. The lectures look at Chinese history, philosophy, religion, politics etc. presenting current research that is addressing unsettling questions triggered by these developments. Individuals must register for each event that they want to attend.
Justin Ritzinger — Push and Pull: Toward a Taylorian Theory of Alternative Modernities
May 6, 2022 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm (CET time); for more information and registration click HERE.
Viren Murthy — Conservative Radicalism: Watsuji Tetsuro’s Critique of Civil Society and Its Implications for Chinese Intellectual History
May 20, 2022 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm (CET time); for more information and registration click HERE.
