Category Archives: Methodology

Moral Cultivation in the Premodern World: Craft and Transformation in Later Stoics, the Zhuangzi, and Zen

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Yale’s Global Philosophy Reading Group warmly invites you to a symposium entitled Moral Cultivation in the Premodern World: Craft and Transformation in Later Stoics, the Zhuangzi, and Zen. The symposium will take place next Thursday, April 4th in HQ 136, from 3:30 to 6:00 PM, with a reception (food from House of Naan, Prosecco, and sparkling water) to follow. Please see the description, program, and abstracts below for more details. We hope to see you there!

If you know in advance that you’ll attend, please send a quick email to james.brown-kinsella@yale.edu so we can order enough food and drink for the reception.

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Suggestions for 2nd Edition of Doing Philosophy Comparatively?

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An editor at Bloomsbury contacted me about putting together a 2nd edition of my book Doing Philosophy Comparatively. In the next couple of months we’ll be gathering suggestions about what to add the new edition, which will include about 30% new material, and we’re trying to get as much feedback about the current edition as possible. If you have looked at the book and thought certain topics were missing or that parts of it could be expanded or have other suggestions for improvement, please send me an email at tconnolly@esu.edu. Many thanks!

Body and Cosmos in China: An Interdisciplinary Symposium in Honor of Nathan Sivin

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The Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania is delighted to announce an interdisciplinary symposium in honor of Nathan Sivin at Perry World House, 3803 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104, on Oct. 14-15, 2017.

The symposium is free and open to the public, but pre-registration is required.  Just click here if you’d like to attend:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/body-and-cosmos-in-china-an-interdisciplinary-symposium-in-honor-of-nathan-sivin-tickets-37455848451.

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New Handbook on Chinese Philosophy Methodologies

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The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy Methodologies, edited by Sor-hoon Tan, is due to be published later this week. Details are here, and I’ll paste the very rich Table of Contents below. This is another in the Bloomsbury Research Handbooks in Asian Philosophy series, on which more is available here. So far, the only other title concerned with Chinese philosophy is The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy and Gender, edited by Ann-Pang White, which appeared earlier this year; see further below for its Table of Contents, and more details here. The series also contains several books focusing on the philosophies of India.

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New issue of Confluence

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The latest issue of Confluence: Online Journal of World Philosophies, has just been released. It contains about 300 pages of articles, including a symposium led by Jonardon Ganeri on the question, “Is reason a neutral tool in comparative philosophy?” Near the end of the issue is a short survey article I wrote about the competing role ethical and virtue ethical interpretations of early Confucianism.

C&CP on Decolonializing Comparative Methodologies

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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”

 

Rewriting the story of philosophy

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Via Feminist Philosophers, I learned of this paper by Don Howard, entitled “The History That We Are: Philosophy as Discipline and the Multiculturalism Debate.” A couple of excerpts:

The hypothesis that I want to put forward here is that the conception of the “philosophical” underlying this state of affairs does not correspond to a timeless Platonic form, but that it is instead a construction undertaken in a specific cultural context, at a specific historical moment, for some very specific reasons, not all of which have to do with the love of wisdom. The time is the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. The place is northern Europe, chiefly, though not exclusively, Prussia and Hanover.
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CFP: Special Issue of Dao

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From Yong Huang, Editor of Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy

Call for Papers for a special issue of Dao on Chinese and Comparative Philosophy: Theoretical and Methodological Reflections

In conjunction with our academic sponsor, Association of Chinese Philosophers in America, which is going to celebrate its 20th anniversary, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, which will have its own 15thbirthday, plans to publish a special issue (or special topic, depending upon the number of finally accepted papers; if more than enough papers are finally accepted, some space may be reserved for this theme in the immediately following issue), on the theme “Chinese and Comparative Philosophy: Theoretical and Methodological Reflections.” The inaugural issue of our journal was featured by an article of this nature by Robert Neville: “Two Forms of Comparative Philosophy.” Now, after 15 years of publication of quality articles and book reviews in Chinese and comparative philosophy, it is time for us to reflect on this issue again.

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Interpreting an Alien Philosophy: What Works for Me

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[Dear readers: I am happy to present the following invited guest post from Dr. Elisa Freschi of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Dr. Freschi (BA +MA in Indology and Tibetology, BA in Philosophy, PhD in South Asian Studies) has worked on topics of Classical Indian Philosophy and more in general on comparative philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of religion, philosophy of language and on the re-use of texts in Indian philosophy (about which she has just finished editing a volume). She is a convinced upholder of reading Sanskrit philosophical texts within their history and understanding them through a philosophical approach. She has worked at the Austrian Academy of Sciences since September 1, 2012, with a Lise Meitner project on Epistemology of Sacred Texts in Vedāntadeśika’s Seśvaramīmāṃsā. For more information about her work see here.]

No matter whether one focuses on Classical Chinese philosophy (as probably most readers of this blog) or on Classical Indian philosophy (like myself), one works on something which is different than oneself. I will contend that this feeling is useful also if one focuses on contemporary Chinese, or Indian (or Tibetan and so on) philosophy, or on Classical, Medieval, Modern Western philosophy, since it alerts one to a key factor, namely the difference between oneself and one’s object of study.

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