Oxford University Press has just published my new book on early Confucian social thought, and what contemporary people might learn from it: Mastery, Dependence, and the Ethics of Authority. The publisher’s page is here. At present the cheapest way to purchase it is directly from Oxford, with a discount code for 30% off (AAFLYG6).
This comes with hearty thanks to Steve Angle and Bryan Van Norden, who were belatedly revealed as the press’s referees.
THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY
Welcomes: KIM SUNGMOON (City University of Hong Kong)
With responses from: OMAR DAHBOUR (Hunter College & Graduate Center, CUNY)
Please join on November 8, 2019 at 5:30 for his lecture entitled,
BEYOND THE PLURALISM DILEMMA — A CONSTITUTIONAL RECONSTRUCTION OF CONFUCIAN DEMOCRACY
Recently, a group of scholars has challenged the moral legitimacy of Confucian democracy from a liberal philosophical standpoint. Continue reading →
Just a quick announcement that Elisa Levi Sabattini and I are about to publish a new translation of Xinyu:
https://brill.com/view/title/56294?rskey=msXfbz&result=1
Also watch out for my new book on classical Chinese philosophy, forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Since I’m not ashamed of self-promotion, I’ll be posting with details in due course.
About this Book
A leading foreign policy thinker uses Chinese political theory to explain why some powers rise as others decline and what this means for the international order.
For more information, please see the publisher website or below.
Schneewind, S. (2018). Shrines to living men in the Ming political cosmos. Cambridge, MA: Published by the Harvard University Asia Center. ISBN 9780674987142.
Please see the publisher website for more information.
Title: The Division of Educational Labour Between Confucian Education and Political Liberalism
Speaker: Baldwin Wong
Date: 3 May 2019 (Friday)
Time: 16:00-17:30
Venue: Center for East Asian and Comparative Philosophy (Room 4433, Mong Man Wai Building)
Please see here for more detail.
The Issue is Not the Issue: A Podcast with Hans-Georg Moeller and Dan Sarafinas
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfs0MY7rs8J6jWlCdneoPVQ
Hans-Georg Moeller and Dan Sarafinas discuss contemporary debates on “political correctness” and related moral and social issues. They point to concepts such as virtue speech (“virtue signalling”), civil religion, “profilicity,” and the role of critique to better understand their nature.
Episode 3—Critique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W1m0Bez8vU
Philosophy today runs the risk of once more becoming the “handmaiden of theology” by being put in the service of civil religion. The Kantian concept of critique is revived to reflect on contemporary dogmatism and associated power structures that lead to phenomena such as “competitive wokeness” in entertainment (Taylor Swift) or the need to write “diversity statements” in academia. The idea of a therapeutic rather than a normative philosophy is suggested and it is explained how society, along with critique, evolves rather than progresses.
Episode 4—Profilicity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Yz1C0-mtWI
Why do we need to produce “virtue speech”? We need it to be competitive in society and to bolster our public profiles. A new profile-based identity paradigm, called “profilicity,” is on the rise. It is replacing other identity paradigms such as sincerity and authenticity and provides not only individuals but also institutions (political parties, companies, universities, etc.) with identity value.
Yi-Huah Jiang’s article “Confucian Political Theory in Contemporary China” has been published in the Annual Review of Political Science 21 (2018), page 155-173.
The full article can be found here.
Hans-Georg Moeller and Dan Sarafinas discuss contemporary debates on “political correctness” and related moral and social issues. They point to concepts such as virtue speech (“virtue signalling”), civil religion, and the role of critique to better understand their nature.
Episode 1–Virtue Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pg8H-b87Cs;
The phenomenon of virtue speech (“virtue signalling”) has become a central feature in recent outrage movements pervasive throughout the West. Virtue speech, which is implicitly tied to accusations of hate speech, is a form of moralistic discourse setting speech examples that make it difficult to openly discuss elements of our culture without falling into the trap of moralizing.
Episode 2–Civil Religion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EDEuXCPHOQ
Civil religion plays a central role in the virtue speech, or political correctness, discourse. The history of the concept is discussed as well as the structure of the American form of civil religion and how tenets of civil religion are constantly being performed and re-enacted, particularly in current social media outrage movements.
A new essay called “In Defense of Hierarchy,” the joint responsibility of several of us but largely written by Julian Baggini, has been published at Aeon. It is the fruit of discussions at a conference sponsored by the Berggruen Philosophy and Culture Center, and is an interesting example of comparative or what some folks are now calling cosmopolitan philosophy. Enjoy!
