Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
2017.03.05 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews
Eirik Lang Harris, The Shenzi Fragments: A Philosophical Analysis and Translation, Columbia University Press, 2016, 173pp., $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780231177665.
Reviewed by Franklin Perkins, University of Hawai’i at Manoa
Cambridge University Press has published East Asian Perspectives on Political Legitimacy: Bridging the Empirical-Normative Divide, edited by Joseph Chan, Doh Chuli Shin, and Melissa S. Williams. More details and table of contents here.
Columbia University Press has also published Eirik Harris’s outstanding study of the Shenzi fragments — congratulations, Eirik!
Eirik Lang Harris, The Shenzi Fragments: A Philosophical Analysis and Translation (Columbia University Press, 2016)
Read on for details on the book, as well as a code that can be used for a 30% discount on the book.
I am posting this on behalf of Eirik Harris and Henry Schneider:
Chinese Legalism was at its peak in the Qin and Qing eras. Chairman Mao started what would be a brief revival of the ideas of Hanfei and Shang Yang. What role do the ideas of Chinese Legalism / Realism play today? Eirik Harris (City University of Hong Kong) and Henry Schneider (University of Graz) want to explore contemporary applications of Early Chinese Realist / Legal / Administrative / … / thought.
Interested scholars are welcome to participate. At the moment, Eirik and Henry are interested in organizing different panels for both the APA Pacific 2017 (Seattle) and the ICSP 2017 (Singapore). With time, a more ambitious working and publication program can emerge. Scholars, students and all interested people should contact eiriklangharris@gmail.com and hschneider@gmx.ch. If you want to submit papers for the above mentioned panels, you are more than welcome.
Someone said to Confucius, “Master, why don’t you engage in government?” The Master said, “The Book of Documents says, ‘Filial! But be filial, and a friend to your brothers, thus contributing to government.’ Why then do that other kind of ‘engaging in government’?”
或謂孔子曰：「子奚不為政？」子曰：「《書》云：『孝乎惟孝、友于兄弟，施於有政。』是亦為政，奚其為為政？」
I’ll suppose for the sake of argument that the reported exchange is authentic, and argue that it is not significant evidence of Confucius’ views. Confucius is not aiming to communicate his views here.
Sungmoon Kim’s new book, Public Reason Confucianism: Democratic Perfectionism and Constitutionalism in East Asia (Cambridge, 2016) has just been published. Congratulations, Sungmoon! Here are links to the CUP website and Amazon. Cambridge has also made available a form that anyone can use to get a 25% discount; click here. Here is the book’s description:
Recent proposals concerning Confucian meritocratic perfectionism have justified Confucian perfectionism in terms of political meritocracy. In contrast, ‘Confucian democratic perfectionism’ is a form of comprehensive Confucian perfectionism that can accommodate a plurality of values in civil society. It is also fully compatible with core values of democracy such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and the right to political participation. Sungmoon Kim presents ‘public reason Confucianism’ as the most attractive option for contemporary East Asian societies that are historically and culturally Confucian. Public reason Confucianism is a particular style of Confucian democratic perfectionism in which comprehensive Confucianism is connected with perfectionism via a distinctive form of public reason. It calls for an active role for the democratic state in promoting a Confucian conception of the good life, at the heart of which are such core Confucian values as filial piety and ritual propriety.
Loubna El Amine discusses Confucianism, human rights, and related topics–and even mentions this blog–in her recent Washington Post piece, “Are ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ Western colonial exports? No. Here’s why.”
The new issue of Perspectives on Politics (14:1, March 2016), available here, contains several articles of interest:
I have just started reading Larry Israel’s book Doing Good and Ridding Evil in Ming China: The Political Career of Wang Yangming (Brill, 2014), and it looks excellent. Larry posted something about it on the Readers’ Discussion section of the site, but it deserves a main post!
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
2016.02.02 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews
Henry Rosemont Jr., Against Individualism: A Confucian Rethinking of the Foundations of Morality, Politics, Family, and Religion, Lexington Books, 2015, 190pp., $85.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780739199800.
Reviewed by Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee, University of Hawaii, West Oahu
This book has ten chapters and can be roughly divided into two parts: the first five chapters focus on the discussion of many problematics of the Western notion of individualism; and the second half is devoted to the Confucian role-based alternative. This book can be seen as a culmination of Henry Rosemont Jr.’s decades of work in the field of comparative philosophy. His critique of Western individualism along with his search for Confucian spirituality as an alternative stretches back to his early works such as A Chinese Mirror: Moral Reflections on Political Economy and Society (Open Court, 1991), “Human Rights: A Bill of Worries” (in Confucianism and Human Rights, Columbia University Press, 1998) and Rationality and Religious Experience: The Continuing Relevance of the World’s Spiritual Traditions (Open Court 2001). Against Individualism is a natural progression of all these early groundworks that Rosemont has laid along the way.
