10 replies on “International Conference on Nature and Value in Chinese and Western Philosophies”

1. Dear Madam/Sir,

   Greetings from Bangladesh Buddhist Federation (BBF), Dhaka, Bangladesh!

   I’d like to bring your kind attention that I’m interested to attend the conference that you’re organizing.

   Please note that BBF is a non-profit organization working in the field of religious education and social welfare as well as non-violence, human rights, cultural development and child protection.

   I’m sincerely requesting you that you please send me necessary information about the conference.

   Regards
   Pratim Barua
   Youth Coordinator
   Bangladesh Buddhist Federation (BBF)
   Dhaka, Bangladesh.

   Reply

2. Steve, I am happy for those activities, the more the better. But using the word “philosophy” for Chinese thought seems as controversial as calling Confucianism a “religion.” There is just no word for “philosophy” in the Chinese canon; they have their very own Chinese categories and taxonomy and I still hope that one day global scholarship will recognize cultural property rights and employ the correct Chinese terminologies.

   Reply

   • I thought you had adopted a different view here! http://warpweftandway.com/2012/08/19/new-book-on-chinese-religion-and-philosophy/#comment-4179

   • Not at all.

3. I know how big the pressure is on young green scholars to submit to old categories and continue a sort of cultural imperialism, e. g. simply annotating “Chinese” to Western categories, thus “Chinese philosophy” or “Chinese dragon” or “Chinese religion.” I also understand that so many Chinese people who were educated in the West would rather drop the correct Chinese terminology and become professors in the West. That is the easy way. The hard way is to be truthful and honest and insist on the correct Chinese terminologies when talking about their culture. Because if they don’t promote their own unique terminologies back into World history, that World history will be, literally, totally Chinese-free.

   Reply

   • Or, we could take a less realist view of language where culturally constructed terms from the past do not wholly determine contemporary meaning.

   • Indeed. That is something I mentioned before to Thorsten, as exemplified by Erica Brindley’s work on ‘individualism.’
     http://www.iep.utm.edu/ind-chin/

   • Action is better than cynicism. Do something about scholars who call Chinese shengren and junzi whatever they want except by the their correct names: shengren and junzi. Now, that would be true scholarship, and something similar is already done in most other disciplines, Japanology and Indology and Buddhology. Only in Sinology our “scholars” still call Chinese concepts by convenient, often biblical or philosophical names and terms. This distorts the reality of Chinese traditions and its socio-cultural reality. Just saying.

   • What does it take not to “distort the reality of Chinese traditions”? Why don’t you refer to ‘China’ as ‘Zhongguo’, for instance? Or better yet 中國?

4. I find myself disagreeing with much of what TP says and suggests here. I’ll address a few points.

   1.
   Recently in my propaganda efforts aimed at China, I was working with a group to write up a short film that discussed, among other things, a misleadingly titled law against “aggressive panhandling” in a town in California. A county court invalidated the measure on First Amendment grounds, and part of the reason was that the law simply targeted panhandling in general, not aggression. I wrote in English, carefully repeating the word “aggressive” in various stories and contexts as a device for making our point economically. Alas, it turned out that we (including several well-read Chinese people) could not find a Chinese near equivalent of that term. Thorsten, would that linguistic point, if correct, convince you that there is no aggressiveness in China?

   2.
   I wonder, Thorsten, what you take “philosophy” to mean.
   (Cf. http://warpweftandway.com/2012/09/11/buffalo-iscp-international-conference-on-chinese-philosophy/#comment-4229 )

   3.
   I think the main westerners who speak of Chinese “philosophy” are people working in philosophy departments, young and old. Mainly they are interested in Chinese philosophy because they are interested in philosophy and they respect the possibility of contributions from (early) Chinese thinkers. Mainly it’s not that they started out by being interested in what the early Chinese thinkers were doing. The use of the phrase “Chinese philosophy” in documents such as academic articles and (especially) course titles does have certain pragmatic purposes: mainly to secure at least some positive attention for the Chinese materials (and, as always in academic life, for the academics themselves). The aim is not “cultural imperialism.”

   Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.