Kang accepts position at Washington and Lee

Li KANG writes to let us know that she has accepted a tenure-track offer from Washington and Lee University, and will be joining the Philosophy Department as an Assistant Professor starting in Fall of 2019. Her bio:

I got my philosophy degrees on three continents: a B.A. from Wuhan University (China), an M.Phil. from University of St Andrews (UK), and a Ph.D. from Syracuse University (US). From 2017 to 2019, I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College. My main areas of research are metaphysics and Chinese Buddhism. While half of my work involves developing views within the analytic tradition, the other half involves showing how the analytic tradition and non-Western traditions enrich each other. Currently, I am working on discovering and developing the metaphysics of Chinese Buddhism in relation to analytic philosophy and cognitive science.

Congratulations, Li!

Hongladarom Reviews Epistemology for the Rest of the World

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2019.03.30 View this Review Online   View Other NDPR Reviews

Masaharu Mizumoto, Stephen Stich, and Eric McCready (eds.), Epistemology for the Rest of the World, Oxford University Press, 2018, 295pp., $85.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780190865085.

Reviewed by Soraj Hongladarom, Chulalongkorn University

When I was a graduate student at the Department of Philosophy at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana back in the 1980s, I took the program’s required epistemology course. What struck me then was that its content was very much tied to the English language. It was not exactly the kind of English that I studied in my English major classes back home, but a simple one focusing on only a few words. The main analysis was of sentences such as “S knows that p”. Naturally, I came across the famous paper by Edmund Gettier, and I remember that I spent a large amount of time figuring out what was going on. Somebody had a true and justified belief that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket, but in the end, he does not know that. I wondered what was going on. So I translated the whole thing into Thai thinking that doing so might help me understand the whole thing better, but to no avail. To a normal Thai-speaking person it was strange to think that such a scenario could ever happen. I remember that I had to impose the strangeness of the situation onto my intuition of English. Since I am not a native speaker, I assumed that English speakers might have some kind of intuitive understanding of how the word ‘know’ was used.

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Timothy Connolly – Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy Lecture: “Confucian Approaches to Intergenerational Ethics” Friday Mar 29 at 5:30pm

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes: Timothy Connolly (East Stroudsburg University)
With a response from: Susan Blake (Bard College)

Please join on us at Columbia University’s Religion Department on FRIDAY, March 29th at 5:30 PM for his lecture entitled:

Confucian Approaches to Intergenerational Ethics

ABSTRACT: Since Confucianism is an intergenerational phenomenon, it should have unique insights into ethical issues surrounding our obligations to future generations. Continue reading →

Call for Registration – Curing through Questioning: Philosophy as Therapy Across Ancient Traditions and Modern Applications

Call for Registration – Curing through Questioning: Philosophy as Therapy Across Ancient Traditions and Modern Applications

1st-2nd June 2019
Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre
Worcester College, University of Oxford

Registration is open for a two-day interdisciplinary conference – ‘Curing through Questioning: Philosophy as Therapy Across Ancient Traditions and Modern Applications’ – to take place on 1st-2nd June 2019 at the Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre in Worcester College, University of Oxford.

We are glad to confirm the following invited speakers:

Amber D. Carpenter (Yale-NUS College)
Jessica Frazier (University of Oxford)
Barbara Jikai Gabrys (Zen Master in the Hakuin-Inzan line of the Rinzai tradition; University of Oxford)
Christopher Gill (University of Exeter)
Livia Kohn (Boston University)
Karyn Lai (University of New South Wales)
Graham Parkes (University of Vienna)
Graham Priest (City University of New York)
Katja Vogt (Columbia University)

Seven graduate/early career researchers selected through our CfA will also be giving papers:

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Conference in Taipei: “Phenomenology and Chinese Philosophy” (March 18-20)

Dear colleagues,

this is to inform you about the international conference “Selfhood, Otherness, and Cultivation. Phenomenology and Chinese Philosophy” (March 18-20, at National Chengchi University in Taipei). You can still register on our website which also contains many helpful information (list of speakers, abstracts, etc.). The conference is co-hosted by the philosophy department and the interdisciplinary “Research Center on Chinese Cultural Subjectivity in Taiwan” at National Chengchi University. Our guest of honor is Dan Zahavi (Kopenhagen/Oxford) who, besides participating in our conference, will also give a series of lectures next week (see here).

Cordially,
Kai Marchal

 

 

 

New episodes of The Issue is Not The Issue

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.

Lecture by Roger Ames this coming Friday March 15 at the New School (New York)

Roger T. Ames 安樂哲 on
“Deweyan and Confucian Ethics: A Challenge to the Ideology of Individualism”

FRIDAY, MARCH 15, 2019 AT 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Wolff Conference Room, Room D1103, Albert and Vera List Academic Center
6 East 16th Street, New York, NY 10003

Click here for more info (includes a link to register to attend)

ABSTRACT: John Dewey, in his resistance to foundational individualism, declares that individual autonomy so conceived is a fiction; for Dewey, it is association that is a fact. In his own language: Continue reading →