Dao 24:3 has been published; see here and below for the Table of Contents. Continue reading →
ToC: Asian Studies 13:3
Vol. 13 No. 3 of Asian Studies has been recently published. Please see here and below for the Table of Contents. Continue reading →
Job Opening: Associate Professor/Assistant Professor (Daoism / Religious Studies) at CUHK
The Chinese University of Hong Kong is seeking to fill an associate professor/assistant professor position with a focus on Daoism at its Department of Cultural and Religious Studies. Please see here for more information regarding the position and the application requirements.
Friday, September 19: “Engineering the Dao: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust the Mengzi” Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy
The COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY and the WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE
welcome you to an IN-PERSON meeting:
Hagop Sarkissian (CUNY): «Engineering the Dao: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust the Mengzi»
With responses from Tao Jiang (Rutgers)
ABSTRACT: Why does Mengzi tell rulers that their love of wealth and women poses no obstacle to ideal rulership, even as he venerates sage kings who seemingly lack such desires? How can he advocate for universal moral response in the child-in-the-well scenario while explicitly rejecting impartial concern? Why does he advise King Xuan to avoid looking at sacrificial oxen—effectively telling him to ignore his compassionate impulses—if moral sprouts are meant to guide ethical action? And why does he reject merit-based appointments, favoring hereditary offices, while advocating ethical transformation of government? These persistent interpretive puzzles have led some scholars to conclude that Mengzi’s philosophy is fundamentally conflicted. In this talk, I propose that these puzzles dissolve when we shift our focus from theoretical systematization to dao construction. Rather than seeing Mengzi primarily as a theorist of human nature, a virtue ethicist, or a political philosopher, I argue he is best understood as a constructor of dao: an engineer of workable frameworks for guiding conduct and organizing social life. Like an engineer, Mengzi builds with available resources—human psychology, institutions, cultural forms—within real-world constraints, prioritizing sustainability over theoretical purity. This “pragmatic constructivist” reading explains Mengzi’s characteristic patterns: motivational permissiveness (redirecting self-interested desires rather than suppressing them), institutional conservatism (preserving Zhou structures while fostering ethical renewal), and accommodation of natural family attachments (without making them the normative foundation). Instead of demanding universal emotional expansion, Mengzi engineers coordination mechanisms that work with human nature, social realities, and political structures as they actually exist. I aim to show how this engineering approach resolves longstanding interpretive difficulties and reveals Mengzi as a systematic social engineer whose methodology remains relevant for contemporary debates on moral and political progress.
DATE: September 19th
TIME: 5:30-7:30pm EST
LOCATION: Philosophy Hall, Room 716, Columbia University, 1150 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR NON-COLUMBIA GUESTS: All non-affiliated members of our community must RSVP to Helen Han Wei Luo (hl3631@columbia.edu) preferably no later than Tuesday, September 16th, including in the request your name on government-issued ID in order to be granted access to campus. Non-affiliated members who do not RSVP will not be given entry to campus. Please also plan to arrive early.
CFP: Franciscan and Neo-Confucian philosophy
Lance Gracy is seeking abstracts for an upcoming edited volume on Franciscan and Neo-Confucian philosophy. The contributed works would assess anew the “metaxological space” of Franciscan and Neo-Confucian philosophy with the aim of conveying the mutual flowering and divergence between the two traditions. With renewed interest in comparative philosophy, the objective of the upcoming edited volume is to intellectually undertake the challenge of discovering indelible species in a “land”—still somewhat obscured—nestled between two expansive world traditions, so to better situate them within contemporary context. While most adjacent scholarship addressing the dynamism of the two traditions is historical or piece-meal, sustained philosophical analysis of the space between them remains an alluring frontier with signs of both difficulty and promise.
For more information, see here; the deadline is October 3.
Angle Reviews Li, Reshaping Confucianism
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Chenyang Li, Reshaping Confucianism: Philosophical Explorations, Oxford University Press, 2023, 344pp., $36.99 (pbk), ISBN 9780197657638.
Reviewed by Stephan C. Angle, Wesleyan University
Over a career spanning more than three decades, Chenyang Li has become one of the world’s leading interpreters of Confucian philosophy. From the beginning, he has been interested in both historical interpretation and more contemporary questions about comparison across traditions and philosophical development. Reshaping Confucianism is the culmination of Li’s work so far, bringing together and further refining a range of his groundbreaking arguments on issues including harmony, care, ritual, gender, freedom, and equality, as well as on newer topics like friendship, longevity, and civic education. The book is both an ideal overview of Li’s wide-ranging views and, taken as…
CFP: ACPA Panels at 2026 Pacific APA, Online
The ACPA (Association of Chinese Philosophers in America) is calling for abstract submissions for the 2026 Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, to be held entirely online on April 8-12, 2026 (Pacific Daylight Time). The submission deadline is October 1, 2025. Please see guidelines for submission and submit here.
CFP: 3rd Carolina Conference on Chinese Thought
The Carolina Conference on Chinese Thought (CCCT) is inviting scholars and graduate students to discuss their work on Chinese thought, drawing from any disciplinary perspective, at its 3rd conference, Friday, April 3 – Saturday, April 4, 2026. Presentations focusing on research, pedagogy, and other engagements with Chinese thought are welcome. Works- in-progress are especially encouraged, with the CCCT being a collegial atmosphere for collaboration. Proposals from scholars and graduate students based in the Carolinas and the U.S. Southeast region will be given preference for selection. Please see here for more details and submission guidelines.
Controversy Surrounding Tu Wei-ming’s Remarks at HK Philosophy Forum
Earlier in August, an event called the “2025 香港哲學紫剂國際論壇 / 2025 Hong Kong Bauhinia International Philosophy Forum” was held in Hong Kong. Prof. Tu Wei-ming delivered a keynote address (on-line). Since then, there has been considerable controversy about the event — which did not prominently feature any Hong Kong-born philosophers — and about Tu’s remarks, which were broadly apolitical. In particular, this critical essay by Cheung Chan Fai 張燦輝, former chair of the CUHK Philosophy Department, and Lee Shui-Chuen 李瑞全 of National Central University’s Philosophy Department (and an important contemporary Confucian voice) has received a great deal of attention.
Episode 24 of “This Is the Way”: Robber Zhi—Honor Among Thieves?
With a big assist from our guest, Stephen C. Walker, we discuss a highly unusual philosophical dialogue in classical Chinese literature, the “Robber Zhi Dialogue” (from the Miscellaneous Chapters of the Zhuangzi). This shocking story shows Confucius attempting to convince the story’s anti-hero (Robber Zhi) to give up his robber lifestyle. By the end of the story, Confucius emerges as the more naive and inauthentic of the two characters, and moral exemplars in general are called into question. Are purveyors of morality also robbers themselves?
Stephen C. Walker’s research page Continue reading →
