A new issue of Hume Studies (49:2) includes three comparative essays that look at Hume’s moral, aesthetic and epistemological projects on taste, tradition and the self, side by side with Confucian texts such as Mengzi, Analects, and Xunzi, as well as works on Buddhist concepts like the two truths. Please read more to see information regarding the essays: Continue reading →
2025 Midwest Conference on Chinese Thought CFP
The Midwest Conference on Chinese Thought was created to foster dialogue and interaction between scholars and students working on Chinese thought across different disciplines and through a variety of approaches. Submissions are invited for papers on any aspect of Chinese thought as well as papers dealing with comparative issues that engage Chinese perspectives.
This year’s conference will be held in-person April 4-5, 2025, at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, in La Crosse, WI. Our keynote speaker will be Professor Richard Kim.
For consideration, please submit a 1-page abstract to Sam Cocks at scocks@uwlax.edu with the subject line: “MCCT 2025 Abstract Submission” by January 15, 2025 for blind review. For more information, visit the conference website here (will be updated soon).
Dr. Kim is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. His core areas of interest are ethics, moral psychology, East Asian philosophy, and comparative philosophy. His research centers on deepening our understanding of the nature of well-being, and relevant concepts including emotion, virtue, and friendship. In both research and teaching, he seeks to employ an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural methodology that integrates traditional philosophical analysis with contemporary psychological research and insights from East Asian philosophical traditions. He is the author of Confucianism and the Philosophy of Well-Being (Routledge 2020) and the co-host with Justin Tiwald of This is the Way: A Chinese Philosophy Podcast. Before coming to Loyola he received his PhD from the University of Notre Dame and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the City University of Hong Kong and Saint Louis University.
四海为学 “Collaborative Learning“ Lecture by Tim Connolly
On November 26th at 9:00am Beijing time the 四海为学 “Collaborative Learning” Project will host a lecture by Professor Tim Connolly, titled ““Sharing Transformative Experience: A Confucian Perspective”. To find details and the Zoom link, please visit the project’s event page. No pre-registration or passcode is required is required for Zoom participation.
A list of the project’s upcoming events can be found at the calendar here.
DECEMBER 6: “An Ethics of Attention”–Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy
THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY and the WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE welcome you to an IN-PERSON meeting:
Daniel Stephens (University at Buffalo): « An Ethics of Attention »
With responses from Santiago Mejia (Fordham University)
ABSTRACT: Spurred partly by recent attempts to ethically assess various negative effects of the attention economy, philosophers have begun to pay more attention to the role that attention plays in our ethical lives. This has included some more general discussion of the ethics of attention. In this talk, I add to this recent discussion by outlining a proposal for a comprehensive ethics of attention. On my proposal, an ethics of attention includes norms that stem from the role that attention plays in the formation of our character, in constituting our relationships and social roles, and in our other ethical decision making and behavior. Because of attention’s nature as a finite resource, and because our various roles and relationships involve interpersonal expectations for how others allocate their attention, an ethics of attention should provide norms that govern how we collectively allocate our attention among these morally important purposes. Because these morally important purposes are all competing for our attention, one goal of an ethics of attention should be to find practices that help to synergize how people meet these demands. I call such a set of practices a “social-attentional scheme”, and propose that the ultimate goal of an ethics of attention is to find an optimal social-attentional scheme. I conclude by discussing the various ways in which we can understand early Confucian ethics as providing us with one such social-attentional scheme, and propose some lessons we can take from this Confucian example as we try to continue developing a contemporary ethics of attention.
DATE: December 6, 2024
TIME: 5:30-7:30pm EST
LOCATION: Philosophy Hall, Room 716, Columbia University
1150 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027
Call for discussants: APA webinar on comparative philosophy
The APA offers an on-demand webinar series featuring engaging discussions on topics of interest to philosophers. Each webinar typically lasts one hour and brings together three to four philosophers to explore a specific theme from diverse perspectives. The APA strives to include a wide range of topics and viewpoints.
Eirik Harris and Henrique Schneider plan to host a webinar in May 2025, focusing on the contemporary state of comparative philosophy and emphasizing Chinese philosophy. The APA is seeking 2–3 philosophers to join this discussion.
If you are interested in participating, please email hschneider@gmx.ch by January 25, 2025. Include three topics you would like to discuss in the webinar.
CFP: Envisioning Futures: Decolonial and World Philosophical Approaches
The Department of Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong is pleased to announce the international conference Envisioning Futures: Decolonial and World Philosophical Approaches, scheduled for November 21-22, 2025. The university will provide accommodation for all participants for three days. The conference organisers are negotiating the possibility of publishing a selection of the accepted papers in a high-profile philosophy journal.
Continue reading →
ISEAP 2024 Conference
The International Society of East Asian Philosophy (ISEAP) will have its fourth international conference on December 14-15, which will be held at the Fukuoka University, Japan. This conference will be open to online audiences. To learn more about the conference, visit this page.
Advance registration for zoom attendance is required. Please register through this form.
Episode 13 of “This Is the Way”: Family Before State
Confucianism is well known for prioritizing familial responsibilities and love over other competing demands such as public interest or duties to the state. In this episode we explore two of the best known passages from early Confucianism that some modern scholars believe makes Confucianism morally problematic. The first passage we discuss is the “Upright Gong” passage, Analects 13.18, which has Confucius advocating mutual “covering up” of crimes by fathers and sons. The second passage is Mengzi 7A35, in which Mengzi is asked what the sage king Shun would have done if his father had committed murder. Mengzi’s answer, briefly stated, is that Shun would have given up his throne and would have fled with his father to care for him for the rest of his life.
Through these passages we explore questions about justice, consequentialist ethics, and the nature of moral dilemmas (and Confucian ways of handling them). Continue reading →
Revised Book: Ng, Zhu Xi’s Theory of Self-Cultivation of Probing Principle
A revised and much-expanded version of Ng Kai-chiu 吳啟超’s book, 《朱子的窮理工夫論》[Zhu Xi’s Theory of Self-Cultivation of Probing Principle] has been published by National Taiwan University Press. More information in both Chinese and English (the book is in Chinese) is available here.
New Books: Rogacz and Ambrogio, eds., Chinese Philosophy and its Thinkers
The massive, three-volume Chinese Philosophy and its Thinkers: From Ancient Times to the Present Day
(General Editors: Dawid Rogacz & Selusi Ambrogio) has been published by Bloomsbury. The three volumes are:
- Volume I: Chinese Ancient and Early Imperial Philosophy
- Volume II: Chinese Imperial Philosophy After Buddhism
- Volume III: Chinese Philosophy from the Eighteenth Century to the Present
See here for more information, including tables of contents. Congratulations to Profs. Rogacz and Ambrogio for shepherding this project to completion!
