Allen’s Striking Beauty reviewed at NDPR

Barry Allen’s Vanishing Into Things (Harvard, 2015) on Chinese epistemology was reviewed at NDPR last June; now comes a review of his other 2015 book:

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2016.03.18 View this Review Online   View Other NDPR Reviews

Barry Allen, Striking Beauty: A Philosophical Look at the Asian Martial Arts, Columbia University Press, 2015, 252pp., $30.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780231172721.

Reviewed by Evan Thompson, University of British Columbia

Striking Beauty is an exciting, groundbreaking work. It is the first Anglophone philosophy book to focus on the Asian martial arts. It sympathetically and insightfully examines the values and presuppositions of these disciplines. It ranges across ethics, aesthetics, action theory, the philosophy of sport, Greek philosophy, Spinoza, Deleuze, cognitive science, and Chinese philosophy. Barry Allen’s experience as a devoted martial arts practitioner shines through the writing. He presents the Asian martial arts not just as a new subject matter for philosophy but also and more importantly as a new setting for doing cross-cultural philosophy. The result is an original and inspiring work that philosophers and martial arts practitioners will read for many years to come.

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Open-Rank Position in Chinese Philosophy at NCCU

The Department of Philosophy at National Chengchi University (Taipei, Taiwan) invites applications for a position of professor, associate professor, or assistant professor. Appointments are effective from August 1, 2016

Qualifications: Ph.D. in Philosophy or related fields. Applicants should be able to offer English and Chinese taught courses.

Specialization: Western Philosophy (Kant’s philosophy or German idealism preferred) or Chinese Philosophy (neo-Confucianism preferred)

Deadline: All application materials should be postmarked no later than April 6 (Wednesday), 2016.

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Papers for Rutgers Workshop; Final Call for Reservations

The website for our upcoming Rutgers Workshop on Chinese Philosophy (RWCP), “Conversations with Western Philosophers,” is now live; see here. It contains a full program and links to the papers that will be presented. (One of them is password-protected and not available for general distribution, at the request of the author.) If you would like to attend, please RSVP immediately; the room is almost at capacity based on existing reservations.

Time-sensitive question re Confucius quote

A writer from National Geographic has contacted me with a question, and I wonder if anyone out there has a better answer than I have so far come up with. She is working on an article that uses a quote widely attributed to Confucius, and wants to confirm the attribution. It is: “By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.” One source that I found on-line suggests that this is based on Analects 16:19 (“孔子曰：「生而知之者，上也；學而知之者，次也；困而學之，又其次也。困而不學，民斯為下矣！」”; ctext here.). This is indeed a listing of three ways of acquiring understanding or wisdom, but the rest doesn’t match very well.

Does anyone have any ideas? There are tons of Confucius quotations in other texts, and maybe this is one of them? Or maybe a loose/early version of that Analects passage? The writer’s deadline is 2pm EST tomorrow! Thanks for any help, which I will pass on.

Summer Workshop (Funding Available)

I have recently learned about the “Greater China Summer Workshop Program in Chinese Studies” to be held this summer in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Beijing, organized and sponsored by the Sinological Development Charitable Foundation. Information on the Foundation and its goals, as well as about the program, are available on its website, here. The program aims to introduce Chinese Studies (focusing on Early Confucianism and the Hundred Schools; Buddhism and Daoism; and Neo-Confucianism). There are a limited number of Sponsorships (full financial support) available, plus a self-pay option. The application deadline is April 1, 2016.

Workshop on Yan Fu 嚴復 and Cross-Cultural Political Theory in Taipei

Dear colleagues,

If you happen to be in Taipei this wednesday (March 16), you are welcome to take part in the workshop on “Yan Fu and the Possibilities of Cross-Cultural Political Theory” organized by the International Center for Chinese Philosophy (Soochow University). No need to register: there will be enough seats for everyone!

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Two New Books on Modern Chinese Philosophy

Two books in Brill’s “Modern Chinese Philosophy” series have recently been published:

Xiaoqing Diana Lin, Feng Youlan and Twentieth Century China: An Intellectual Biography

http://www.brill.com/products/book/feng-youlan-and-twentieth-century-china

King Pong Chiu,  Thomé H. Fang, Tang Junyi and Huayan Thought: A Confucian Appropriation of Buddhist Ideas in Response to Scientism in Twentieth-Century China

http://www.brill.com/products/book/thome-h-fang-tang-junyi-and-huayan-thought

Harvey Lederman – Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy Lecture: “Weakness of the Will and Liangzhi in Wang Yangming”, Mar.18 @ 5:30pm

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes: HARVEY LEDERMAN (New York University)
With responses from: STEVE ANGLE (Wesleyan University)

Please join us at Columbia University’s Religion Department on FRIDAY, MARCH 18th at 5:30PM for his lecture entitled:

“Weakness of the Will and Liangzhi in Wang Yangming”

This paper starts from Wang Shouren’s (王守仁, Yangming 陽明 1472-1529) doctrines concerning weakness of the will, with the aim of developing an interpretation of his theory of “intuition” (l ́ıangzh ̄ı 良知). Wang famously insisted on the “unity of knowledge and action” (知行合一). “Action” is understood in this claim as the subject’s affect; to act appropriately is to have the ethically appropriate affective response. In claiming that knowledge and action are one Wang claims that one form of weakness of the will is impossible: if one knows piety (for example), one is guaranteed to have a pious affective response, that is, to act piously. Wang held that humans have an innate capacity to respond to stimuli with ethically appropriate affect, and that the explanation of this capacity somehow involves the faculty of “intuition” (良知), the faculty by which one obtains moral knowledge. But how does intuition yield moral knowledge? And how does this knowledge guarantee that one will have the affect appropriate to the circumstances? Continue reading →