Opportunities Related to “Intellectual Humility”

With the support of the John Templeton Foundation, and subject to a final grant agreement, the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute announces a funding proposal competition of $2 million dollars to support interdisciplinary research projects on intellectual humility and its role in promoting meaningful public discourse. The deadline for letters of intent is May 1st 2016. 

Topical areas of focus include both the barriers that prevent people from engaging in constructive, reason-based dialogue, conducted with intellectual humility, regarding culturally divisive issues, as well as scalable models or other interventions that may be effective or ineffective in promoting this sort of talk. 

In addition, applications are being accepted for both residential and non-residential fellowships for work relevant to the project’s aims. The deadline for residential fellowship applications is April 15th 2016; non-residential fellowship applications will be considered on a rolling basis. 

Full details can be found at: http://publicdiscourseproject.uconn.edu/.

On-line Resources Related to the Yi Jing

Prof. Richard Smith of Rice University writes:

I wanted to let you know that a free, word-searchable PDF version of the 98-page bibliography for my new book, The Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), is now available at https://rowman.com/WebDocs/Smith_9781442221925_online%20bibliography.pdf. 

I might add that there are also a number of other items available for download at my History Department website (http://history.rice.edu/faculty/richard-j-smith). One of these is a long powerpoint on Ming-Qing “encyclopedias of daily use” (riyong leishu) (http://history.rice.edu/content/chinese-encyclopedias), which is also available at http://www.slideshare.net/smithrj/encyclopedias-in-late-imperial-china-2014-36080622 (where it occasioned some interesting and productive conversation). In addition, there are quite a few items on my History Department site related to the Yijing (see http://history.rice.edu/Yijing). Among these materials are a number of Asian-language glossaries for the names, titles and terms that appear in my two books on the Changes: The I Ching: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2012) and Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing (I-Ching, or Classic of Changes) and Its Evolution in China (University of Virginia Press, 2008).

Doctoral student support for research in historiography

Attached here is a PDF with an open call for six doctoral student positions in a research project on narrative modes of classical, medieval and modern historiography in India, China, and Tibet. The project, which is funded by the European Research Council, is running at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. The positions are in classical Indology, modern Indian studies, medieval Indo-Persian studies, medieval Tibetan Studies, classical-medieval Sinology, and modern Chinese studies. The three-year positions are tuition-free and come with a small stipend. The application deadline is March 31.

A Conference on “Sinophone Philosophy 汉语哲学”

I posted once before about the idea of “Sinophone philosophy (i.e, Chinese-language philosophy; Hanyu Zhexue 汉语哲学),” here. I was recently invited to a conference on the subject (alas, I won’t be able to attend), and thought that the three main topics on which the conference will focus might be of interest to some:

一、对于中国哲学史中传统思想之当代的、具方法论自觉的理论性重构。[1. Topics concerning the contemporary, methodologically self-conscious theoretical reconstruction of traditional thought from the history of China’s philosophy.]

二、以西方哲学为对象、然而能与汉语世界相关研究成果批判地对话之学术研究。[2. Topics that take Western philosophy as their objects, but use research results from the Sinosphere (i.e., Chinese-language world) to undertake critical, dialogical, academic research.]

三、立基并取材于汉语世界文化传统、而对哲学问题所进行的独立反思。[3. Topics that base themselves in and use results from the cultural traditions of the Sinosphere, and undertake independent reflection on philosophical topics.]

As comparative philosophers reflect on how to undertake philosophical work in a way that reflects our pluralistic world and does not privilege “Western” philosophy simply because of its current historical dominance (which is in part the result of the successes of Euro-American capitalism and colonialism), I think that Sinophone Philosophy is a stimulating concept worth our attention.

Experimental Philosophy Through History – February 20, 2016 at NYU – Full Schedule

This coming Saturday, February 20th, NYU will be hosting a workshop titled Experimental Philosophy Through History  at 5 Washington Place, Room 101, from 10:00 AM to 6:15 PM. The workshop will be on questions at the intersection of experimental philosophy and the history of philosophy.

The recent movement of experimental philosophy has raised a variety of important questions, but many of those questions have actually been discussed in various earlier periods in the history of philosophy. So we are bringing in twelve scholars, representing different periods in the history of philosophy, to discuss questions about how the sorts of issues raised by contemporary experimental philosophy were understood by philosophers in those early periods.

A previous announcement was posted here. I include the full schedule below:

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Rosenlee Reviews Rosemont, Against Individualism

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2016.02.02 View this Review Online   View Other NDPR Reviews

Henry Rosemont Jr., Against Individualism: A Confucian Rethinking of the Foundations of Morality, Politics, Family, and Religion, Lexington Books, 2015, 190pp., $85.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780739199800.

Reviewed by Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee, University of Hawaii, West Oahu

This book has ten chapters and can be roughly divided into two parts: the first five chapters focus on the discussion of many problematics of the Western notion of individualism; and the second half is devoted to the Confucian role-based alternative. This book can be seen as a culmination of Henry Rosemont Jr.’s decades of work in the field of comparative philosophy. His critique of Western individualism along with his search for Confucian spirituality as an alternative stretches back to his early works such as A Chinese Mirror: Moral Reflections on Political Economy and Society (Open Court, 1991), “Human Rights: A Bill of Worries” (in Confucianism and Human Rights, Columbia University Press, 1998) and Rationality and Religious Experience: The Continuing Relevance of the World’s Spiritual Traditions (Open Court 2001). Against Individualism is a natural progression of all these early groundworks that Rosemont has laid along the way.

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