Like many of you, I’ve also been trying to understand Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution by putting it in the larger context of Chinese history (from Confucius to 1989 and to the present).
I could not help but compare it with 1989.
Why do many Americans still say “Confucius say”?
Confucius valued careful and serious speech. One passage in the Analects says that a person can be judged as wise or unwise on the basis of a single sentence. So how is it possible that for many Americans, the first thing they think of when they hear the name of the Chinese teacher is “Confucius say,” followed by a silly one-liner?
ISCP Panels at Pacific APA 2015
Here are the two ISCP panels to take place at the 2015 Pacific APA:
Major Confucianism Conference This Week
The inagural conference of the World Consortium for Research in Confucian Cultures will take place this coming week in Honolulu. More information, including conference program, is located here.
Where are all the Confucians in Hong Kong tonight?
Like many of you, I have often been thinking about the relation between liberal democracy and the Confucian tradition (or better: the traditions of thought claiming to somehow continue the spiritual legacy of Confucius and Mencius). In these hours, that is “as dusk fell on Hong Kong Tuesday evening” (in the words of CNN), thousands of young people are filling the streets of Hong Kong demanding full democracy and the right to elect their own leader.
Mair on Xin
Victor Mair has published an essay about the meaning of <i>xin</i> 心, about which we had some considerable discussion here a little while ago.
The Limits of Academic Philosophy?
I have lately been reading Frank Perkins’s marvelous book Heaven and Earth are Not Humane: The Problem of Evil in Classical Chinese Philosophy (Indiana, 2014). There’s lots of rich and provocative content in the book worth talking about, but at least for right now I want to focus on a different kind of question that Frank raises right at the beginning, on p. 5. Discussing the question of whether Warring States thought is appropriately labelled “philosophy,” he writes that “in practice, [this] is a question about institutions and the power of inclusion and exclusion… Certain boundaries are accepted in practice by almost all academic philosophers.”
U of C closing its Confucius Institute
Commentary and relevant links here.
“Dazed and Confucian”: Russell Moses on Xi Jinping
An interesting take on Xi Jinping’s frequent expressions of reverence for China’s past.
New SEP article on Epistemology in Chinese Philosophy
By Jana Rošker, found here.
