Report on 2nd RWCP (Xunzi on Authority)

2nd Rutgers Workshop on Chinese Philosophy (RWCP): “Xunzi on Authority”
Friday, April 11, 2014
Report by Marilie Coetsee

This April, Tao Jiang (Rutgers), Ruth Chang (Rutgers), and Stephen Angle (Wesleyen) invited scholars from around the country to Rutgers’second annual meeting on Chinese philosophy, focused this year on Xunzi’s work on authority. Falling in line with last year’s successful conference on “Nature and Value in Chinese and Western Philosophies,”this year’s workshop produced stimulating discussion about the variety of ways in which Xunzi’s work can contribute to and expand upon our conventional Western philosophical conceptions of authority.

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Culturally Variant Intuitions

A session at the recent APA Pacific on “Multicultural Epistemology” (featuring Jason Stanley and Edouard Machery, among others) has got me thinking about culturally variant intuitions. Recent evidence from experimental philosophy has indicated that respondents in East Asian countries tend to have different reactions than their Western counterparts to cases such as “The Magistrate and the Mob,” or Kripke’s Gödel scenario. A recurring question at the APA session concerned what these differences ought to mean for philosophers working in the given areas. Stanley argued that rather than refuting a prevalent methodology that begins from philosophers’ intuitions about cases, cultural variances simply provide us with a wider data set to be explained. Machery in turn presented his research-in-progress suggesting that cross-cultural intuitions about Gettier cases exhibited far more similarity than previous work by experimental philosophers has suggested. Continue reading →

Report on Mozi Conference

A Report on “Modern Interpretations of Mozi”

Lee Ting-mien (University of Leuven)

The workshop “Modern Interpretation of Mozi,” organized by University of Leuven (KU Leuven), was held on April 3, 4 in 2014. The participants – Annick Gijsbers (University of Leuven), Carine Defoort (University of Leuven), Joachim Kurtz (Heidelberg University), Lee Ting-mien (University of Leuven), Nicolas Standaert (University of Leuven), Nie Tao (University of Leuven and Sichuan University), Qin Yanshi (Sichuan Normal University), Tian Hanyun (Yangzhou University), Xie Qiyang (China University of Political Science and Law), Yvonne Schultz Zinda (University of Hamburg), Zheng Jiewen(Shangdong University) – were scholars and graduate students working on Mozi studies in late-imperial or Republican China. Nine papers were presented on the workshop, beginning in the Ming dynasty and ending in the middle of the 20th century:

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Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy lecture by Ted Slingerland: “Trying Not to Try: Cooperation, Trust, and the Paradox of Spontaneity” on Friday, May 9 @5:30pm

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes: EDWARD SLINGERLAND (University of British Columbia)

With responses from: MICHAEL BROWNSTEIN (New Jersey Institute of Technology)

Please join us at Columbia University’s Religion department on Friday, May 9, 2014 at 5:30PM for his lecture called:

“Trying Not to Try: Cooperation, Trust, and the Paradox of Spontaneity”

Abstract: Many early Chinese thinkers had as their spiritual ideal the state of wu-wei, or effortless action.  Continue reading →

New Essays on Bai Tongdong’s Blog

Fudan University professor and sometime contributor to this blog, Bai Tongdong, has his own blog here, and has recently posted some essays there (in Chinese) that some readers may be interested in. The most recent is “传统正名系列3 作为普适价值的儒学” or “Rectification of Names #3: Confucianism as Universal Value.” It is a provocative and (in my view) constructive interjection into the debates that have been raging over “universal” (which often is code for “Western”) values. Enjoy