Chinese History Positions at ANU

For historians who patiently abide our company, I relay this announcement from John Makeham:

The Australian National University (ANU) is currently advertising two new positions in Chinese History:

These are both research-intensive positions. One position is a Senior Fellow specializing in the late imperial and contemporary periods (the Republic and People’s Republic, and Taiwan). The other position is for a Fellow specializing in the pre-modern period.

I would be most grateful if you could bring the following link–which provides details of the positions–to the attention of interested parties: http://jobs.anu.edu.au/PositionDetail.aspx?p=1949

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Kings and Thieves

Section 5B/4 of the Mencius is a very interesting text. It’s one of the points at which the Mencius gets defensive about Mencius’s personal virtue. The issue here is Mencius’s willingness to accept gifts from rulers who acquired them by taking from their people. Why accept those gifts, given that you wouldn’t accept gifts from a more everyday sort of bandit?

This passage interests me in part because I’m interested in Mencian defensiveness (on which see also the earlier thread about Shun and his awful family). But that’s not the issue I want to take up here. What I’m wondering about is how (if at all) Mencius’s argument is supposed to work. Continue reading →

Welcome David Elstein

I’d like to welcome David Elstein to the Warp, Weft, and Way cast of contributors. David is assistant professor of philosophy at the State University of New York, New Paltz. He received his B.A. from Oberlin College and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Though his initial training and research was in pre-Qin thought, recently he has become interested in contemporary Chinese philosophy, particularly Confucian political thought. He has published articles in Philosophy East and West and Dao, and is working on a book examining contemporary Chinese views on Confucianism and democracy.

Call for Papers: Bhagavad Gita and Chinese Philosophy

As a forum for comparative studies between Chinese philosophy and other philosophical traditions in the world, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy is soliciting contributions that make creative and fruitful use of the vast conceptual resources in the Chinese philosophical traditions to approach central issues and ideas in the Bhagavad Gita for a special issue, with the theme “Bhagavad Gita and Chinese Philosophy,” guest edited by Professor Tao Jiang. The Bhagavad Gita, or simply the Gita, is the best-known Indian religious scripture, and one of the most translated texts in the world along with the Bible and the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching). Due to its prominence and influence within India and beyond, the Gita has been the subject of constant scholarly studies in the West, quite often in the context of fruitful comparisons with Western religious and philosophical texts. However, there has been little, if any, effort in the scholarly community to engage the Gita from perspectives arising out of Chinese philosophical texts. In order to facilitate philosophical engagement between Chinese and Indian traditions, we are soliciting papers that draw meaningful and fruitful connections between the ideas presented in the Gita and those in Chinese philosophical texts. The submissions need to be explicitly comparative involving the Gita and some Chinese text/thinker. Please send an electronic copy of your paper by January 31, 2012 to the editor-in-chief, Yong Huang (yhuang@kutztown.edu). If you have any question, please feel free to contact either Yong Huang or the guest editor of the issue, Tao Jiang (tjiang@rci.rutgers.edu).

Dao Annual Best Essay Award

The deliberation of Dao Annual Best Essay Award 2010 has comes to a conclusion. The process was divided into two stages. At the first stage, we formed a selection/nomination committee consisting of three editorial board members, who went through all main articles published in the four issues of Dao in 2010 and selected the following three articles as the finalists:

KIM Myeong-seok, “What Ceyin zhi xin (Compassion/Familial Affection) Really Is”
Tan Sor-hoon, “Authoritative Master Kong (Confucius) in an Authoritarian Age”
James Behuniak, “John Dewey and the Virtue of Cook Ding’s Dao.”

Congratulations to Drs. Kim, Tan, and Behuniak!

At the second stage, these three articles were presented to the whole editorial board, and each editorial board member was asked to provide a ranking of these three articles. As a result, Dr. Kim Myeong-seok’s paper receives the highest ranking. So the award goes to Dr. Kim, who is currently an assistant professor of philosophy at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul.

Congratulations, Dr. Kim!

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Is Confucian Feminism So Easy?

My main project while on sabbatical this year has been a book on contemporary Confucian political philosophy (built on the Tang Junyi Lectures I gave a year ago). I am working on one of the final chapters right now, in which I argue that Confucianism must recognize and critique structural forms of injustice. This has led me to revisit some of the literature on Confucianism and feminism, including Lisa Li-Hsiang Rosenlee’s Confucianism and Women (SUNY, 2006). I want to ask, somewhat in the spirit of a devil’s advocate, is it really as easy to articulate a Confucian feminism (or a feminist Confucianism) as Rosenlee says? Continue reading →

HKU Workshop on Happiness and the Dao

All are welcome to this upcoming workshop…

Happiness and the Dao: Ancient Greek and Chinese Approaches to Ethics
March 25-26, 2011
Department of Philosophy
Hong Kong University

Ancient Greek ethics focuses largely on the theory and practice of eudaimonia, the happy or flourishing life. Classical Chinese ethics similarly focuses on the theory and practice of the dao, the proper way of life. Continue reading →

Ziporyn's "Zhuangzi as Philosopher"

Prompted by our recent string of posts on Zhuangzi, I have added a link (in the “References and Tools” section) to the supplemental material that Brook Ziporyn has prepared together with his translation of the text (Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings [Hackett, 2009]). Particularly relevant to recent discussions might be Brook’s essay “Zhuangzi as Philosopher,” which is included with the other materials. If anyone has any comments or questions about that essay, or the other materials, there’s a chance that comments posted here may elicit replies from Brook….