Nussbaum on Chinese and Singaporean Education Models

Not really Chinese or comparative philosophy but tangentially relevant, I suppose, and interesting. The whole piece is here, at the New Republic. Here are Nussbaum’s summary, concluding remarks:

It is time to take off the rose-colored glasses. Singapore and China are terrible models of education for any nation that aspires to remain a pluralistic democracy. They have not succeeded on their own business-oriented terms, and they have energetically suppressed imagination and analysis when it comes to the future of the nation and the tough choices that lie before it. If we want to turn to Asia for models, there are better ones to be found: Korea’s humanistic liberal arts tradition, and the vision of Tagore and like-minded Indian educators. I’ll take up their more enlightened approaches in my next column. Continue reading →

New Page

I’ve set up a page — Readers’ Posts — that will be useful for readers who have announcements, links, or other thoughts to share with the rest of us. If you can’t see the tab for it, refresh this page and it should appear. Hopefully, this will provide a more obvious forum for the very useful sorts of things that have heretofore been appearing on the Question Board but aren’t questions. Use and enjoy!

Defoort on Chinese Philosophy

I’m working on a “demarcation problem” section for my textbook, touching on issues about philosophy, Western philosophy, and Chinese philosophy. I’ve actually learned a lot from discussing the issue with some of you on the blog. Also, I was happy to discover — belatedly — a great piece by Carine Defoort that lays out the issues in a nicely structured way and helps me to see how my own thinking maps onto the spectrum of views one could have about Chinese philosophy.

Here is a brief excerpt from the beginning of Defoort’s “Is There Such a Thing as Chinese Philosophy? Arguments of an Implicit Debate” (Philosophy East and West 51:3 (Jul., 2001), pp. 393-413). I’m not sure why I’ve never read this piece before, given my interest in the topic, but I’m just now discovering it, along with follow-up discussion pieces five years later (PEW 56:4) by Rein Raud and Defoort. Continue reading →

Ideas Wanted for "World Political Thought"

Yale University Press is exploring the possibility of a series called “World Political Thought,” the goal being to publish authoritative English-language editions of important works from the many traditions of political thinking outside of the Euro-American traditions that dominate political theory/political philosophy today. I’m serving as editor for the East Asian part of this project. One early step that we are considering is starting with low-hanging fruit: texts that exist already in obscure and/or out-of-print editions (maybe appended to someone’s dissertation?) that could be spruced up and republished, in order to get the series off the ground rapidly. (The more substantial project of commissioning translations of other texts will also get going, and proceed simultaneously.) Anyone have suggestions? For the time being, I’m mainly interested in the “low-hanging fruit,” but any and all ideas are welcome.