ndpr review of moral fool

Stephen had kindly placed his reference to a recent and extremely negative review of the Moral Fool only at the end of the no longer much frequented discussion of this book in this forum. I had requested the publishers of the review, the editors of the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, to be granted the right to a reply. This request was denied. I might thus as well say a few words here.

It is not really worth the effort to respond in detail to the many often incorrect and contradictory claims of the reviewer. In general, he accuses me of not having written a book in the only genre that he seems to deem academically appropriate, namely an exegetical study on the secondary literature in one’s field. Of course, as will be most obvious to any reader, I intentionally did not make such an attempt in the Moral Fool, but rather tried to develop a perspective of “negative ethics” derived from various philosophical sources, including Chinese ones and to relate them to some current social issues and viewpoints.

Some colleagues and friends have asked me if I knew why the reviewer had been so extraordinarily hostile. I did not know this, since I had never heard his name before. However, I subsequently became aware of some “dots” which perhaps are entirely disconnected: Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews often commissions its contributions directly through requests of their editors. P.J. Ivanhoe is an editor of this journal. In the review, I am accused of not citing major authorities on Chinese Philosophy, among which the reviewer lists P.J. Ivanhoe. The reviewer, in the acknowledgments in his book on W. James, thanks P.J. Ivanhoe. I co-published a critical review of Prof. Ivanhoe’s religious interpretation of the Zhuangzi some years ago in Philosophy East and West.

Message from Tu Weiming

An interesting one, sent via Jeeloo Liu (ACPA president). I’m not sure Tu reads this blog, but comments and discussion are welcome in any case.

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To:  Fellow Students of Chinese Philosophy

From:   Tu Weiming

Re:  The State of the Field

It gives me great pleasure to share my tentative thoughts on our field both as an intellectual pursuit and as an academic discipline.  Let me first give you some background.  Otherwise this might easily be construed as presumptuous and even self-serving.  As some of you know, I attended the last Congress in Seoul (June 2008) as the speaker (Maimonides Lecturer for one of the three endowed chair.  I was allotted a 90-minute plenary session to present my reflections on the Analects.  However, more pertinently, I was elected as a member of the Steering Committee of FISP (Federation of International Philosophical Societies) which, among other things, has the authority to oversee the organization of the Congress.  Since its inception in 1900, the Congress had never met in Asia.  The 2003 Congress was held in Istanbul, but ironically, even though Turkey is located in Asia broadly defined, its national aspiration is to join the European Union.  I was told that during all the plenary sessions there had only been an African voice, and no Asian voice. This reminds me that my Chinese colleagues told me that during the 1998 Congress in Boston, my presentation on the Confucian idea of the educated person was the sole Asian voice.

However, the Seoul Congress must be fully recognized as the single most significant event for Asian and comparative philosophy and with far-reaching implications for Chinese philosophy.  It recognized Buddhist philosophy, Daoist philosophy, and Confucian philosophy as integral parts of world philosophy, to be seriously considered as important as metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Continue reading →

The Future We Make

Well, the marking of the Chinese new year (good fortune to all of you out there!) provides an opportune moment to think about “the future of Chinese philosophy,” not so much in our soothsaying mode but in our capacity as people who are invested in shaping the field. Taking our cue from Robert Neville’s ambitious and provocative list of projects, perhaps we could think about the projects that we think would be important to take up and pursue vigorously in the field. Maybe each person interested could contribute one item to the list. Okay, I’ll start:

  1. Identify and defend something that is philosophically distinctive and valuable from the variety of writings and movements of Chinese philosophy.

Continue reading →

Neville's Projects for Chinese Philosophy

Many of you will recently have received the most recent ISCWP Newsletter. (If any readers are not members of the ISCWP and would like to be, please see information here about joining. There no mandatory dues.) In a short lead article, Sor-hoon Tan summarizes some remarks the Robert Neville made on the subject of the future of Chinese philosophy. I post the key points here.

The following is an excerpt of the eight projects which is discussed in much greater detail in the paper, a revised version of which will be published in the Pluralist, vol. 5, no. 2 (Summer 2010):

Big Moment Ethics and Philosophy

Prompted by a posted question from Scott Barnwell on our Question Board, Bill Haines has made some provocative comments regarding two related topics that for some of us may now count as conventional wisdom: that Chinese philosophy has more to say than Western philosophy about everyday life, and that Western ethics tends correctly to be characterized as “big moment ethics.” Scott and Bill both reference this interview with Joel Kupperman. I’d like therefore to move his remarks up to a main post, to encourage further discussion. The rest of this post is by Bill. –Steve

I can’t claim knowledge here, but I can’t imagine how someone could think that that Asian thought has significantly more to say about everyday life and the little things than does Western thought. I wonder whether Kupperman’s view amounts to a kind of semantic point, or semantic mistake, about the word “philosophy.” Continue reading →