Alphabet Soup at the Pacific APA

The Pacific APA Program Committee has shared the tentative Group Meeting Program with the groups that are sponsoring panels. Here is the message we received:

A draft version of the 2010 Pacific Division Group Program is now available on-line at http://apa-pacific.org/current/group-program.php. (You’re quite welcome to circulate this link to your group’s members.)

This is a preliminary program that we have posted in order to identify problems. Please take a look at the draft and let me know by Wednesday, November 18th of any corrections that should be made.

However, please understand that putting on a program as large and complex as this means that requests for timetable changes can only be made in rare and extraordinary circumstances. Moreover, we are at this point using every appropriate and available meeting room in the hotel.

The 2010 program is large and we strongly advise anyone who wishes to stay at the conference hotel to book a room now. The above web site also has links to the hotel web site.

If you click on the link and sift through it, you will find a number of panels sponsored by groups that many of us are affiliated with: ISCWP, ISCP, ACPA, and SACP. (Links to the websites of these groups can be found on the right-hand border of this blog.) You will note that, due to the limited slots available for group meetings, sometimes the panels sponsored by two of these groups conflict with one another. On the other hand, it is always that case that there are conflicts among panels dealing in Western philosophical traditions, so perhaps we should not be worried. So I offer this partly just for your information, and partly to see whether anyone has thoughts on the current roles that the four groups are playing in promoting Chinese and comparative philosophy.

Neo-Confucianism Seminar at Columbia this Friday

The next session of the Columbia University Seminar on Neo-Confucian Studies will convene on Friday, November 13, 2009, from 4:00 to 6:00pm in the Common Room of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.

Professor Tao Jiang of Rutgers will present the paper “Conceptions of Spiritual Freedom in Classical Chinese Thought.”

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Quick Technical Note about Commenting

There are two ways to comment in response to a post. You can jump directly to the ‘Submit Comment’ box and use it. That will result in a “primary” comment. The other way to comment is to respond to an existing comment by clicking ‘Reply’ just below the comment. That will result in a bullet-point, nested comment (the nests are enabled five levels deep). For example, see my comment here. Using the ‘Reply’ comments allows for sub-discussions and cuts down on some of the need to scroll up and down the comment papyrus.

What's Wrong With Those Pesky "Village Worthies"?

I’ve started work on a paper that asks how issues like continence and conscientiousness look when viewed through the lens of early Confucianism. These seems like a good idea in part because of the great range of ways in which such issues are treated in recent virtue ethics/virtue theory literature: some take it for granted that conscientiousness is a virtue, and perhaps even a central one (e.g., Adams, Wallace), while others insist that it is not a virtue at all, while disagreeing about what value it may have (e.g., Slote, Roberts). How do Confucians carve up the terrain? What attitudes, states, dispositions, and so on do they recognize that might do similar work to conscientiousness and related ideas?

These are big questions that I don’t propose to seriously address in this post, though maybe I’ll go there in subsequent efforts. (I’m new to this whole blog-posting thing. One step at a time.) For today, I want to focus on the infamous “village worthies (xiang yuan 鄉愿)” who are described briefly in Analects 17:13 as “thieves of virtue” and discussed at somewhat more length in Mengzi 7B37. My questions are: what’s wrong with them, and do the two texts view them in precisely the same way?

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Welcome to the Group Blog!

Manyul Im’s Chinese Philosophy Blog has been phased out (though still available for archived reference). Most of the posts and comments from that blog have been imported here to Warp, Weft, and Way. As you can see, much of the appearance of the blog has also been preserved. Click on the Home tab to join the new discussion!

I’m personally very pleased with the group of scholars who have come aboard to contribute their thoughts and to stimulate discussion. Please feel as welcome here to join in the conversation — in the warp and weft of discussion, if you will — as you felt at the old blog.

New SEP Entry on Neo-Taoism (xuanxue)

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Neo-Taoism”, by Alan Chan (at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, formerly of National University of Singapore’s philosophy deparment), just became available on October 1. From He Yan and Wang Bi to Guo Xiang, everything you wanted to know about post-Han Daoism, encyclopedically considered. Here’s a teaser:

Both He Yan and Wang Bi were known for their expertise in the Yijing. Both were deeply interested in the Laozi. The fifth-century work Shishuo xinyu (New Accounts of Tales of the World), which is indispensable to understanding early medieval Chinese literati culture, relates that He Yan was working on or had just completed a commentary to the Laozi, but when he saw Wang Bi’s Laozi commentary, he recognized the superiority of the latter and reworked his own into two essays on the Dao and “Virtue” (de) instead (4.7 and 4.10). Wang Bi’s Laozi and Yijing commentaries occupied a privileged place in the formal xuanxue curriculum later, and arguably they remain the most important philosophical treatment of the two classics today. However, it should be noted that both He Yan and Wang Bi wrote on the Confucian Lunyu as well. Through their extant writings, we gain a good view of the central concerns of Neo-Daoist philosophy. Continue reading →