Since it was launched in 2011, the MA and Visiting programs in Chinese philosophy (with courses taught in English) at Fudan have been extremely successful. In spite of the pandemic that has seriously affected the enrollment, 124 students have been enrolled in either the M.A. program (102 students) and the visiting student program (22 students). They are from 38 countries, with students from North America and Europe forming the majority of the student body), and many of them are top students in their classes, majoring in philosophy, classics, and/or East Asian or Chinese studies. The above facts make these programs simply the most successful of their kind (English-based post-graduate programs in Chinese philosophy) in mainland China.

The program boasts perhaps the largest community of English-speaking postgraduate students interested in Chinese philosophy in the world, a community our students have enjoyed greatly. The comprehensiveness and specialization of our curriculum in Chinese philosophy are unmatched by other programs. We have also assigned tutors to our students, helping them read classical Chinese texts, in addition to the normal language classes. Because of the number and the quality of our students, our programs are a “favorite” of the university administration. As a result, we have been EXTREMELY successful at securing fellowships for students applying for the MA program. (For the visiting student program, only partial fellowships are available through Fudan, but students can apply through some external channels, like the Chinese Scholarship Council, the EU, Chinese consulates, Confucius Institutes, etc..)

To continue its success, I ask you to help us to distribute the information about the programs and encourage your students to apply. If they are already in a doctoral program and wish to spend a year in China, they are also welcome. You can go to the following website for more detailed information: https://iso.fudan.edu.cn/isoenglish/ce/4c/c16952a642636/page.htm

The Midwest Conference on Chinese Thought was created to foster dialogue and interaction between scholars and students working on Chinese thought across different disciplines and through a variety of approaches. Submissions are invited for papers on any aspect of Chinese thought as well as papers dealing with comparative issues that engage Chinese perspectives.

This year’s conference will be held in-person April 12-13, 2024, at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Two nights of hotel accommodations will be provided for conference participants. Our keynote speaker will be Professor Harvey Lederman.

For consideration, please submit a 1-page abstract to Michael Ing at ming@indiana.edu with the subject line: “MCCT 2024 Abstract Submission” by January 15, 2024 for blind review. For more information, visit the conference website here (will be updated soon).

Professor Harvey Lederman studied Classics and modern and classical Chinese at Princeton as an undergraduate, where he imagined a career studying comparative literature. During a second BA in Classics at Cambridge, he became seriously interested in the history of Greek philosophy and Chinese science, and he began to study philosophy in earnest at Oxford, where he completed a BPhil and DPhil in philosophy. After a postdoctoral fellowship at NYU, and a one year stint at Pittsburgh, he was an assistant professor and then professor at Princeton, and now is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is working on a long term project about Wang Yangming, which he began while still a student at Oxford. In 2022, after eight years of work, the first products of this project appeared in print, in a series of articles about Wang’s “Unity of Knowledge and Action”. One of these was the first paper on Chinese philosophy published in The Philosophical Review, the premiere journal in analytic philosophy, in over seventy years. Other current projects include a series of papers on incomplete preferences and values in decision theory and formal ethics, and one on the semantics of attitude reports. In 2024, Harvey will be a distinguished visitor to the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy (中國文哲所) at the Academia Sinica.