The excellent ethics blog PEA Soup hosts a public discussion of one article per issue of Ethics, and starting March 30 the discussion will feature Ted Slingerland’s “The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics,” which is now freely available (as part of an arrangement between the blog and Ethics). Double-congratulations to Ted (for the essay in Ethics, and for it being chosen for this discussion)!
UPDATE: the actual url for the discussion is here.
Not exactly on point, but Slingerland’s fondness for cognitive science (and fields often grouped within this interdisciplinary rubric, like neuroscience) and the related tendency to reduce the mind to the brain (or use ‘brain-talk’ as interchangeable with ‘mind-talk’) strike me as eminently contestable in light of work in the philosophy of mind and, after Steven Horst, the philosophy of science as well. I bring up some of the relevant literature in a blog post on metaphor here: http://literarytable.com/2011/03/29/metaphor-an-introduction/
To get a sense of some of the reasons one might want to question Slingerland’s rather indiscriminate and uncritical reliance on the cognitive science literature, please see these two articles by Pardo and Patterson: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1432476 and http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1338763
Apart from this, and speaking as an amateur, I happen to enjoy Slingerland’s readings/interpretations of Chinese worldviews and ethics.