Professor Huang Yong will be spending a few days at UNSW Sydney, Australia, in August, delivering a reading masterclass as well as a talk.

Details as follows:

1. READING MASTERCLASS

NB: Registration Required

Wednesday 12 August 2026

10:00am-4:00pm (Australian Eastern Standard Time; UTC/GMT +10:00)

A close reading and discussion of two texts from A Source Book of Chinese Philosophy (Wing-tsit Chan, Princeton University Press): [*contact the Organiser below for pdf’s]

1. Chapter 8, “The Mystical Way of Chuang Tzu”
2. Chapter 35, “Dynamic Idealism in Wang Yangming”

Lunch Included for on-site participants

Morven Brown Building Room 209

UNSW Sydney

Online on teams: Join the meeting now

Meeting ID: 474 579 090 913 370

Passcode: Xj2qx3SG

For more information
For a copy of the texts or for more information, contact Timothy O’Leary:  t.oleary@unsw.edu.au

Registration link

 

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2. SEMINAR

Thursday 13 August 2026

12:00-1:30pm (Australian Eastern Standard Time; UTC/GMT +10:00)

Sagely Actions: Wang Yangming’s Challenge to the Standard Theory of Agency

Abstract:
Agency is a central topic not only of philosophy of action but also of moral, political, and legal philosophy, as it is closely related to the issue of responsibility. While there are different theories of agency in contemporary philosophy, the one whose foundation was laid by Donald Davidson, deeply influenced by G.E.M. Anscombe, has often been considered to be the standard theory. This theory regards the intention, understood to be the reason for action, which is further explained in terms of belief and desire in a means-end relationship, as the key to our understanding of agency. In this paper, I shall argue that this theory encounters a difficulty in explaining the agency of sagely actions, especially as characterized by the neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming, which are spontaneous. While the historical approach is primarily developed to explain the sagely action, it can also provide an explanation of the agency of skilled activities, more adequate than both the one provided by Hubert Dreyfus and the one by defenders of the standard theory: the skilled person can act spontaneously precisely because they have consciously taken a long and painstaking process of practice to become skilled persons.


Online on Teams: Join the meeting

Meeting ID: 477 891 165 897 560
Passcode: Mp7qQ3We

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