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 March 10-12, 2023, at York University in Toronto. Our keynote speakers will be Chris Fraser, Edward Slingerland, and Mercedes Valmisa.
For consideration please submit a 1-page abstract to Julianne Chung at jnchung@yorku.ca with the subject line: “MCCT 2023 Abstract Submission” by December 31, 2022 for blind review. For more information, visit the conference website here (https://mcct.sitehost.iu.edu/home.php).
Chris Fraser is Richard Charles and Esther Yewpick Lee Chair in Chinese Thought and Culture at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Philosophy of the Mozi (Columbia, 2016), The Essential Mozi(Oxford 2020), Late Classical Chinese Thought (Oxford, forthcoming), and Zhuangzi (Oxford in progress). He has published extensively on early Chinese ethics, politics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind.
Edward Slingerland is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. His research specialties and teaching interests include Warring States (5th-3rd c. B.C.E.) Chinese thought, religious studies, cognitive linguistics, ethics, and the relationship between the humanities and the natural sciences. His publications include several academic monographs and edited volumes, approximately fifty refereed articles in top journals in a wide variety of fields, and two trade books, Trying Not to Try: Modern Science, Ancient China and the Power of Spontaneity (Crown 2014) and Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization (Little Brown 2021). He is also Director of the Database of Religious History (DRH; religiondatabase.org).
Mercedes Valmisa is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Gettysburg College. Her research focuses on social philosophy and is oriented by multi-cultural and interdisciplinary approaches, including Chinese and Buddhist philosophies, Sinology, and Anglo-European and Hispanic traditions. She has written about agency, nonhuman agency, autonomy, social ontology, and pragmatic conceptions of truth, among other topics. Her first book, Adapting: A Chinese Philosophy of Action (Oxford 2021) reconstructs the philosophy of adapting as an open-ended model for effective relational action particularly well-suited to account for the interdependent, embedded, and collective character of human agency. Her current research program explores agency as a relational and collective event distributed across a heterogeneous field of actors, many of which have no intentionality, awareness, and will (i.e., “things” such as objects, landscapes, genes, rules, roles, and institutions). She holds graduate degrees from National Taiwan University and Princeton University.