Author Archives: Dan Robins

CFP: Education and the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement

This is a call for submissions to a special issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory, which will be edited by Liz Jackson and Timothy O’Leary of the University of Hong Kong.

The Umbrella Movement, a student-led series of protests, occupations and collaborations across different social groups, has permanently altered the social and political landscape of Hong Kong. In marked contrast to the depoliticized, capitalist orientation that predominated in the public sphere in the past, the Umbrella Movement is marked by youth performance of alternative values of collaboration, accountability, and communitarian care. Participants in the Umbrella Movement, both students and educators, are finding new ways to nurture experiential learning in student-authored contexts, in contrast with the teacher- and test-centered education historically customary in Hong Kong. Resistance to the conservative political values of Hong Kong, that preclude local youth democratic participation in revising and reshaping the society, lies at the heart of this movement.

This Special Issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory examines the Umbrella Movement as not only a political movement, but also an alternative form of education that is framed by student resistance and the desire by young people to reclaim their cultural, social, and political world.

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CFP: Singapore-Hong Kong Symposium on Chinese Philosophy

Inaugural Conference

13–14 March 2015

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

The Singapore-Hong Kong Symposium on Chinese Philosophy is being organized as a way to foster dialogue and interaction between scholars and students based in Singapore and Hong Kong. Submissions are invited for papers on any aspect of Chinese thought, as well as papers dealing with comparative issues that engage Chinese perspectives. Speakers will be selected through a review of abstracts. While preference will be given to scholars and advanced graduate students based in Singapore and Hong Kong, participants from any geographic area are welcome. Accommodations on campus will be provided for a limited number of speakers coming from abroad.

Please submit 1-2 page abstracts for review to SHKConf@ntu.edu.sg by November 30, 2014.

For inquiries about the conference, please contact Franklin Perkins.

Loy on inclusive care and partial virtue

As Steve and Manyul announced last month, with each new issue of Dao the blog will host a discussion of one of the issue’s articles, and the journal will make that article freely available online. Here I’m kicking off the series with a discussion of Loy Hui-chieh’s “On the Argument for Jian’ai” (Dao 12.4, available here).

Loy’s article treats the Mohists’ main argument for inclusive care (jiān ài 兼愛), focusing on the role played in it by appeals to virtues such as filial piety that are inevitably partial. Fundamental to his treatment is the view (which I share) that inclusive care did not require absolute impartiality—it did not imply that we have equal obligations to all people, or that we should treat them the same, or feel the same about them. Loy thus undermines one common sort or argument against the Mohists, that inclusive care is incompatible with the partial virtues and is therefore morally dubious. However, this does not mean that the Mohists’ own appeals to the partial virtues succeed, and Loy goes on to argue that they do not. I’ll sketch Loy’s argument, and then make critical comments on two points.

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Xunzi and the Mohists on Natural Disasters

In a famous passage, Xúnzǐ argues that natural disasters lead to catastrophe only because of human failings: with the proper preparation, floods and droughts still occur, but do not devastate. I’m probably not the only friend of this blog who found special poignancy in this argument while lecturing on it in the aftermath of Katrina.

The news today has been good. Irene seems to have weakened unexpectedly. (I hope this hasn’t changed since last I saw good information.) Here in Philadelphia, it looks like we’ll get a category one hurricane, the equivalent (in Hong Kong terms) of a typhoon signal ten. I think there was just one of those in the ten years I lived in Hong Kong; we didn’t even lose internet. I’m preparing mostly by baking lots of bread and making lots of hummus. I’m still a bit nervous, because I don’t know what I can expect from local construction, and the American infrastructure is (understandably, to an extent) less robust than Hong Kong’s. And there are lots of people more vulnerable than I am, and lots of people who have been and are going to be hit harder. I’m glad that friends have evacuated the Jersey shore, and am proud of friends who are part of the preparations and will be part of the response.

In any case, it’s got me thinking about Xúnzǐ, and also about the Mohists, who would have interpreted a storm like Irene as a punishment from heaven. Continue reading →

Xunzi on Poverty

Book 9 of the Xunzi includes a passage that seems to argue that in order to prevent desperate poverty (qiong 窮) it is necessary that some people be poor (pin 貧) while others are rich. Sorting out the view Xunzi takes of poverty in this argument is harder than you might expect.

The argument’s central claim is that if people are equal in their power and position and the same in their desires and aversions, this will inevitably lead to conflict, disorder, and poverty. The sages are supposed to have solved this problem by establishing the rituals and the duties, a hierarchical system that ensures that some can lead while others follow.

Why, though, must there be inequality of wealth as well as of power? Continue reading →

The Heart of Deference

Section 2A/6 of the Mencius tells us that the heart of deference (辭讓) is the starting point of ritual. I’ll try to convince you that this is a puzzling claim, and then suggest a solution to the puzzle.

The puzzle is that ritual obviously mobilises motives other than deference, and calls for behaviour that is not simply deferential. Think of the way that grief takes on ritualised shape in funerals: this is not just an extension of deference. So, why did it make sense to the author or authors of Mencius 2A/6 to say that deference is the starting-point of ritual?

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Kings and Thieves

Section 5B/4 of the Mencius is a very interesting text. It’s one of the points at which the Mencius gets defensive about Mencius’s personal virtue. The issue here is Mencius’s willingness to accept gifts from rulers who acquired them by taking from their people. Why accept those gifts, given that you wouldn’t accept gifts from a more everyday sort of bandit?

This passage interests me in part because I’m interested in Mencian defensiveness (on which see also the earlier thread about Shun and his awful family). But that’s not the issue I want to take up here. What I’m wondering about is how (if at all) Mencius’s argument is supposed to work. Continue reading →

A Certain Butcher?

The butcher Ding cuts up an ox with the grace of a ritual performer and in the process shows us how to take care of life—or so suggests Book 3 of the Zhuangzi. A fair number of scholars have taken this to be the text’s intended solution to the worries of Book 2. We may not be able to tell right from wrong in some ultimate sense, but we can achieve a kind of local certainty by taking care of life in the course of skilled activity.

But as with sagely gestures elsewhere in the Zhuangzi, there are reasons to hesitate. Foremost among them is the fact that in Book 2 itself we find comments about three skilled masters that seem to take up essentially the same worries that the butcher’s skilled activity supposedly solves. Continue reading →

Your Xing and What You Do

This post sketches part of the argument in my paper “The Warring States Concept of Xing,” which is just out in Dao 10.1 (Spring 2011). “Xing” is commonly translated as “nature,” though “spontaneous character” would be better.

There’s this idea that (in Warring States terms) it can be your xing 性 to do something even though you have no tendency to actually do it. This idea is badly wrong. And no one would take it seriously if they weren’t misreading the Mencius.

The big problem is that the Mencius seems to say that it is our xing to be good, and that people who study the Mencius are mostly trained to think that that claim somehow stands for or summarises everything else the collection has to say about human nature. And trying to interpret the claim so that it does stand for all that leads to some major interpretive troubles. Continue reading →

Loving Brothers and Handsome Men

Anybody want to talk about ai 愛? It seems like this might be the day for it.

The natural topic (for me, anyway) is the Mohist doctrine of jian ai 兼愛, or inclusive care. But, awkwardly enough, it’s perfectly clear that this doctrine isn’t about love, much less romantic love. So that won’t do.

But what about the statement in the “Lesser Selection 小取” that though Huo does ai her younger brother, who is a handsome man, she does not ai a handsome man. That second ai maybe looks a bit Valentine-y. Does anyone think they know what’s going on? Continue reading →