Dear colleagues,

hereby I would like to notify you of a workshop on “Mou Zongsan and Contemporary Philosophy” taking place this tuesday (June 16) at National Chengchi University in Taipei. The aim of this workshop is to re-think the legacy of one of the most important thinkers in the Chinese-speaking world in the 20th century, Mou Zongsan (1909-1995). In our global present, it is more urgent than ever to critically assess non-Western intellectual traditions and to understand better whether (and if so, how) these traditions can be defended philosophically effectively without falling into the traps of mere apologetics or cultural nationalism. The speakers will focus on central philosophical issues in Mou’s thinking, f.ex. “intellectual intuition”, “self-consciousness”, and “experience” and their potential relevance for contemporary philosophy.

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Here is a sharp analysis of the recent crisis in China which, I guess, will interest many of you. The author writes: “If anything, Wuhan bankrupted the meritocracy myth for many people who once believed that the country was largely run by no-nonsense, result-oriented technocrats.” One starts wondering when exactly those scholars who have been praising China’s so called “meritocracy” as superior to (Western) liberal democracies will start taking (social and political) reality into account. Does it make sense to say that this still is merely a bad reality contradicting a normative ideal?!

Dear colleagues,

The following announcement might be of interest to some readers of “Warp, Weft, and Way”. We encourage younger scholars in fields like sinology, religious studies, cultural studies and philosophy to apply. The conference will be an excellent opportunity to meet distinguished scholars from Taiwan, Hongkong and other Sinophone societies and to interact with young scholars from around the globe.

Kai

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Dear colleagues:

Hereby I’d like to draw your attention to the following announcement by the Research Center for Chinese Cultural Subjectivity, National Chengchi University, Taipei (Taiwan). If you have any further question, you can write to cca@nccu.edu.tw (or just send me a message: I am one of the four co-directors of this center). Please also note the tight dead-line.

On May 7 and 9, the philosophy department of NCCU in Taipei organizes a workshop on the German philosopher Ernst Tugendhat’s book “Egocentricity and Mysticism” (Columbia UP, 2016). One of its translators, Mario Wenning, will discuss with us the philosophical relevance of Tugendhat’s ideas, esp. his interpretation of Daoist and Buddhist teachings. If you happen to be in Taipei and are interested in the topic, please feel free to join our discussion. For all other details see the abstract in Chinese (below).

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I often have trouble understanding the ease with which some Western observers/scholars living outside of Chinese-speaking societies try to merge modern feminist ideas with traditional Chinese culture, especially Confucian discourses. From a more embedded perspective, these attempts often look oversimplifying, or simply unconvincing. Again and again, social reality in China follows its own laws, not those imagined by observers outside of China.

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This saturday (October 28, 9-12 a.m.), a couple of colleagues (among others, Leigh Jenco, Sébastien Billioud, 林遠澤, and Fabian Heubel) will meet for a workshop at National Chengchi University (Taipei) on the possibility, and the theoretical implications, of cross-cultural learning. If you happen to be around and want to join our discussion, you are welcome to do so! Just send me an e-mail.

Daniel A. Bell speaks on the priority of harmony over freedom in a recent interview. Today, his interview appears just beneath CCTV’s extensive media coverage for Xi Jinping’s speech on the 19th Party Congress (see lower half of this page; in case you can’t find it there anymore, just use this link). Fama crescit eundo.

This is to announce that the volume Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss in the Chinese-Speaking World: Reorienting the Political, edited by Carl K. Y. Shaw （蕭高彥）and me, has just been published by Lexington and is now available on the internet and elsewhere. Here is the link to the publisher’s website, here on Amazon. And here is the description on our cover:

“Reorienting the Political examines the reception of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss in the Chinese-speaking world. The legacies of both Schmitt, the German legal theorist and thinker who joined the Nazi party, and Strauss, the German-Jewish classicist and political philosopher who became famous after his emigration to the United States, are highly controversial. Since the 1990s, however, these thinkers have had a powerful resonance for Chinese scholars.

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