Author Archives: Steve Angle

Winner of 2025 Dao Annual Best Essay Award

Dao has established “The Annual Best Essay Award” since 2007. In addition to a certificate of achievement, the award comes along with a prize of US$1,000. The award winners will be noted in the website of the journal as well as the website of Springer, the publisher of the journal. The award ceremony is held each year at the American Philosophical Association Annual Meeting (Eastern Division) in early January, where a special panel on the theme of the award-winning essay is held. The critical comments and the author’s responses to them presented at the panel, after review and revision, will be published in the last issue of Dao each year.

The selection process consists of two stages. First, a nominating committee of three editorial board members, who have not published in Dao in the given year, is established. This committee is charged with the task of nominating three best essays from all those published in the previous year. These three essays are then sent to the whole editorial board for deliberation. The final winner is decided by a vote by all editorial board members who are not authors of the nominated essays.

The editorial board has just finished its deliberation on the best essay published in 2025, and the result is:

Robert A. Carleo III, “A More Confucian Path to Equality,” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 24 (2025): 227–249.

Robert A. Carleo III’s “A More Confucian Path to Equality” offers an original reinterpretation of Mencian egalitarianism. Challenging influential attempts to ground Confucian equality in modern notions of rights and reciprocal respect, Carleo argues that Mencius instead advocates a form of equality rooted in compassion and nonreciprocal care. Combining close textual scholarship with philosophical creativity, the essay illuminates an alternative path to social and political equality and demonstrates the continuing relevance of Confucian thought to contemporary philosophical debates. It exemplifies the type of comparative philosophy Dao aims to promote.

Victor Mair, 1943-2026

The Associate Editors of Sino-Platonic Papers report “with great sadness that that the great scholar and our wonderful friend Victor Mair passed away peacefully on Sunday, June 28, surrounded by family and friends.” They add that “new issues of Sino-Platonic Papers will continue to be released until the stock of manuscripts that passed Victor’s careful vetting has been exhausted. The journal’s complete catalog will remain online in perpetuity to benefit scholars and the intellectually curious.” I will share a fuller obituary when it becomes available.

Liu Xiaogan, 1947-2026

Obituary: Professor Liu Xiaogan

The Department of Philosophy at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) is deeply saddened by the passing of Professor Liu Xiaogan on 30 June 2026, at the age of 79. Professor Liu was our esteemed emeritus professor and one of the most distinguished scholars of Daoist philosophy of his generation. His death represents a significant loss to the field of Chinese philosophy.

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ToC: Journal of Chinese Studies no. 82

香港中文大學中國文化研究所《中國文化研究所學報》第82期（2026年1月） 已經出版。本期《學報》刊載學術論文四篇，書評六篇。

The latest issue of the Journal of Chinese Studies (no. 82) has just been published by the Institute of Chinese Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. This issue comprises four academic articles and six book reviews.

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E. Bruce Brooks, 1936-2026

With a heavy heart I share the news of E. Bruce Brooks’s passing. Alvin Cohen shared the following short obituary:

Born in Akron, Ohio, June 23, 1936, son of Ernest Arthur and Helen Brooks.  He attended Western Reserve Academy (1954) in Hudson, Ohio, and Oberlin College (1958).  He received his PhD at the University of Washington, Seattle (1968).  Taught at Harvard University and Smith College, then became Research Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, leading the Warring States Project from 1993 until he passed away on May 26, 2026.  He is survived by his wife and co-researcher A. Taeko Brooks, and his son Clement Brooks of Indianapolis.

His main research focused on the Warring States Period of China (fourth and third centuries BCE).  He showed that the texts of that period, traditionally regarded as written by single authors at specific dates, were “school texts” composed by different authors at different dates.  For example, the twenty chapters of the Lunyu 論語, traditionally ascribed entirely to Confucius, have a fundamental contradiction between ren 仁 and li 禮.  This led to his discovery that the chapters were each composed by different hands at different times over the period from 479 to 221 BCE.  See his The Original Analects (1998).  He further applied his analytic methodology to other Warring States texts.  The overall results appeared in his The Emergence of China (2015), which one reviewer said that it is the only book that shows how a society comes into being.

His studies resulted in the Brooks Index of Rhetorical Diction (BIRD), a research methodology that examines “functional words” to assess both the meaning and emotional message of sentences.  He was able to effectively apply the BIRD analysis to other languages and cultures.  Ultimately, he showed that all civilizations evolve from religious sacrificial to secular military power societies.  He passed away while in the midst of his research on the Old Testament for his book King David: From Sacred to Secular.

Bruce was deeply learned and passionate about his craft. His many insights and his personal example of dogged, convention-defying scholarship have influenced many of us over the decades. Our field is the poorer for the loss of Bruce’s singular presence.

New Article: Kim, “Contemporary Confucian Political Theory: Its Origin, Evolution, and Challenges”

Sungmoon Kim’s major review essay, “Contemporary Confucian Political Theory: Its Origin, Evolution, and Challenges,” has been published in Political Theory; see here. The Abstract follows.

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