Author Archives: Tim Connolly

The most cross-cultural APA ever?

The upcoming 2016 APA Pacific will feature sessions on Chinese Philosophy of Language; Contemporary Latin American Philosophy; Jonardon Ganeri’s The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-person Stance; The Moral Significance of Shame and Disgust: Chinese and Western Perspectives; Trends in Brazilian Epistemology; Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism; Comparing Chinese and Korean Philosophies; Contemporary Indigenous Philosophy; Paradox in Contradiction in East Asian Philosophy; Confucianism; Cultural Evolution; and Barry Allen’s Vanishing into Things . . .

. . . and that is just on the main program!

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Confucius referenced in U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage

“The centrality of marriage to the human condition makes it unsurprising that the institution has existed for millennia and across civilizations. Since the dawn of history, marriage has transformed strangers into relatives, binding families and societies together. Confucius taught that marriage lies at the foundation of government. 2 Li Chi: Book of Rites 266 (C. Chai & W. Chai eds., J. Legge transl. 1967). This wisdom was echoed centuries later and half a world away by Cicero, who wrote, “The first bond of society is marriage; next, children; and then the family.” See De Officiis 57 (W. Miller transl. 1913). There are untold references to the beauty of marriage in religious and philosophical texts spanning time, cultures, and faiths, as well as in art and literature in all their forms.” [Read full opinion here.]

Rewriting the story of philosophy

Via Feminist Philosophers, I learned of this paper by Don Howard, entitled “The History That We Are: Philosophy as Discipline and the Multiculturalism Debate.” A couple of excerpts:

The hypothesis that I want to put forward here is that the conception of the “philosophical” underlying this state of affairs does not correspond to a timeless Platonic form, but that it is instead a construction undertaken in a specific cultural context, at a specific historical moment, for some very specific reasons, not all of which have to do with the love of wisdom. The time is the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. The place is northern Europe, chiefly, though not exclusively, Prussia and Hanover.
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