Confucius valued careful and serious speech. One passage in the Analects says that a person can be judged as wise or unwise on the basis of a single sentence. So how is it possible that for many Americans, the first thing they think of when they hear the name of the Chinese teacher is “Confucius say,” followed by a silly one-liner?
Author Archives: Tim Connolly
New SEP article on Epistemology in Chinese Philosophy
By Jana Rošker, found here.
An Institute for Cosmopolitan Philosophy in a Culturally Polycentric World
A blueprint by Jonardon Ganeri, which has sparked some interesting discussion over at the Indian Philosophy blog.
Philosophy’s Western bias and what can be done about it
A post at New APPS by Christian Coseru, with Owen Flanagan, Eric Schwitzgebel, and Jonardon Ganeri weighing in thus far in the comments section.
Waldorf meets guoxue in off-the-grid Chinese schools
Read about it here.
The State of the State
The Global Contest for the Future of Government (new Foreign Affairs article).
From China, With Pragmatism
The latest entry in the New York Times’ Stone column. Discussion welcome!
Making Philosophy of Religion Less Parochial
Every Spring I teach a course on Philosophy of Religion, a subject that, though not my area of expertise, I enjoy teaching because it attracts a passionate and diverse group of students.
Still, it gets to me every time that the religion in Philosophy of Religion is limited to Western monotheistic traditions. Continue reading →
How using a foreign language changes moral decisions
Via Leiter Reports, a new study about how the use of foreign languages affects people’s judgments about trolley problems. May be of interest in light of the thread below regarding culturally variant intuitions.
Culturally Variant Intuitions
A session at the recent APA Pacific on “Multicultural Epistemology” (featuring Jason Stanley and Edouard Machery, among others) has got me thinking about culturally variant intuitions. Recent evidence from experimental philosophy has indicated that respondents in East Asian countries tend to have different reactions than their Western counterparts to cases such as “The Magistrate and the Mob,” or Kripke’s Gödel scenario. A recurring question at the APA session concerned what these differences ought to mean for philosophers working in the given areas. Stanley argued that rather than refuting a prevalent methodology that begins from philosophers’ intuitions about cases, cultural variances simply provide us with a wider data set to be explained. Machery in turn presented his research-in-progress suggesting that cross-cultural intuitions about Gettier cases exhibited far more similarity than previous work by experimental philosophers has suggested. Continue reading →
