Philosophy East & West (73.2) just published a book symposium on my book, Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China (OUP 2021). It features contributions by six critics, including Loy Hui-chieh (on Introduction, Conclusion, and the Mohists), Hagop Sarkissian (on Confucius), Sungmoon Kim (on Mencius and Xunzi), Yuan Ai (on Laozi), Paul J. D’Ambrosio (on Zhuangzi), and Yuri Pines (on fajia/Legalists), with my response. The symposium covers a broad set of topics, ranging from the relevance of history and culture to philosophy, historical vs. philosophical reasonings, virtue politics, alternative interpretative paradigms, contestations of key terms and passages, contemporary global relevance of moral norms in classical Chinese texts, other early texts that could have been included in the book, among many others.
Author Archives: Tao Jiang
Sungmoon Kim at Neo-Confucian Studies Seminar on Friday, April 7
The next session of the Columbia University Seminar on Neo-Confucian Studies will convene on Friday 4/7 from 3:30-5:30 pm in the Heyman Center on Campus. Our speaker will be Professor Sungmoon Kim of the City University of Hong Kong. Professor Kim will present his draft “Political Meritocracy for Responsibility.” The Heyman Center is also a dormitory. The guards at its entrance will have a list of all our attendees and will let you in based on that list. To be on the list, please RSVP to Nolan Benson at neb2134@columbia.edu by the end of March.
Dinner will be at Szechuan Garden 川里川外 at 6 pm, south of the Columbia campus on 105th street. When you RSVP, please let Nolan know if you are coming to dinner as well.
Zoom talk by Haun Saussy on Thursday, March 30, 5-6:30pm ET
The Chinese Studies Program at Fordham University is hosting on online Winter Colloquium Series featuring prominent scholars in the field. Our second guest is Haun Saussy, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, who will give a talk on his newly published book, The Making of Barbarians: Chinese Literature and Multilingual Asia (Princeton University Press 2022), on Thursday, March 30, 5-6:30pm EDT, via Zoom. Please register with this link:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfumGUclSscNm7aulV52wZJC78e0TP58WFXepqe3dgjFynNTg/viewform.
Registered guests will receive the Zoom link before the event.
Aeon article on the Zhuangzi
Aeon just published my article on the Zhuangzi, “Beyond dust and grime.” Here is the link:
https://aeon.co/essays/zhuangzis-ancient-fable-about-the-personal-and-the-political
It is a rewrite of the Zhuangzi chapter in my Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China (OUP 2021).
New Book: Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China: Contestation of Humaneness, Justice, and Personal Freedom
My new book, Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China: Contestation of Humaneness, Justice, and Personal Freedom, has just been published by Oxford University Press (OUP 2021). It is available in both paperback and hardcover. Use the code AAFLYG6 to get a 30% discount off on the publisher’s website (OUP website). Amazon link is here. A detailed Table of Contents (including a tentative Chinese translation of ToC) can be found here.
From the publisher’s website:
This book rewrites the story of classical Chinese philosophy, which has always been considered the single most creative and vibrant chapter in the history of Chinese philosophy. Works attributed to Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Han Feizi and many others represent the very origins of moral and political thinking in China. As testimony to their enduring stature, in recent decades many Chinese intellectuals, and even leading politicians, have turned to those classics, especially Confucian texts, for alternative or complementary sources of moral authority and political legitimacy. Therefore, philosophical inquiries into core normative values embedded in those classical texts are crucial to the ongoing scholarly discussion about China as China turns more culturally inward. It can also contribute to the spirited contemporary debate about the nature of philosophical reasoning, especially in the non-Western traditions.
This book offers a new narrative and interpretative framework about the origins of moral-political philosophy that tracks how the three normative values, humaneness, justice, and personal freedom, were formulated, reformulated, and contested by early Chinese philosophers in their effort to negotiate the relationship among three distinct domains, the personal, the familial, and the political. Such efforts took place as those thinkers were reimagining a new moral-political order, debating its guiding norms, and exploring possible sources within the context of an evolving understanding of Heaven and its relationship with the humans. Tao Jiang argues that the competing visions in that debate can be characterized as a contestation between partialist humaneness and impartialist justice as the guiding norm for the newly imagined moral-political order, with the Confucians, the Mohists, the Laoists, and the so-called fajia thinkers being the major participants, constituting the mainstream philosophical project during this period. Thinkers lined up differently along the justice-humaneness spectrum with earlier ones maintaining some continuity between the two normative values (or at least trying to accommodate both to some extent) while later ones leaning more toward their exclusivity in the political/public domain. Zhuangzi and the Zhuangists were the outliers of the mainstream moral-political debate who rejected the very parameter of humaneness versus justice in that discourse. They were a lone voice advocating personal freedom, but the Zhuangist expressions of freedom were self-restricted to the margins of the political world and the interiority of one’s heartmind. Such a take can shed new light on how the Zhuangist approach to personal freedom would profoundly impact the development of this idea in pre-modern Chinese political and intellectual history.
