Sungmoon Kim (City University of Hong Kong) will give a hybrid presentation, “Confucian Power as Responsibility,” at Rutgers University New Brunswick on Tuesday, April 29, 4-5:30pm EDT. Everybody is welcome, but registration is required for Zoom streaming. If you plan on coming in person, please drop me a quick note. Click here for the abstract and the link to register for Zoom streaming.
Author Archives: Tao Jiang
On-cho Ng on “Dai Zhen’s Hermeneutics” in Neo-Confucian Studies Seminar at Columbia on May 2
On Friday, May 2, 3:30-5:30pm, On-cho Ng will present a paper, “Dai Zhen’s Hermeneutics” in the Neo-Confucian Studies Seminar at Columbia University. We will meet at our regular location, The Heyman Center for the Humanities (74 Morningside Dr, New York, NY 10027). On-cho Ng is Professor of Asian Studies and Philosophy, and Founding Head of the Asian Studies Department (2012-2021), at the Pennsylvania State University. Primarily a specialist in late imperial Chinese intellectual history, he has published on a wide range of topics, such as Confucian hermeneutics, religiosity, ethics, and historiography. His books include Cheng-Zhu Confucianism in the Early Qing, Mirroring the Past, The Imperative of Understanding, and Theory and Practice of Zen. His dozens of articles have appeared in venues such as the Journal of Chinese Religions, Dao, Philosophy East and West, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Journal of World History, and the Journal of the History of Ideas. He is editor of the Book Series on Chinese intellectual history (National Taiwan University) and associate editor of the Journal of Chinese Philosophy. He has been chair/co-chair of the Neo-Confucian Studies Seminar for two decades.
Important: for non-Columbia guests, please RSVP by emailing Sapphire Qiaochu Tang at qt2154@columbia.edu no later than Wednesday, April 23, to be granted access to the campus. Once the registration email is sent, please expect an email with a QR code to access campus. The email will come from: CU Guest Access <caladminnoreply@columbia.edu. Please make sure to bring a valid ID, and please arrive early. You can also request the pre-circulated paper from Sapphire.
7th Rutgers Workshop on Chinese Philosophy: An International Conference on “Moral Conflict in Early Chinese Philosophy”
The 7th Rutgers Workshop on Chinese Philosophy (RWCP) will take place in person in New Brunswick, NJ, on April 10-11, 2025. This year’s workshop will be a two-day international conference, with the theme “Moral Conflict in Early Chinese Philosophy.” Scholars of early Chinese philosophy from Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America will engage each other and the audience on this important topic. Everybody is welcome. Space is limited and registration is required. Here’s the link for more details: https://rccs.rutgers.edu/component/jevents/icalrepeat.detail/2025/04/10/2446/54/seventh-rutgers-workshop-on-chinese-philosophy?Itemid=147
New book: Confucianism at War: 1931-1945
Routledge has just published a book edited by Shaun O’Dwyer, Confucianism at War: 1931-1945. The book brings together original research by East Asian and European scholars – some of it published for the first time in English – which demonstrates that Confucianism was “a potent and also contested cultural resource for promoting national cohesion, war mobilization, and expansionism in East Asia between the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the end of World War II in 1945.” More information on the book can be found here. Thanks to Dongxian Jiang (Fordham) for the pointer.
PEW publishes a book symposium on Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China
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.
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.
