Author Archives: hagop sarkissian

Eric Schwitzgebel – Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy Lecture: “Death and Self in the Incomprehensible Zhuangzi”, THURSDAY Oct.13 @ 5:30pm

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes: ERIC SCHWITZGEBEL (University of California Riverside)
With responses from: CHRISTOPHER GOWANS (Fordham University)

Please join us at Columbia University’s Religion Department on *THURSDAY*, OCTOBER 13th at 5:30PM for his lecture entitled:

“Death and Self in the Incomprehensible Zhuangzi”

ABSTRACT: The ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi defies interpretation. This is an inextricable part of the beauty and power of his work. The text – by which I mean the “Inner Chapters” of the text traditionally attributed to him, the authentic core of the book – is incomprehensible as a whole. It consists of shards, in a distinctive voice. Despite repeating imagery, ideas, style, and tone, these shards cannot be pieced together into a self-consistent philosophy. This lack of self-consistency is a positive feature of Zhuangzi. It is part of what makes him the great and unusual philosopher he is, defying reduction and summary.  In this talk, I will look at Zhuangzi’s inconsistent remarks about death and the self. Continue reading →

Columbia Neo-Confucian Seminar: Hagop Sarkissian “Experimental Philosophy and the Confucian Philosophical Tradition: A Brief History and Comparison.” Friday, September 30 @ 3:30pm

The next session of the Columbia University Seminar on Neo-Confucian Studies (University Seminar #567) will convene Friday, September 30, 2016 from 3:30 to 5:30pm in the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.

Hagop Sarkissian (City University of New York, Baruch College | Graduate Center) will present his paper

“Experimental Philosophy and the Confucian Philosophical Tradition: A Brief History and Comparison.”

ABSTRACT: Continue reading →

Tao Jiang – Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy Lecture: “Between Philosophy and History: The Challenge of Authorship to Classical Chinese Philosophy in the Western Academy”, Sep.23 @ 5:30pm

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes: TAO JIANG (Rutgers University)

With responses from: ESKE MØLLGAARD (University of Rhode Island)

Please join us at Columbia University’s Religion Department on FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23rd at 5:30PM for his lecture entitled:

“Between Philosophy and History: The Challenge of Authorship to Classical Chinese Philosophy in the Western Academy”

 ABSTRACT: The tension between philosophical and historical inquiries has been a perennial problem. Within the modern academy, the disciplines of philosophy and history are protected by their respective institutional norm and practice, without much need for interaction. However, Chinese philosophy, situated between Sinology and philosophy in the western academy, has encountered extraordinary challenges from both Sinologists (most of whom are historians) and (Western) philosophers. At the root of the difficulty facing Chinese philosophy lies its very legitimacy, torn between the historicist orientation of Sinology and the presentist orientation of mainstream contemporary Western philosophy. Such divergent disciplinary norms have put scholars of Chinese philosophy in a difficult position. On the one hand, they have to defend the philosophical nature, or even the philosophical worthiness, of classical Chinese texts in front of contemporary Western philosophers whose interests tend to be more issue-driven and in the philosophical integrity of ideas, rather than the historicity of ideas. At the same time, these scholars of Chinese philosophy, when dealing with Sinologists, need to justify the basic premise of their philosophical approach to the classics due to the historical ambiguity and compositional instability of these texts. Continue reading →

Call for Abstracts: Fifth Northeast Conference on Chinese Thought (NECCT)

We hereby request submissions of abstracts for the Fifth Northeast Conference on Chinese Thought (NECCT), to be held at the University of Bridgeport (Bridgeport, CT) on Saturday and Sunday, November 5-6, 2016.

Interested scholars should send an abstract of no more than one single-spaced page, plus a current CV, to Manyul Im (manyulim@bridgeport.edu) and Hagop Sarkissian (hagop.sarkissian@baruch.cuny.edu) no later than June 30, 2016. All files should either be in Word or .pdf format. Please make the subject line of the email read as follows: NECCT 2016 Submission.

The goals of the conference are twofold:  Continue reading →

Columbia Neo-Confucian Seminar: Brook Ziporyn “Zhu Xi on the Consciousness and Unconsciousness of the Mind of Heaven and Earth” this Friday, April 22 @ 3:30pm

The next session of the Columbia University Seminar on Neo-Confucian Studies (University Seminar #567) will convene Friday, April 22, 2016 from 3:30 to 5:30pm in the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.

Brook Ziporyn (University of Chicago) will present his paper “Zhu Xi on the Consciousness and Unconsciousness of the Mind of Heaven and Earth: Cross-Cultural Considerations of Ontological Theism and Atheism.”

All are welcome to attend. Copies of his paper and other information are available from the organizers: Ari Borrell , Tao Jiang, On-cho Ng, or Deborah Sommer.

Harvey Lederman – Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy Lecture: “Weakness of the Will and Liangzhi in Wang Yangming”, Mar.18 @ 5:30pm

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes: HARVEY LEDERMAN (New York University)
With responses from: STEVE ANGLE (Wesleyan University)

Please join us at Columbia University’s Religion Department on FRIDAY, MARCH 18th at 5:30PM for his lecture entitled:

“Weakness of the Will and Liangzhi in Wang Yangming”

This paper starts from Wang Shouren’s (王守仁, Yangming 陽明 1472-1529) doctrines concerning weakness of the will, with the aim of developing an interpretation of his theory of “intuition” (l ́ıangzh ̄ı 良知). Wang famously insisted on the “unity of knowledge and action” (知行合一). “Action” is understood in this claim as the subject’s affect; to act appropriately is to have the ethically appropriate affective response. In claiming that knowledge and action are one Wang claims that one form of weakness of the will is impossible: if one knows piety (for example), one is guaranteed to have a pious affective response, that is, to act piously. Wang held that humans have an innate capacity to respond to stimuli with ethically appropriate affect, and that the explanation of this capacity somehow involves the faculty of “intuition” (良知), the faculty by which one obtains moral knowledge. But how does intuition yield moral knowledge? And how does this knowledge guarantee that one will have the affect appropriate to the circumstances? Continue reading →

Joshua Mason – Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy Lecture: “Cognitive Linguistics and Cultural Gulfs: From Embodied Metaphors to Responsible Generalizations”, Feb. 26 @5:30pm

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes: JOSHUA MASON (West Chester University of Pennsylvania)
With responses from: DEREK SKILLINGS (CUNY Graduate Center)

Please join us at Columbia University’s Religion Department on FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 26th at 5:30PM for his lecture entitled:

“Cognitive Linguistics and Cultural Gulfs: From Embodied Metaphors to Responsible Generalizations”

ABSTRACT: An ongoing debate in comparative research is about whether we should see cultural diversities as manifestations of essential differences or as superficial variations on a universal blueprint. Edward Slingerland has pointed to cognitive linguistics and the use of embodied metaphors to emphasize the universality of concept formation and cognition across cultures. He suggests that this should quiet the “cultural essentialists” who take fundamental differences in eastern and western thinking as their starting points. Michael Puett has also leveled a critique of cultural essentialism in support of a presuppositionless approach, and Slingerland’s conclusions seem to offer him support. However, I will argue that even if all modern humans are broadly similar in metaphor use and cognitive processes, research in the humanities must continue to account for the differences implied by the particular metaphors employed and emphasized in diverse traditions. I contend that responsible hermeneutic practice does this through provisional, yet indispensable, generalizations. A starting point which recognizes the existence of cultural gulfs will facilitate, not vitiate, future advances in cross-cultural understanding. Continue reading →

Experimental Philosophy Through History – February 20, 2016 at NYU – Full Schedule

This coming Saturday, February 20th, NYU will be hosting a workshop titled Experimental Philosophy Through History  at 5 Washington Place, Room 101, from 10:00 AM to 6:15 PM. The workshop will be on questions at the intersection of experimental philosophy and the history of philosophy.

The recent movement of experimental philosophy has raised a variety of important questions, but many of those questions have actually been discussed in various earlier periods in the history of philosophy. So we are bringing in twelve scholars, representing different periods in the history of philosophy, to discuss questions about how the sorts of issues raised by contemporary experimental philosophy were understood by philosophers in those early periods.

A previous announcement was posted here. I include the full schedule below:

Continue reading →

Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy – Spring 2016 Speakers

We are excited to share with you our upcoming lineup of speakers:

February 26: Joshua Mason (West Chester University)

March 18: Harvey Lederman (NYU)

April 8: Shigenori Nagatomo (Temple University)

April 29: Sara McClintock (Emory University)

We will provide more information regarding the topic of each speaker’s presentation as the semester progresses. We hope to see you all at what promises to be a semester of discussion and engagement.

Inquiries should be directed to one of the following individuals:

Co-Chairs
Professor Jonathan Gold
Associate Professor, Princeton University, Department of Religion
jcgold@princeton.edu

Professor Hagop Sarkissian
Associate Professor, The City University of New York, Baruch College, Department of Philosophy
hagop.sarkissian@baruch.cuny.edu

Rapporteur
Daniel M. del Nido
dmd2167@columbia.edu

Experimental Philosophy Through History – February 2, 2016 at NYU

Many of you know me as a scholar of Chinese philosophy. But I also have research interests that I pursue through the methods of experimental philosophy, which seeks to investigate philosophical questions through the methods of the empirical sciences (in my case, experimental psychology).

I’m co-organizing this workshop with Joshua Knobe and Kevin Tobia (Yale), which will concern (as its name implies) questions at the intersection of history of philosophy and experimental philosophy. It seems that many of the questions that have arisen recently in debates about experimental philosophy have also been discussed in other periods in the history of philosophy, including general issues surrounding armchair and experimental approaches to philosophy. We thought it would be helpful to hold a workshop in which scholars working in the history of philosophy could discuss these issues.

In my presentation, I will be outlining the ways in which this basic dynamic has played out in some periods in the history of Chinese philosophy. Continue reading →