A major, three-day conference on China’s “Middle Period” (800-1400) just concluded at Harvard. It featured an unusual format, designed to spur more cross-disciplinary conversation than is usual, as well as to handle the large number of papers and participants who were present. I believe there were something approaching 200 folks there, from graduate students to senior scholars. The titles, abstracts, and a range of on-line comments are all available here: http://www.middleperiodchina2014.org.
Category Archives: Academia
New Book – Nothingness in Asian Philosophy
Nothingness in Asian Philosophy – Routledge 2014
by Douglas Berger (editor) & Jeeloo Liu (editor)
From the Description at Amazon:
“A variety of crucial and still most relevant ideas about nothingness or emptiness have gained profound philosophical prominence in the history and development of a number of South and East Asian traditions—including in Buddhism, Daoism, Neo-Confucianism, Hinduism, Korean philosophy, and the Japanese Kyoto School. These traditions share the insight that in order to explain both the great mysteries and mundane facts about our experience, ideas of “nothingness” must play a primary role.”
Nomination Deadline Approaching
The American Philosophical Association deadline for committee nominations is MAY 31, 2014. There are a couple of openings on the Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies committee. If you are an APA member and you would like to nominate someone — yourself or someone other than yourself — for the committee, visit this site: https://nominations.apaonline.org/. Note that you must log into the site using your APA online username and password in order to enter a name and select a committee.
Fulbright Opportunities
The American Fulbright Program is a scholar exchange program that brings scholars and students from overseas to the United States and sends scholars and students from the United States overseas.
There are a large number of programs for the countries of East Asia. If you are an American citizen and are a new university graduate (or will be next year), you are eligible for programs to teach English abroad or to engage in study/research programs. Professors should circulate this information to students.
If you are an American scholar, there are many research and teaching opportunities.
Awards generally cover all expenses (including airfare) and include stipends.
I have attached three introductory documents to this message.
Graduate and undergraduate students
You can find all of the programs here: http://www.iie.org/fulbright.
The announcements for the next round of programs have just come out. Many of the deadlines are August 1.
US-China Security Perceptions Survey
A new survey — which looks at perceptions of one another on the part of various US and Chinese “elite” groups as well as the broader populace — contains some fascinating data. Interesting to look at the views of “scholars” as opposed to other elite groups, though not surprising that we scholars are more likely to see one another as “partners” than as competitors or enemies. The various perspectives on the role(s) of “culture” as also broadly relevant to our concerns here.
Support the Chinese Text Project!
If you work with early Chinese texts, you have probably used the Chinese Text Project (ctext.org), a wonderful on-line resource created by Donald Sturgeon some years ago while he was still a master’s student in Taiwan.
To many of us, within two or three years of its founding, ctext.org had become a more convenient and useful research tool than the online e-text resources created by large institutions such as Academia Sinica. As Donald has continued to expand the site’s functions — such as by adding a dictionary and concordance indexing — its utility has overtaken that of any rival Chinese text database, online or not.
Often, while working on a book chapter or essay, I have multiple browser windows open displaying different pages of content from ctext.org. I’m sure many others in the field use the site the same way.
All that useful content takes up a lot of server resources, however, which someone has to pay for. For years now, that someone has mainly been Donald himself. He’s had a few welcome anonymous donations and a handful of short-term sponsors, but by and large the costs for the site come out of his own pocket. And that’s not counting all the time and programming expertise that he’s put into it.
So a graduate student living on a modest stipend in one of the world’s most expensive cities is paying for a valuable research tool that all of us use.
May I suggest that those of us who can afford it — not graduate students, but professors and other interested readers — consider donating to support the site’s operations? You can do so through Paypal on the site’s support and donation page here. To those of us who visit the site frequently, the Chinese Text Project is worth much more than the cost of a book and probably more than the cost of most of the software on our computers. So why not consider donating an amount equal to the price of a book or a software package to support the continued operation and growth of this invaluable resource?
And if you’re in a position to do so, consider arranging for an institutional subscription to or sponsorship of the site, as described here.
This is a project that deserves our support.
— Chris Fraser
Fulbright Taiwan
Some information for professors (U.S. citizenship) who might be interested.
I met today with the executive director of Fulbright Taiwan and the chair of the Department of Philosophy at National Taiwan University, where I am currently doing a teaching Fulbright. Both of them expressed the sentiment that this is a good association and that the U.S.-Taiwan relationship would be well-served by continuing it. Fulbright depends on the initiative of applicants, however, rather than putting out calls for participation. So they can only accommodate a philosopher if a philosopher applies. A special interest was expressed for political philosophy, especially related to the potential democratization of China. (I’m teaching American Pragmatism and Comparative Moral Psychology–at the graduate level.) They both thought it would be a good idea to get the word out on this blog.
AAUP Questions Yale-Singapore Collaboration
Though this is not explicitly about Chinese or Comparative philosophy, some issues about the clash between Singapore and ideals of Western liberalism arise because of Singapore’s social policies that are authoritarian and, because of that, sometimes coded as Confucian. The AAUP authors below raise questions about the wisdom of collaboration and accommodationism by Yale University with an “authoritarian regime” and argue that what is at stake are “not simply ‘cultural differences’ but whether Yale recognizes universal human rights and the protections for academic staff.”
I’m inclined to say that cultural differences are not so simple and that they might problematize the recognition of “universal human rights.” Not that the existence of cultural differences negates the existence of universal rights, but that they pose an epistemological question about how much confidence, relatively speaking, the West should place in some of the freedoms as being universally owed to people simply in virtue of their humanity. That’s a long, theoretical discussion, in which it helps to specify which purported rights are universal in such a way.
I’m mostly interested here in the practical wisdom of a hardline “all or nothing” approach the AAUP authors seem to be arguing for below. That is, they seem to be arguing that Yale should keep its hands spotlessly clean by staying out of a collaboration altogether if a rather long list of guarantees cannot be met fully at the proposed Yale-NUS campus. (Here is the link to the UNESCO recommendations referenced below.)
