Guo Qiyong, Dean of School of Chinese Classics at Wuhan University and eminent authority on Chinese philosophy, recently published a scathing critique of the Chinese education system titled “The Humanistic Spirit of Universities is Being Lost with Each Passing Day.” Guo identifies three trends that harm humanities education:
Category Archives: China
An Interview with Bin Song
Attached is part 1 of a transcribed interview with Bin Song from the Blog of the APA, discussing his origins in China’s complex cultural history, his move to France to study philosophy, and some preliminaries about Ruism (sometimes called “Confucianism”). https://blog.apaonline.org/2021/02/19/on-flight/
CFP: AAR Confucian Traditions Unit for 2021 Annual Meeting
The Confucian Traditions Unit of the American Academy of Religion is inviting proposals for the 2021 Annual Meeting to be held, we hope, in San Antonio, Texas, November 20-23. The deadline for submissions is 5pm EST on Monday, March 1.
(Details below)
Upcoming talk at Rutgers Center for Chinese Studies
The Rutgers Center for Chinese Studies is hosting another on-line lecture this week:
Title: A Philosophical Defense of Culture: Perspectives from Confucianism and Cassirer
Speaker: Shuchen Xiang, Peking University
Venue: Zoom (registration required)
Time: Thursday, Jan. 28, 7-8:30pm EST
The talk is based on Xiang’s forthcoming book with the same title from SUNY Press. Visit their website (rccs.rutgers.edu) to get more info and to register. The talk is open to public, but registration is required.
Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Schwarzman College
Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University
Schwarzman Scholars Teaching Fellows work as part of the Academics team and play a vital role in helping the Schwarzman Scholars program in fulfilling its mission by ensuring academic success of courses and students. Teaching Fellows will fulfill the following three main academic roles: teaching support, academic support, and student advising.
Closing date: 1/31/2021
Call for Papers for Midwest Conference on Chinese Thought (Virtual)
16th Annual Midwest Conference on Chinese Thought
Wright State University
30 April-1 May 2021
The Midwest Conference on Chinese Thought was created to foster dialogue and interaction between scholars and students working on Chinese thought across different disciplines and through a variety of approaches. Submissions are invited for papers on any aspect of Chinese thought as well as papers dealing with comparative issues that engage Chinese perspectives.
This year’s conference will be held virtually on Friday, April 30 and Saturday, May 1 and hosted by Wright State University. Our keynote speaker will be Robin R. Wang, Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University.
Professor Wang will present “Dao of Rou 柔 (Suppleness): Proprioceptive Knowledge and Its Epistemological Value in Early Daoism”:
Through Chinese intellectual history, early Daoism, a Dao-based and inspired teaching and practice, has been considered the philosophy of rou 柔 (suppleness, pliant, yielding, softness), which the Daodejing couples with water, the infant, and the feminine. A popular Chinese binary expression of culture, gen 根 (root/foundation) and hun 魂 (soul/spirit), takes Dao as the root of Daoist teaching and rou as a spirit of Lao-Zhuang. However, rou has often been understood only as de (德) moral virtue or shu (术) strategy, something more practical than conceptual. This talk will respond to this theoretical gap and argue for rou as a form of proprioceptive awareness or bodily knowledge that shapes a cognitive style and an epistemological stance to guide our rational effort, illumination, and well-being. More importantly, this rou style of knowing embodies the epistemic value, such as intellectual humility, openness, receptivity and resilience, for a cognitive success.
Similar to previous conferences, we anticipate selecting 12-16 papers for presentation. For consideration submit a 1-page abstract to Judson Murray at judson.murray@wright.edu by January 31, 2021 for blind review. For more information, visit the conference website here.
Postdoc at Zhejiang University
A Two-year Postdoctoral Program in Zhejiang University (Fall 2021, Hangzhou, China)
The Department of Philosophy in Zhejiang University, in collaboration with the English Department of Zhejiang University City College, is looking for a young postdoctoral research scholar (below 35) who is specialized in the study of Christianity in China in the early modern period, comparative religion, and/or Chinese religion(s). The scholar should have a good command of Chinese, English and some command of other Asian or European languages, such as Japanese, French etc. Highly motivated to do research, the scholar should collaborate with other scholars and hold a good publication record in top-tier journals. Excellent interpersonal, oral and written communication skills are also expected. The annual stipend is approximately $45,000 (270,000-290,000RMB), with accommodation and other employment benefits provided. For further details, please contact Dr. Amy Yu Fu at fuy@zucc.edu.cn (subject: post-doc)
Year-end Review from Berggruen China Center
Sent by the The Berggruen Research Center, Peking University:
The year has been challenging but not without inspiration. The Center’s first book, Intelligence and Wisdom: AI Meets Chinese Philosophers, was published by CITIC Press Group in February and has sold over 6300 copies. In March, while promoting the book, we moved all the Center‘s activities online. We hosted two workshops on “AI Narratives in China”, a collaboration with Cambridge University‘s Leverhulme Center, which explores the effects of local culture and historical narratives on the reception of AI in China. We also held three closed-door workshops for our “Facial Recognition and Privacy” program, which focuses on how facial recognition policies can best reflect cultural values and social practices. The Berggruen Seminar series was relaunched online in July, and we have since hosted four events: “Confucian Common Sense Meets the AI Revolution”, “What Should Care Robots Care About?”, “Digital Personality”, and “AI, Emotion, and Ethics”.
We also launched a new online public program, the Global Thinkers series, which featured Jared Diamond at its inaugural event on risk management in coping with the global pandemic.
In October, the Center launched a new online product, Ruin, which brings together translated articles from Berggruen Institute’s journal Noema and other original contributions sourced locally. We hope that Ruin becomes a public square for creative thinkers where innovative ideas are recognized, debated, enriched, and propagated. We also launched an account on video platform Bilibili, attracting more than 40,000 views over three live streamed events.
The Center welcomed a new cohort of Fellows this year: Bai Shunong, Professor of Biology at Peking University; Duan Weiwen, Professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; Hao Jingfang, science fiction author and researcher; and Lu Qiaoying and Sabastian Sunday Grève, Assistant Professors at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Peking University.
Article of Interest: Batsch, “The Rationality Wars”
Readers may be interested in: Shadi Bartsch, “The Rationality Wars: The Ancient Greeks and the Counter-Enlightenment in Contemporary China,” History & Theory 59:4 (2020). Here’s the abstract:
Amid contemporary discussions about the relationship of logic to knowing, an entirely different conversation about the moral status of rationality is taking place between Chinese and Western thinkers. Although most would agree that deductive thought has been a highly privileged feature of the Western philosophical tradition since Plato (for good or bad), the question of its role in Confucian thought is less clear—and considerations of this topic tend to be highly charged. In turn, the question of whether the West has been tarred by a Weberian descent into a merely instrumental form of rationality has emerged as a hot topic in Chinese scholarship. However, the question merely supplies a way of engaging in cross‐cultural comparisons that are political rather than genuinely philosophical in nature. This article explores the sparring over terminology and concepts that characterizes this recent trend in scholarship. Ultimately, it suggests that instead of Chinese scholars appropriating the ideas of Western authors in order to raise anti‐Western specters of spiritual derangement, both traditions would be better off discarding this outdated and essentializing terminology in the first place.
CEACOP Workshop: Modern Confucianism between Philosophy and Sociology
The Center for East Asian and Comparative Philosophy (CEACOP) at the City University of Hong Kong is organising a workshop on 10 Dec in which Prof. Ralph Weber and his team will present their projects on 20th century Confucianism. Please find the event poster here with information about how to register. All are welcome!
