Category Archives: Chinese philosophy – 中國哲學 – 中国哲学

Roetz responds to Duchesne

Heiner Roetz has asked me to make available his response, entitled “Too much honor,” to a white supremacist critique of his book Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age posted earlier this year on the website of the “Council of European Canadians” by Ricardo Duchesne. As Roetz says, he is attacked as one of the Western academics who lay the “intellectual groundwork” for the “silent invasion“ of the West – above all Canada, Australia and New Zealand – by the Chinese.

Confucianism and Household Servants?

This post expands a question I asked once in the old Discussions section.

It is sometimes said that the (or a) Ruist picture of moral psychology stresses family because Ruists stress the development of moral sensibilities starting with people’s earliest relationships, which are their childhood relationships at home.  So … what about household servants?

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New “Elements” Series on Comparative Political Theory

Leigh Jenco is the series editor for a new series at Cambridge Univeristy Press that adopts their novel “elements” approach. Leigh explains that an “element” is a “work of up to 30,000 words, is peer-reviewed, efficiently published, fully searchable and downloadable online with print-on-demand, and can be enhanced with images, videos, sound files, etc.” She adds that “the format is, in other words, combining the best features of books and journal articles at the same time. I think it is very well-suited to comparative philosophy and political theory, because it gives space to say more about background and context while also allowing the development of a substantive argument.” For more information, see here.

Censorship issue at “Frontiers of Literary Studies in China”

Here are three items related to a censorship issue at Frontiers of Literary Studies in China:

New Analects Translation

Paul van Els of Leiden University writes…

This new translation of the Lunyu, which recently came out, may have escaped the attention of Warp, Weft, and Way blog readers, as it was published by what appears to be an obscure press:

Li, Chris Wen-Chao. 2018. What Confucius Really Said: The Complete Analects in a Skopos-Centric Translation. San Francisco: Maison 174. (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1727464494/)

Purists might frown upon this translation, if only because the real Confucius could not and would not have quoted Katy Perry as saying “You’re hot then you’re cold, You’re yes then you’re no, You’re in then you’re out, You’re up then you’re down” (p. 164). Still, Li’s work is a creative take on the ancient text, and translations such as “Confucius @MasterSays: Guys who talk sweet and smile all the time are scum.” (p. 3) might strike a chord with the Twitter generation.