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

Where are all the Confucians in Hong Kong tonight?

Like many of you, I have often been thinking about the relation between liberal democracy  and the Confucian tradition (or better: the traditions of thought claiming to somehow continue the spiritual legacy of Confucius and Mencius). In these hours, that is “as dusk fell on Hong Kong Tuesday evening” (in the words of CNN), thousands of young people are filling the streets of Hong Kong demanding full democracy and the right to elect their own leader.

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The Limits of Academic Philosophy?

I have lately been reading Frank Perkins’s marvelous book Heaven and Earth are Not Humane: The Problem of Evil in Classical Chinese Philosophy (Indiana, 2014). There’s lots of rich and provocative content in the book worth talking about, but at least for right now I want to focus on a different kind of question that Frank raises right at the beginning, on p. 5. Discussing the question of whether Warring States thought is appropriately labelled “philosophy,” he writes that “in practice, [this] is a question about institutions and the power of inclusion and exclusion… Certain boundaries are accepted in practice by almost all academic philosophers.”

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ISCWP Seeking Commentators for Pacific APA

Yang Xiao writes: The board of ISCWP is glad to announce that we are going to have two panels at APA Pacific Division Meeting in April 2015 in Vancouver, Canada (see below). Here is the link to the information about the meeting:

http://www.apaonline.org/events/event_details.asp?id=322900

We still need two volunteers to chair the two panels, and seven volunteers to be the commentators on the seven papers. Details are below. Please let me know as soon as possible, but no later than October 10th!

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