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

Open Access to Harris on Aristotle and Confucius on Shame

With each published issue of Dao, we choose one article for discussion here on Warp, Weft, and Way, and Dao‘s publisher gives everyone free access to the article for a year. The next article to get this treatment is “Aristotle and Confucius on the Socioeconomics of Shame” by Thorian Harris. The article can be accessed here. Howard Curzer of Texas Tech is going to start off the discussion in a couple weeks with a précis; in the meantime, we encourage you to download and read the article, and then join in the discussion when it begins.

Two Upcoming Chinese Philosophy MOOCs

Those who want to explore Chinese thought in more depth will soon have the opportunity to participate in not one, but two Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCs):

Comments welcome!

New Funding Opportunity for Ph.D. Students

The Institute of International Education, which administers the Fulbright Program,  just announced a new award for Ph.D. students wishing to do research in China, and philosophy is included as one of the disciplines.

The announcement is here: http://www.iie.org/Programs/Confucius-China-Studies-Program

This new program, called the Confucius China Studies Program, is funded by, you guessed it, the Confucius Institute.  This could be a great opportunity for anyone wishing to do Ph.D. research in China.

New book by Jiwei Ci: Moral China in the Age of Reform

A significant new book has been published by Cambridge: philosopher Jiwei Ci‘s Moral China in the Age of Reform. The Amazon link gives on access to some of the book. Here’s what I say on the back cover:

“Jiwei Ci accomplishes two things in his splendid new book. First, he goes beyond the account of his seminal Dalectic of the Chinese Revolution (1994) to explore the causes and effects of the moral crisis that has accompanied China’s three decades of post-Mao reform. Second, he uses this analysis as the foundation for theories of freedom and human agency — theories that are deeply revealing not just of the possibilities and challenges faced by Chinese citizens, but also of the human condition more generally.”

Conference on Reading the Masters

There will be an impressive-looking, interdisciplinary conference next month called “Reading the “Masters”: Contexts, Textual Structures, and Hermeneutic Strategies” held in Brno, Czech Republic. Much more information is available via their website. (I know that Paul already posted about this in the “Reader’s Discussion Topics” area of the blog, but I think that main posts have more visibility (and are included in our Facebook feed), so I am repeating the information here.)

Politics of Revival of Confucianism

An interesting article examining the CCP’s motives for promoting Confucianism has been published: Shufang Wu, “The Revival of Confucianism and the CCP’s Struggle for Cultural Leadership: a content analysis of the People’s Daily, 2000–2009,” Journal of Contemporary China 23:89 (2014), pp. 971-991. Abstract follows, with the key line in bold.

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Review of Chan, Confucian Perfectionism

This is a rich review of Joseph Chan’s important new book; the review is significant, in part, because it represents an engagement by someone from outside the Chinese philosophy world with contemporary Chinese thought. Wall is himself an advocate of perfectionism, which helps to explain why the cross-tradition engagement here is so fruitful.

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2014.08.16 View this Review Online   View Other NDPR Reviews

Joseph Chan, Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times, Princeton University Press, 2014, 256pp., $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780691158617.

Reviewed by Steven Wall, University of Arizona

This is an unusual book. It is partly an effort to reconstruct and revive an ancient tradition of political thought, partly an exercise in comparing that tradition to western liberalism and partly a contribution to contemporary political theory. It does not fit into any well-defined disciplinary niche. Its unusual aims, in turn, present a challenge to the reviewer. Should the success of the project be assessed in terms of its fidelity to a tradition of thought that has shaped Chinese culture for over two millennia, or should it be assessed in terms of its contribution to contemporary political thought? No doubt the right answer to this question is that it should be assessed along both dimensions, but this answer does not tell us how much weight to give to each measure of assessment. My own assessment will not grapple with this problem, since I am in no position to gauge its success in remaining faithful to traditional Confucian ideas. Accordingly, this review does not offer a verdict on how well Confucian Perfectionism succeeds in its aim of staying true to Confucian political thought (leaving that judgment to others who are better placed to make it). It focuses instead on how well the view of politics that it presents hangs together and how well it contributes to an understanding of the political topics that it addresses.

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