The rather surprising question in my title is inspired by three things. Most immediately, I have just returned from the AAS Conference in San Diego, where I participated in a panel on Elite and Popular Confucianism, presenting a paper called “American Confucianism: Between Tradition and Universal Values.” Second, I have heard some talk about the establishment within one or more Chinese universities of explicitly Confucian-themed academic units. Finally, I recently became aware of Soka University, a liberal arts college in Southern California that was founded by the Soka Gakkai Buddhist organization from Japan.
Category Archives: Chinese philosophy – 中國哲學 – 中国哲学
Workshop at Wesleyan on Virtues: Intellectual and Moral
Virtues: Intellectual and Moral — An International Workshop
April 2, 2013, 4:15–6:30pm, Wesleyan University, Russell House (350 High Street, Middletown, CT)
Three philosophers based in Taiwan will present papers exploring different aspects of intellectual and practical virtue, each paper followed by comments from a member of the Wesleyan Philosophy Department, with general discussion at the end. The event is free and open to all. Please contact Lynn Higgs with any questions.
Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy lecture on Confucian ethics March 22 @5:30pm
THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY
Welcomes ANDREW LAMBERT, Department of Philosophy, Wester New England University
With responses from Warren Frisina, Dean of Honors College, Associate Professor of Religion, Hofstra University
Please join us at Columbia University Department of Religion on March 22, 2013 at 5:30pm for his lecture entitled
A Confucian Account of Ethical Obligation?
ABSTRACT: The Confucian doctrine of the five cardinal relationships is often taken as a defining feature of the Confucian tradition, with its emphasis on family life and relationships. However, objections arising from more modern ethical ideals threaten to undermine the doctrine, or at least render it irrelevant to contemporary ethics. I present three such objections.
In seeking to deflect the objections, I suggest a different way of understanding the purpose and effects of the five relationships doctrine. Instead of seeing the doctrine as a constellation of concrete practical norms and duties pertaining to individuals occupying certain social roles and positions, I suggest we understand the five relationships doctrine as a kind of training device, which cultivates a certain kind of personal sensibility. This is a sense of obligation to engage with and find a basis for familiarity with those people encountered in the subject’s local social world.
I argue that when understood in this way, the discourse of the five cardinal relationships is not subject to the three common objections noted above, and presents a distinctive form of ethical obligation.
I finish by locating this account of ethical obligation within a larger moral vision, thereby suggesting this is a genuine form of ethical obligation rather than mere etiquette or psychological conditioning.
Time: 5:30-7:30 pm
Place: Rm. 101 in the Department of Religion 80 Claremont Avenue
http://goo.gl/maps/zfUKH
PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE:
http://www.cbs.columbia.edu/cscp/
Review of Rosemont, Reader’s Companion to the Analects
Guest poster Andrew Komasinski offers us a review of Henry Rosemont Jr., A Reader’s Companion to the Confucian Analects (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Please direct any comments to Andrew.
Henry Rosemont Jr.’s A Reader’s Companion to the Confucian Analects is a novel approach in the English-language world. Building on Rosemont’s forty years of professional knowledge and personal experience with the Analects, this text will be of great use for the right type of reader. Containing no footnotes and not structured as an argument, this is not a scholarly monograph and bypasses many issues primarily of interest to scholars. The text differs from the similarly titled Cambridge Companion series which provides a set of scholarly essays highlighting the contemporary debate or Routledge Philosophy Guidebooks that guide undergraduate students through complex arguments.
Charles Wei-hsun Fu Foundation Essay Contest
Charles Wei-hsun Fu Foundation: ISCP Essay Contest in Asian Philosophy
The Charles Wei-hsun Fu Foundation and the International Society for Chinese Philosophy are pleased to announce the 2013 ISCP Essay Contest in Asian Philosophy.
AAS in San Diego Next Week
There’s not a ton of philosophy on the AAS program for next week — there never is — but for the first time in years, I’m going to be there and would enjoy meeting any Warp, Weft, and Way readers who are also attending. Here are a couple interesting panels, as seen from my perspective (listed in chronological order):
New Book: Yong Huang, Confucius
It has just come to my attention that Yong HUANG’s book Confucius: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury 2013) has recently been published [publisher’s site] [Amazon link]. I have only had a chance to take a quick look at it, but it looks to be philosophically sophisticated and yet engaging and accessible. Rather than a systematic overview of Confucius’s teachings, Huang tackles a series of questions that arise “in our everyday life or moral reflection,” and argues that Confucius’s answers are the best — or at least, better than available alternative answers in the Western tradition. Enjoy!
Zhao Tingyang Lecture at Harvard this Wednesday
How to Make a World of Perpetual Peace
Prof. Zhao Tingyang (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; HYI Visiting Professor of East Asian Thought)
Discussant: Professor Stephen Angle (Philosophy and East Asian Studies, Wesleyan University)
Date: Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Time: 4:15 pm
Location: Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA
The new problem of our times is that of a failed world rather than failed states. Globalization has brought us to the unpleasant fact that our supposed world is actually a non-world. Rather than dealing with the problems of globality by means of modernity, we must make a world, one of perpetual peace, with an ‘all-under-heaven’ system that reaches beyond the nation state system, with relational rationality emphasized more than individual rationality.
Chinese and Comparative Philosophy in Singapore: Events in 2013
2013 is turning out to be a busy time for Chinese and Comparative Philosophy in Singapore. Apart from those of us who are part of the local scene (for instance, Sor Hoon Tan and myself at the National University of Singapore, Alan Chan and Chenyang Li at the Nanyang Technological University), we also have Franklin Perkins visiting NTU (for the academic year 2012/13), and Roger Ames at NUS (for 2013 Spring).
New Book on the Analects / Review Opportunity
Palgrave Macmillan has recently published A Reader’s Companion to the Confucian Analects by Henry Rosemont Jr. Further details can be found here.
Macmillan is interested in offering a free electronic version of this title to a scholar interested in posting a review of the book here on Warp, Weft, and Way. If you would like to pursue this, please contact Katie Gordon (Palgrave Macmillan Marketing Executive; katie.gordon@palgrave.com) and also let one of the blog administrators know. (If you’re not an official contributor, we can arrange to post the review as a guest post.)
