For the spring semester of 2013, the Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy presents the following schedule:
February 8 – Jonathan Gold (Princeton)
March 1 – Sandeep Sreekumar (Baruch College, CUNY)
March 22 – Andrew Lambert (Western New England University)
April 12 – Manyul Im (Fairfield University)
April 26 – Joerg Tuske (Salisbury University)
All meetings held at the Columbia University Department of Religion
5:45-7:45 pm
Rm. 101 in the Department of Religion, 80 Claremont Avenue
Second Call for Papers
International Conference on the Philosophy of Criminal Punishment
June 18-20, 2013
Department of Philosophy, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Keynote speakers:
Erin Kelly, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, Tufts University; author of “Criminal Justice without Retribution,” The Journal of Philosophy (2009).
T. M. Scanlon, Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity, Harvard University; author of What We Owe to Each Other, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.
Tommie Shelby, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy, Harvard University; author of “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto,” Philosophy and Public Affairs (2007).
We are pleased to announce the second meeting of the interdisciplinary Workshop on Manuscript and Text Culture (WMTC) at Queen’s, University of Oxford. The paper of the workshop will be given by Martin Kern (Princeton), Astor Visiting Fellow and Fellow Commoner of Queen’s, on Wednesday 30 January at 6 pm in The Queen’s College. The title of the talk is:
‘The “Jinteng” Chapter of the Shangshu and its Newly Discovered Manuscript Version from ca. 300 BCE: Comparison and Methodological Considerations’.
If you are interested in attending, please email: wmtc@queens.ox.ac.uk.
Further information about the workshop can be found here: <http://wmtc.queens.ox.ac.uk/> (The site is still under construction, so please don’t mind its current appearance..)
John Baines (Egyptology)
Charles Crowther (Ancient History/Epigraphy)
Dirk Meyer (Chinese)
Bou Mou, Editor of Comparative Philosophy, writes to report that the new special issue (volume 4, no.1 / January 2013) of Comparative Philosophy, celebrating the the tenth anniversary of the ISCWP, has been published at the journal website http://www.comparativephilosophy.org.
This special issue consists of five peer-reviewed articles by ISCWP members from different geographic areas in the world, Steve Angle (USA), Chung-I Lin (Taiwan/ROC), Stephen Palmquist (Hong Kong), Henrique Schneider (Austria) and Dean Walsh (USA), together with the “Introduction” by ISCWP President Sor-hoon Tan (Singapore).
This is related to Steve’s post about the recent APA panel on embodied cognition. But since my question strays a bit away from that, I thought I’d start a new thread.
First, thanks, Steve, for the great information, especially for the link to the participants of the summer institute! (And, Steve, do have an equivalent participants list from your Virtue Ethics summer institute?)
If anyone can help, I’m interested in knowing more about Western specialists who are dipping into non-Western philosophy, especially Chinese philosophy.
I know of Owen Flanagan and Michael Slote, of course. I also know that Karyn Lai and Stephen Hetherington are working together. Previously, there have been Hall & Ames (in Chinese and political philosophy) and Lloyd & Sivin (on the edge of philosophy). David Wong and Joel Kupperman each made names for themselves first on the Western side but have found inspiration from the Eastern side (as well have having done significant work on the Eastern side in the case of Wong).
What other kinds of openness to East-West cooperation is happening from the Western side?
Further, this blog has discussed the dearth of Ph.D. programs in Chinese philosophy, but what about other avenues for training/cooperation? The NEH summer institutes mentioned above are great examples. Are there others–for folks with a Ph.D. in a Western specialty but who want to know more about Asian philosophy? I know that for instruction, the Asian Studies Development Program has been holding summer institutes for college and university faculty who want to infuse Asian content into the undergraduate curriculum generally. There is also the Nishan Confucian Studies Summer Institute for teachers. What else is going on? Who is cooperating with whom? Which Western specialists are dipping into Asian philosophy? What avenues do they have for cooperation or training? Which Asian specialists are successfully reaching out to their Western colleagues?
Any information would be appreciated.
One key to successful comparative philosophical research is locating an area in where there is sufficient overlap between different traditions’ approaches that each can see the other as generating relevant challenges or questions, stimulating new ways of framing issues, and so on. I would argue that the “virtue ethics” paradigm has been successful in just this way, bringing together an increasing number of Anglophone and Sinophone philosophers and philosophical projects in fruitful fashion, as judged by the interesting, explicitly work that is being generated by Anglophone scholars (including those with little prior background in Chinese and Chinese philosophy) and some Sinophone thinkers (including those with little prior background in Western philosophy).
Another possible area of overlap and mutual stimulus — though it remains to be seen whether it will generate a similar level of fruitfulness — is virtue epistemology; Michael Chien-kuo Mi and colleagues at Soochow University in Taiwan have been collaborating with Ernie Sosa of Rutgers University and some other Western-trained philosophers in this endeavor.
What I mainly wanted to call attention to here, though, is a third area. The recent APA conference featured a panel (sponsored by the APA Committee on the Status of Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies) on “Asian/Comparative Views of the Embodied and Enactive Mind.” Drawing on Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, as well as on various streams of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and phenomenology, the panelists (Bongrae Seok, Matthew MacKenzie, and Bradley Park) made it eminently clear that there is a major area of overlap and many opportunities for mutual stimulus and learning. I was also struck by the fact that a successful NEH Summer Institute was held last summer on this topic; looking at the range of participants and faculty, it is again clear that there is a lot of room for exciting growth in this area of comparative philosophy.
UPDATE: We were able to recover the two posts from yesterday. Any comments, including comments on the Question Board, will need to be reposted manually, though. Sorry about this!
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Sorry, folks, all of the blog activity from yesterday (Jan. 2), including two blog posts and their comments, seem to have disappeared mysteriously. This is under investigation.
Long-time friend of the blog, Scott Barnwell, has posted his fourth installment exploring the question of whether there really is such a thing as “classical Daoism,” over on his blog, Bao Pu. Here are a couple of paragraphs; go over and check it out. Discuss there or here, as you wish — if here, please address all comments to Scott.
The purpose of this 4th essay is to explore these two texts to see what similarities and differences exist. If we understand a “school of thought” (modern Chinese: Xuepai ??) to refer to a system or complex of beliefs, ideas, values and methods, would the various authors of the Laozi and Zhuangzi constitute such a school, as is commonly believed? Or were they two different schools of thought with only slight overlap, perhaps a Laoist school and a Zhuangist school? Is there a “family resemblance” that exists between these two texts that does not between them and others, such as the Mengzi, Mozi, Hanfeizi or Yijing? Jia ?, which commonly meant “house” or “family,” has suggested to Harold Roth that Sima Tan’s use of it “implies that he thought of his six groups as having an important lineage dimension in which masters and disciples functioned according to a family model.”[7] By positing a lineage of masters and disciples (= teachers and students) we come close to the idea of a school (of thought) as well, although whether the contributors to the Laozi and Zhuangzi were two branches of one lineage remains to be seen.
We’ve already explored the nature of ancient Chinese texts and some possible scenarios of how the texts came to be in the earlier essays, especially the 3rd one on Zhuangzi. We have hypothesized that the existence of the Laozi and Zhuangzi required some sort of lineage or group that had compiled and preserved (and added to) these texts, at least until the Han dynasty period where texts were sought out by regional rulers and the imperial government in order to preserve the classical legacy in various libraries. These groups need not have been large, and, further, we do not know if this lineage was unbroken, or whether decades went by where the texts sat neglected in boxes in people’s homes.
A month ago I noted that Sungmoon Kim’s review of Fred Dallmayr and ZHAO Tingyang, eds. Contemporary Chinese Political Thought: Debates and Perspectives had been published at NDPR. My own review for Dao of the same book has now been published on-line first, and should be accessible to those with institutional access to Dao. I’ll paste the first couple paragraphs, as well as the penultimate paragraph (which makes a fairly self-standing point), below.
COMPARING CHINA AND THE WEST:
Bringing the Disciplines Together
The International Association for Comparative Study of China and the West (IACSCW) invites proposals for presentations at its conference to be held in Beijing at Peking University from 12 to 14 July 2013. Its primary purpose is to bring together from all over the world individuals and organizations with an ongoing interest in comparing China and the West.
