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

New Comparative Philosophy Journal

Bo Mou (San Jose State University, USA) has recently founded a new journal called Comparative Philosophy, described as “an international journal of constructive engagement of distinct approaches toward world philosophy.” The new journal’s website is here. The table of contents of volume 1, no. 1, scheduled to appear in January 2010, follows. Continue reading →

SACP Graduate Student Essay Contest

(Very last minute, but better late than never…) The Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy sponsors an annual graduate student essay contest in association with their annual conference.  Students should submit an essay of no more than 25 pages (or 10,000 words)  AND a 300 word abstract to both Al Albergate (alalbergate@aol.com) and Peimin Ni (nip@gvsu.edu) by Dec. 31, 2009. Continue reading →

Approaches to Chinese and Comparative Philosophy–What Are We Doing?

I’ve been thinking recently about a difficulty in our field in general.  Especially after reading some comments on an earlier post on publishing in Chinese philosophy, it seems a good time to discuss this issue.  There are, all of us would admit, a number of different and sometimes opposing methodologies concerning how we read, interpret, and use ancient Chinese philosophical material in our work.  We have different agendas, and have different methods of reading and using texts and ancient material based on these agendas.  However, we often fail to lay our cards on the table concerning these agendas when we write, and also fail to understand authors’ approaches when we read them, and this makes for confusion and tension as the field of Chinese and comparative philosophy attempts to grow to a more prominent position within philosophy in general.  I am thinking here of Chinese philosophy as done by philosophers primarily, because I recognize there are different, and sometimes incompatible, agendas for others in different fields as well, which complicates the issue even further.  Continue reading →

Chinese and Comparative Philosophy Journals

A blog reader who wishes to remain anonymous writes:

This comment is intended to further discussion of the long thread on Leiter about the status of research and teaching (at the Ph.D. level) of Chinese philosophy in the U.S and the West.

Over the decade during which I’ve been doing research in philosophy (dating from the time I finished coursework in grad school), I have spelled my research projects in the Scottish Enlightenment with periodic research projects in other areas. Last year I finally published a book on my main research topic. Not wanting to get burned out in that area of specialization, I decided to return to some earlier interests in ancient Chinese philosophy and write a few papers.

Two are finished and prepared for submission to journals that publish in East Asian philosophy in English. My hunch was that Philosophy East & West (PEW) was heads and shoulders above the other journals in that family, including Dao, Journal of Chinese Philosophy (JCP) and Asian Philosophy (AP). But a colleague mentioned to me that she thinks Journal of Chinese Philosophy is best. I looked online and found no discussion of the quality and rankings of these journals. This surprised me Continue reading →

Happiness East and West Conference Abstracts

I’m headed to Hong Kong tomorrow for the Happiness East and West Conference at HKU. It looks like I’ll come back with some interesting things to discuss on the blog. I thought some of you might be interested in seeing the titles and abstracts of the papers that will be presented there. So, here they are… Continue reading →

Xunzi and the Aesthetic-Moral Value Fusion

So, among other things, I’m working on a longish paper on aesthetic value and its fusion in early China with what we would consider to be moral value.  There are portions of this I’ll be presenting in Hong Kong next week (“Aesthetic Pleasure as Early Confucian Happiness”) and at the end of March at the Pacific APA meeting in San Francisco (“Gentlemen Prefer Bronze: Aesthetic Sensibility as Moral Sense in the Analects“). This is part of my discussion on Xunzi (which I will not be presenting anywhere), that aims for an aesthetic-value consequentialism reading:

What ties together much of Xunzi’s work is his emphasis on the transformative effects of education and self-cultivation, largely through the poetry, music, and rituals of Confucian life, incorporating traditional texts, forms, and activities. This is the backbone of Xunzi’s thought. In education and self-cultivation, it is the refined and noble quality of a person’s demeanor, inner psychological state, and activity that justifies the program of education and regimen of self-cultivation. The knowledge contained in the Zhou-derived rituals, music, odes, historical documents and records, according to Xunzi, enters the heart, disperses throughout the body, and is manifested both in activity and in rest (Xunzi 1). Continue reading →