Category Archives: Confucianism

Aaron Stalnaker – Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy Lecture: “Dependence, Autonomy, and the Varieties of Relationship” Friday Jan 24

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes: AARON STALNAKER (Indiana University)
With responses from: TIMOTHY CONNOLLY (East Stroudsburg University)

Please join on January 24, 2020 at 5:30 for his lecture entitled,

Dependence, Autonomy, and the Varieties of Relationship

ABSTRACT: This talk places master-student relations in the context of Confucian social theory, focusing on issues of obedience, remonstration, and respect for different sorts of authorities.  I survey early Confucian accounts of the good society centered on role relations, personal development, and flourishing, both individual and communal.  I then examine the question of autonomy within these relationships, looking closely at remonstration, obedience, and disobedience.  The talk concludes with a broader discussion of human dependence, placing Confucian conceptions in dialogue with Eva Feder Kittay, Martha Fineman, and Alasdair MacIntyre.  All three, like the Confucians, see dependency relations as central to human life and the problems of politics, in sharp contrast to most liberal views that imagine a social contract between autonomous, free, and equal individuals.  Confucians view extreme dependence as a special case of the pervasive interdependence of all human beings on each other, with family relations serving in many respects as the model for other relations. Continue reading →

New Book: Kim, Theorizing Confucian Virtue Politics

Sungmoon Kim’s latest book, Theorizing Confucian Virtue Politics: The Political Philosophy of Mencius and Xunzi, has been published by Cambridge. The Amazon link is here; a flyer from Cambridge (with a 20% discount) is here. More information follows.

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New book: Mastery, Dependence, and the Ethics of Authority, by Aaron Stalnaker

Oxford University Press has just published my new book on early Confucian social thought, and what contemporary people might learn from it: Mastery, Dependence, and the Ethics of Authority.  The publisher’s page is here.  At present the cheapest way to purchase it is directly from Oxford, with a discount code for 30% off (AAFLYG6).

This comes with hearty thanks to Steve Angle and Bryan Van Norden, who were belatedly revealed as the press’s referees.

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CFP: The 4th Biennial Conference World Consortium for Research in Confucian Cultures

The Organizing Committee of the 4th biennial conference of the World Consortium for Research in Confucian Cultures gladly announces a call for papers.

Conference theme: “Gender, Family, and Global Confucianism”

Conference and Organizing and Program Committee:

Heisook Kim (Ewha Woman’s University), Roger T. Ames (PKU), Jeong Keun Shin (Sungkyunkwan University) (co-chairs)

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Bin and Butina, Empirical Study on Perceptions of Ruism in the U.S.

Bin Song and Ben Butina have co-authored a paper titled “An Empirical Study and Theoretical Reflection on the Knowledge and Perceptions of Ruism in the United States,” which is newly published by Confucian Academy 2019 (1). The article is bilingual, and its English version is on p.82-98. The full issue is available here. Its results are somewhat surprising!

New edited collection on role ethics

Routledge has published a collection of essays on role ethics edited by Tim Dare and Christine Swanton, which includes two essays on early Confucian ethics. More information is here.

The publisher’s description is as follows:

Although our moral lives would be unrecognisable without them, roles have received little attention from analytic moral philosophers. Roles are central to our lives and to our engagement with one another, and should be analysed in connection with our core notions of ethics such as virtue, reason, and obligation.

This volume aims to redress the neglect of role ethics by confronting the tensions between conceptions of impartial morality and role obligations in the history of analytic philosophy and the Confucian tradition. Different perspectives on the ethical significance of roles can be found by looking to debates within professional and applied ethics, by challenging existing accounts of how roles generate reasons, by questioning the hegemony of ethical reasons, and by exploring the relation between expertise and virtue. The essays tackle several core questions related to these debates:

What are roles and what is their normative import?
To what extent are roles and the ethics of roles central to ethics as opposed to virtue in general, and obligation in general?
Are role obligations characteristically incompatible with ordinary morality in professions such as business, law, and medicine?
How does practical reason function in relation to roles?
Perspectives in Role Ethics is an examination of a largely neglected topic in ethics. It will appeal to a broad range of scholars in normative ethics, virtue ethics, non-Western ethics, and applied ethics interested in the importance of roles in our moral life.

Roberts, “Why Confucius Rubs America the Wrong Way”

Moss Roberts has published an opinion piece in the Asia Times entitled “Why Confucius Rubs America the Wrong Way.” Roberts begins:

The campaign to eliminate the Confucius Institutes from American education marks a level of ideological insecurity that has characterized this country for a long time. Willful ignorance about China has been an important part of that insecurity. The mission of the institutes is not ambitious; it is mainly devoted to offering Chinese language courses in colleges that lack them or have fledgling programs. As for Confucius himself, in America, interest in his thinking has never been strong; in China relatively greater attention is given to American thinkers and writers.

Vol 32 of The Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture (JCPC)

The editors are delighted to announce the publication of Volume 32 of The Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture (JCPC), the inaugural issue of the revised format of the journal. JCPC is published biannually (in February and August) and welcomes contributions of both articles and book reviews by qualified authors from around the world. This attached file contains the front matter, including a complete table of contents, of Volume 32. The complete volume will be available on line, within the week at our web site: http://jcpc.skku.edu/.