Renmin University of China in Being is happy to call for application to their two-year MA program in Chinese Philosophy, Religion and Culture (CPRC) at the School of Philosophy. All courses in the CPRC program are taught in English. It offers students an excellent opportunity to study Chinese philosophy and religion while living in China. Currently there are still scholarships available for students. The application period runs from November 15th, 2023 to April 30th, 2024. Interested students can contact Prof. Jifen Li or Prof. Dennis Schiling. Please read below for more information about the program.
Category Archives: Graduate study
Funded Graduate Study Opportunity
The Traditional China Chair at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies of the University of Zurich is soliciting applications for a Ph.D. position in Classical Sinology (80 % FTE). Work towards the Ph.D. will be carried out under the auspices of the SNSF project “Literary Forms and Epistemic Goals in Early Chinese Texts” (Principal Investigator: Dr. R. Suter). The doctoral thesis will be jointly supervised by Prof. W. Behr and Dr. Suter. See here for more information.
“Non-Western” tenure-track jobs in philosophy
Back in April, Marcus Arvan put out this blog post analyzing which specializations were listed in the 2021-22 jobs posted at PhilJobs. He concludes that “Non-Western Philosophy” was the requested specialization in 5.8% of tenure-track jobs in this past year, which is pretty stable over the past several years. Note that if a job lists two specializations, then that counts as 0.5 of a job for each, and so on for even more potential specializations. He adds that another 6% of the tenure track jobs list Non-Western as a desired teaching competence (“area of competence”). We don’t have numbers ready-to-hand for the number of job seekers with one or another variety of “Non-Western” as an AOC, but I suspect that the ratio of seekers to jobs in this area compares favorably to most other areas of specialization. Which is not to say that getting a job in philosophy is ever easy!
Chinese philosophy in the 2021-2022 Philosophical Gourmet Report
Once every few years, the Philosophical Gourmet Report publishes rankings of PhD programs in philosophy in the English-speaking world. It ranks programs “overall” and by areas of specialization. As one would hope for a report that aspires to be comprehensive and describe the current state of the field, one of those areas of specialization is Chinese philosophy.
You can find a general description of the methodology of the report here. As the member of the advisory board who took the lead in managing the Chinese philosophy area, and who wrote to the other assessors of Chinese philosophy to convene some joint deliberations about the process, I wanted to say a bit more about how we handled the Chinese philosophy section. Continue reading →
English-language MA in Chinese Philosophy, Religion, and Culture at Renmin University
The School of Philosophy at Renmin University of China has for several years offered a two-year M.A. program in Chinese Philosophy, Religion, and Culture (CPRC). All courses for this program (except Chinese language) are taught in English. It offers overseas students who are not proficient in Mandarin a valuable opportunity to study Chinese philosophy, religion, and culture whilst living in China. It also provides opportunities to study Chinese and experience intercultural communication with professors and classmates of diverse cultural backgrounds and experiences.
For more information, see the programs summary poster here, further information here, and the official website here.
For a list of specialists affiliated with the program, read on.
East China Normal University’s Skills-Based Approach to Chinese Philosophy
Paul J. D’Ambrosio, Dean of the Center for Intercultural Research and Associate Professor in Chinese Philosophy at East China Normal University, writes with some information on ECNU’s English-language graduate programs:
For almost a decade East China Normal University has run a highly successful graduate (M.A. and Ph.D.) program in Chinese philosophy taught in English. In recent years we have begun to implement a method of teaching Chinese philosophy that centers on the practice, or gongfu (“kung-fu”), of doing philosophy with classical texts. The gongfu or “skills-based” approach focuses on developing skills of close reading and interpretation in the original Chinese. We work together to understand, unpack, and explore the interpretive possibilities of specific passages within the context of the traditional works themselves. The core courses ask students to read aloud passages from the Analects, Laozi, Mencius, and Zhuangzi in Chinese and then themselves lead investigative discussions of what those passages can mean. The professors guide discussion, helping correct misreadings and drawing on traditional and modern commentaries to elucidate which interpretations have historically proven most influential and (perhaps) why. While aiming to familiarize and inform, the emphasis in class lies on cultivating the skills essential to soundly analyzing the traditional texts.
Grad Program Page Updated for Fall 2021
I have made a number of updates, additions, and deletions to this blog’s page devoted to graduate programs in Chinese philosophy. Please let me know (by commenting or email) if you see any remaining errors, omissions, or have suggestions. Thanks!
Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme
The Department of Philosophy, the Chinese University of Hong Kong has announced fellowship opportunities for their post-graduate programmes. Note that the deadlines of their post-graduate programmes, including HKPFS, PhD & Mphil, have been changed to 1st December 2021.
PhD Position in ‘Confucianism and Ethics of Technology’
This PhD project, part of the Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies programme at Delft University of Technology, investigates the technological challenge for Confucian political theory on the one hand, and the contribution that Confucian political theory can make to debates on the ethics of technology on the other. Confucianism can be especially illuminating for the ethical studies on digital technologies because of its focus on social relationships as opposed to more-individualistic approaches to the ethics of technologies
To learn more about the position click here.
An Update from Edward Slingerland
Edward Slingerland writes:
” I’ve moved to the Philosophy department at UBC and am hoping to introduce a course on virtue ethics, I’d like to read all the standard Western theory (Murdoch, MacIntyre, etc.), do a little Aristotle, but also spend time on the early China Confucians. Does anyone teach anything like this? Looking to steal some ideas from other peoples’ syllabi… If so, please email me at edward.slingerland@gmail.com.”
