On Tuesday, November 4, 2025 at 9:00pm Beijing time the Chinese-Greek Philosophy Forum Geju yu Dongjian 格局与洞见 (Horizons and Insights) will host a lecture by Professor Jana S. Rošker (University of Ljubljana) titled “Zeno of Elea and Hui Shi 惠施 Through the Lens of the Flying Arrow”. Please find the zoom link here.
More can be learnt about the Geju yu Dongjian 格局与洞见 (Horizons and Insights) forum here.
Justin Tiwald will give a colloquium talk titled “Confucian Disagreements about Autonomous Understanding 自得 (zìdé) in Ethics” at the University of California, Riverside hosted by the Department of Comparative Literature and Languages and the Department of Philosophy on Friday, Oct. 31 at 4pm PST (hybrid format). Please read more for details, the zoom link, and the abstract.
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The COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY and the WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE
welcome you to an IN-PERSON meeting:
Hagop Sarkissian (CUNY): «Engineering the Dao: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust the Mengzi»
With responses from Tao Jiang (Rutgers)
ABSTRACT: Why does Mengzi tell rulers that their love of wealth and women poses no obstacle to ideal rulership, even as he venerates sage kings who seemingly lack such desires? How can he advocate for universal moral response in the child-in-the-well scenario while explicitly rejecting impartial concern? Why does he advise King Xuan to avoid looking at sacrificial oxen—effectively telling him to ignore his compassionate impulses—if moral sprouts are meant to guide ethical action? And why does he reject merit-based appointments, favoring hereditary offices, while advocating ethical transformation of government? These persistent interpretive puzzles have led some scholars to conclude that Mengzi’s philosophy is fundamentally conflicted. In this talk, I propose that these puzzles dissolve when we shift our focus from theoretical systematization to dao construction. Rather than seeing Mengzi primarily as a theorist of human nature, a virtue ethicist, or a political philosopher, I argue he is best understood as a constructor of dao: an engineer of workable frameworks for guiding conduct and organizing social life. Like an engineer, Mengzi builds with available resources—human psychology, institutions, cultural forms—within real-world constraints, prioritizing sustainability over theoretical purity. This “pragmatic constructivist” reading explains Mengzi’s characteristic patterns: motivational permissiveness (redirecting self-interested desires rather than suppressing them), institutional conservatism (preserving Zhou structures while fostering ethical renewal), and accommodation of natural family attachments (without making them the normative foundation). Instead of demanding universal emotional expansion, Mengzi engineers coordination mechanisms that work with human nature, social realities, and political structures as they actually exist. I aim to show how this engineering approach resolves longstanding interpretive difficulties and reveals Mengzi as a systematic social engineer whose methodology remains relevant for contemporary debates on moral and political progress.
DATE: September 19th
TIME: 5:30-7:30pm EST
LOCATION: Philosophy Hall, Room 716, Columbia University, 1150 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR NON-COLUMBIA GUESTS: All non-affiliated members of our community must RSVP to Helen Han Wei Luo (hl3631@columbia.edu) preferably no later than Tuesday, September 16th, including in the request your name on government-issued ID in order to be granted access to campus. Non-affiliated members who do not RSVP will not be given entry to campus. Please also plan to arrive early.
An online seminar by Dr Nikolett Roque-Kőrösi on “Korean Confucianism: Beyond stereotypes and misreadings” is going to be hosted on Thursday 31st July 2025 at 3pm (AWST), 2pm (AEST) and 4pm (Seoul).The talk introduces the basic concepts of Korean Confucianism while challenging some of the common misinterpretations found in Western media and scholarship – and sometimes even within Korea. Please find more details about the lecture here.
The College of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University is hosting a lecture by Brook Ziporyn of the University of Chicago, titled “Unknow Thyself: Agnosis as Superpower in the Zhuangzi,” on Thursday April 3rd, at 4:30pm in the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies Seminar Room (343 Washington Terrace, Middletown CT). Ziporyn will explore non-knowledge’s ability to enhance self and social reform. All are welcome!
THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY
Welcomes you to an ONLINE meeting:
Hannah Kim (The University of Arizona):
« Aspiration, Ambition, and Confucian Debates on Human Nature »
With responses from Timothy Connolly (East Stroudsburg University)
ABSTRACT: A standard introduction to classical Confucianism teaches that Mengzi thought “human nature is good” and Xunzi, that “human nature is bad”. But the exact nature of their disagreement is subject to ongoing debate, with some underplaying the disagreement (they just mean different things by “human nature”) while others take the disagreement to be about the nature of agency, moral education, or dispositions. In this talk, I’ll argue that Agnes Callard’s distinction between ambition and aspiration helps us clarify what the disagreement is about. Mengzi thought humans need to fully pursue the values they already have, while Xunzi thought humans need to aspire towards values they don’t have and aren’t predisposed to. This account has the benefit of capturing Mengzi’s and Xunzi’s respective views on agency and education and providing Xunzi with a picture of moral motivation that even a selfish agent could develop.
DATE: November 8, 2024
TIME: 5:30-7:30pm EST
Zoom info below:
The next session of the Columbia Neo-Confucianism seminar will convene on Friday 2/2 from 3:30-5:30 pm in the Heyman Center on Columbia’s campus. The guest speaker will be Professor Baldwin Wong of Hong Kong Baptist University. Professor Wong will present his draft “To Confucianism, are Perfectionist Policies a Help or a Trap? Lessons from Wang Yangming’s Moral Psychology”. The draft will be circulated a week before the talk. To be on the list, please RSVP to Weiling Kong at wk2363@columbia.edu before 1/31.
The Department of Philosophy at the National Chengchi University is happy to announce that they will be hosting a lecture both in person and virtually titled “The Unfished Project of Miki Kiyoshi”. The speaker for this lecture will be Professor Noe Keiichi alongside discussant Professor Lin Chen-kuo. The lecture will take place at Room 106, BaiNian Building, National Chengchi University on October, 5th, 2023 (1500-1700 Taiwan time) or you can join online by clicking the link here. Read on for more.
