Category Archives: Lecture

Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy lecture on Confucian ethics March 22 @5:30pm

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes ANDREW LAMBERT,  Department of Philosophy, Wester New England University

With responses from Warren Frisina, Dean of Honors College, Associate Professor of Religion, Hofstra University

Please join us at Columbia University Department of Religion on March 22, 2013 at 5:30pm for his lecture entitled

A Confucian Account of Ethical Obligation?

ABSTRACT: The Confucian doctrine of the five cardinal relationships is often taken as a defining feature of the Confucian tradition, with its emphasis on family life and relationships. However, objections arising from more modern ethical ideals threaten to undermine the doctrine, or at least render it irrelevant to contemporary ethics. I present three such objections.

In seeking to deflect the objections, I suggest a different way of understanding the purpose and effects of the five relationships doctrine. Instead of seeing the doctrine as a constellation of concrete practical norms and duties pertaining to individuals occupying certain social roles and positions, I suggest we understand the five relationships doctrine as a kind of training device, which cultivates a certain kind of personal sensibility. This is a sense of obligation to engage with and find a basis for familiarity with those people encountered in the subject’s local social world.

I argue that when understood in this way, the discourse of the five cardinal relationships is not subject to the three common objections noted above, and presents a distinctive form of ethical obligation.

I finish by locating this account of ethical obligation within a larger moral vision, thereby suggesting this is a genuine form of ethical obligation rather than mere etiquette or psychological conditioning.

Time: 5:30-7:30 pm
Place: Rm. 101 in the Department of Religion 80 Claremont Avenue
http://goo.gl/maps/zfUKH

PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE:
http://www.cbs.columbia.edu/cscp/

Zhao Tingyang Lecture at Harvard this Wednesday

How to Make a World of Perpetual Peace

Prof. Zhao Tingyang (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; HYI Visiting Professor of East Asian Thought)
Discussant: Professor Stephen Angle (Philosophy and East Asian Studies, Wesleyan University)

Date: Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Time: 4:15 pm
Location: Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, MA

The new problem of our times is that of a failed world rather than failed states. Globalization has brought us to the unpleasant fact that our supposed world is actually a non-world. Rather than dealing with the problems of globality by means of modernity, we must make a world, one of perpetual peace, with an ‘all-under-heaven’ system that reaches beyond the nation state system, with relational rationality emphasized more than individual rationality.

Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy lecture on the Bhagavad Gita TODAY March 1 @5:30pm

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes SANDEEP SREEKUMAR (The City University of New York, Baruch College)

With responses from Gary Ostertag, Director of the Saul Kripke Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Please join us at Columbia University Department of Religion today (March 1, 2013) at 5:30pm for his lecture entitled

The Elimination of Moral Agency: The Trajectory of Krishna’s Argument in the Gita Continue reading →

Friday’s Neo-Confucianism Seminar at Columbia

The next session of the Columbia University Seminar on Neo-Confucian Studies will convene on Friday, March 1, 2013, from 3:30 to 5:30pm. We will meet in the Board Room on the first floor of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. Please note the earlier starting time.

Our presenter for this session is Deborah Sommer of the Department of Religious Studies at Gettysburg College. Her paper is titled “The Body of Confucius in Han Apocrypha.” The paper was originally scheduled for November 2012 but was postponed due to Hurricane Sandy. Please contact one of the organizers if you would like a copy.

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Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy lecture on the Bhagavad Gita March 1 @5:30pm

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes SANDEEP SREEKUMAR (The City University of New York, Baruch College)

With responses from Gary Ostertag, Director of the Saul Kripke Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Please join us at Columbia University Department of Religion on February 15, 2013 at 5:30 for his lecture entitled

The Elimination of Moral Agency: The Trajectory of Krishna’s Argument in the Gita

ABSTRACT: I argue here that, seen as a whole (which it rarely is), what appears to be the normative-ethical argument in the Gita is either nothing of the kind or a very odd specimen of the kind, inasmuch as what happens in it is that human moral agency, in the standard sense, is progressively undercut and finally eliminated. Krishna
  • (a) starts off with the usual description of human action oriented towards a particular consequence,
  • (b) moves to the elimination of that consequence and the substitution of other higher-level consequences,
  • (c) analyses those higher-level consequences and strips them of all individual human implications,
  • (d) proceeds to transform human actions themselves into impersonal events, and
  • (e) finally, dissolves the human agent himself into a matrix of causal determinations.
This line of argument, once isolated, must yield certain results: it must say that it is not normativity but strict necessity that governs what we take to be human actions, and it must say that, once this is recognized, moral duties cease to have normative force. And behold, this is exactly what Krishna does say in the end. What we have, as a result, is the elimination of ethics from the world properly grasped and the installation of a form of determinism.
What I now argue is that this manoeuvre is not merely an eliminative metaethical one; it swivels back and re-enters the domain of everyday human moral action and there plays a motivating role. After all, what all this has been in aid of is getting Arjuna to do his duty. There seems to be something like a psychological paradox that this presents: at least so far as the Gita is concerned, the view seems to be that we are likelier to perform our moral duties well not merely if we detach ourselves from the self-regarding consequences of such performance but also if we think that those duties are not really duties in the way that we generally understand them and, moreover, that it is not we who are performing them (or, indeed, any actions) at all.

Time: 5:30-7:30 pm
Place: Rm. 101 in the Department of Religion 80 Claremont Avenue
http://goo.gl/maps/zfUKH

PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE:
http://www.cbs.columbia.edu/cscp/

Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy lecture this Friday (02/15) @5:30pm

(Note: This talk was rescheduled owing to the blizzard last week.)

THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Welcomes JONATHAN C. GOLD (Princeton University)

With responses from Robert Wright, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, and prize-winning author of such books as The Evolution of God, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, The Moral Animal, and Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information.

Please join us at Columbia University Department of Religion on February 15, 2013 at 5:30 for his lecture entitled,

Accepting the Conditions: The Ethical Implications of Vasubandhu’s Buddhist Causal Theory

ABSTRACT: Continue reading →

Harvard Lecture: Bushido as Philosophy of Death in Modern Japan

Thursday, February 7, 12:00 p.m.
Beyond the Samurai: Bushido as Philosophy of Death in Modern Japan
Chris Goto-Jones, Professor of Comparative Philosophy and Political Thought, and Dean of Leiden University
Moderator: Andrew Gordon, Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History, Harvard University
Porte Room (S250), CGIS South Bldg., 1730 Cambridge St.
Reischauer Institute special presentation

Feb. 1 Columbia Neo-Confucianism Seminar

RE: February 1, 2013 Columbia University Seminar on Neo-Confucian Studies

Dear seminar members and friends,

The next session of the Columbia University Seminar on Neo-Confucian Studies will convene on Friday, February 1, 2013, from 3:30 to 5:30pm. We will meet in the Board Room on the first floor of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. Please note the earlier starting time.

We will have two presenters for this session (listed here in alphabetical order).

Jennifer Eichman will present the paper “Mind Cultivation: Theoretical and Practical Considerations.”

Richard Stichler will present the paper “Human Nature and Cultures of War.”

All are welcome to attend. Please feel free to forward this message to interested colleagues. Please join us after the seminar for dinner at the Columbia Cottage restaurant, which is located on the corner of Amsterdam and 111th Streets.

If you have any questions or would like a copy of the papers, please contact one of our organizers: Yong Huang, (yhuang@kutztown.edu), Tao Jiang (tjiang@rci.rutgers.edu), On-cho Ng (oxn1@psu.edu), or Deborah Sommer (dsommer@gettysburg.edu>).   Our new rapporteur this year is Yang Liu (yl2435@columbia.edu) of Columbia University.

Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy Spring Schedule

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

Martin Kern at Oxford Workshop on Manuscript and Text Culture

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)

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