The Boston University Confucian Association is sponsoring a lecture by Prof. Tongdong BAI of Fudan University on September 28, 2016. The topic is “A New Confucian Tianxia Model and Its Superiority to the Nation-State and Liberal Models.” Please see here for more details.
Category Archives: Lecture
Tao Jiang – Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy Lecture: “Between Philosophy and History: The Challenge of Authorship to Classical Chinese Philosophy in the Western Academy”, Sep.23 @ 5:30pm
THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY
Welcomes: TAO JIANG (Rutgers University)
With responses from: ESKE MØLLGAARD (University of Rhode Island)
Please join us at Columbia University’s Religion Department on FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23rd at 5:30PM for his lecture entitled:
“Between Philosophy and History: The Challenge of Authorship to Classical Chinese Philosophy in the Western Academy”
ABSTRACT: The tension between philosophical and historical inquiries has been a perennial problem. Within the modern academy, the disciplines of philosophy and history are protected by their respective institutional norm and practice, without much need for interaction. However, Chinese philosophy, situated between Sinology and philosophy in the western academy, has encountered extraordinary challenges from both Sinologists (most of whom are historians) and (Western) philosophers. At the root of the difficulty facing Chinese philosophy lies its very legitimacy, torn between the historicist orientation of Sinology and the presentist orientation of mainstream contemporary Western philosophy. Such divergent disciplinary norms have put scholars of Chinese philosophy in a difficult position. On the one hand, they have to defend the philosophical nature, or even the philosophical worthiness, of classical Chinese texts in front of contemporary Western philosophers whose interests tend to be more issue-driven and in the philosophical integrity of ideas, rather than the historicity of ideas. At the same time, these scholars of Chinese philosophy, when dealing with Sinologists, need to justify the basic premise of their philosophical approach to the classics due to the historical ambiguity and compositional instability of these texts. Continue reading →
Csikszentmihalyi at Sungkyunkwan University
Mark Csikszentmihalyi (UC Berkeley) will be speaking on “Confucian Religion, Confucian Philosophy, and The Double Lens of Comparative Studies” on June 25 at Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. More information is here, and the abstract follows.
Jenco at Harvard: How Should We Use the Chinese Past?
Leigh Jenco (LSE) will be speaking at Harvard on May 2 at 4:00pm. Her title is “How Should We Use the Chinese Past?: Non-Western Histories of Thought in a Global Age.” More information here.
Columbia Neo-Confucian Seminar: Brook Ziporyn “Zhu Xi on the Consciousness and Unconsciousness of the Mind of Heaven and Earth” this Friday, April 22 @ 3:30pm
The next session of the Columbia University Seminar on Neo-Confucian Studies (University Seminar #567) will convene Friday, April 22, 2016 from 3:30 to 5:30pm in the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.
Brook Ziporyn (University of Chicago) will present his paper “Zhu Xi on the Consciousness and Unconsciousness of the Mind of Heaven and Earth: Cross-Cultural Considerations of Ontological Theism and Atheism.”
All are welcome to attend. Copies of his paper and other information are available from the organizers: Ari Borrell , Tao Jiang, On-cho Ng, or Deborah Sommer.
Allan on Confucius and Abdication at Harvard (and in NYRB)
Monday, April 11, 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
The Rise of Confucius and Legends of Abdication in Light of Warring States Period Bamboo Manuscripts
Speaker: Sarah Allan, Burlington Northern Foundation Professor of Asian Studies in honor of Richard M. Dressler at Dartmouth College, chair of the Society for the Study of Early China, and editor of Early China
Sponsored by the Harvard University Fairbanks Center for Chinese Studies
S250, 2nd Floor, CGIS South, 1730, Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA
More information here.
Subscribers to the New York Review of Books can also read Ian Johnson’s “A Revolutionary Discovery in China” in the April 21 issue, which is a review essay based on Sarah Allan’s book Buried Ideas: Legends of Abdication and Ideal Government in Early Chinese Bamboo-Slip Manuscripts.
Angle: “How Buddhist is Neo-Confucianism?”
I trust that everyone who is interested has heard about the upcoming Rutgers Workshop on Chinese Philosophy (RWCP), “Conversations with Western Philosophers”; more info is here. The prior afternoon, I will be giving a public lecture in which some may be interested:
“How Buddhist is Neo-Confucianism? The Roots and Branches of Zhu Xi’s Epistemology”
Thursday, April 14, 2016, 4:30-6:00pm. Pane Room, Alexander Library, College Avenue Campus, Rutgers University. Free and open to the public.
Lecture on Wen (文)
PHILOSOPHIZING THE CONCEPT OF “WEN (文)”: BEGINNING FROM TAKEDA TAIJUN’S SHIBA SEN
APR 5, 12:00–1:30pm
Harvard Yenching Institute Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge
Ishii Tsuyoshi (Associate Professor, Area Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo; HYI Visiting Scholar)
Chair/discussant: David Wang (Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department, Harvard University)
For more information, see here.
Harvey Lederman – Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy Lecture: “Weakness of the Will and Liangzhi in Wang Yangming”, Mar.18 @ 5:30pm
THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY
Welcomes: HARVEY LEDERMAN (New York University)
With responses from: STEVE ANGLE (Wesleyan University)
Please join us at Columbia University’s Religion Department on FRIDAY, MARCH 18th at 5:30PM for his lecture entitled:
“Weakness of the Will and Liangzhi in Wang Yangming”
This paper starts from Wang Shouren’s (王守仁, Yangming 陽明 1472-1529) doctrines concerning weakness of the will, with the aim of developing an interpretation of his theory of “intuition” (l ́ıangzh ̄ı 良知). Wang famously insisted on the “unity of knowledge and action” (知行合一). “Action” is understood in this claim as the subject’s affect; to act appropriately is to have the ethically appropriate affective response. In claiming that knowledge and action are one Wang claims that one form of weakness of the will is impossible: if one knows piety (for example), one is guaranteed to have a pious affective response, that is, to act piously. Wang held that humans have an innate capacity to respond to stimuli with ethically appropriate affect, and that the explanation of this capacity somehow involves the faculty of “intuition” (良知), the faculty by which one obtains moral knowledge. But how does intuition yield moral knowledge? And how does this knowledge guarantee that one will have the affect appropriate to the circumstances? Continue reading →
Zarrow at Neo-Confucianism Seminar Tomorrow
The next session of the Columbia University Seminar on Neo-Confucian Studies (University Seminar #567) will convene March 4, Friday, 2016 from 3:30 to 5:30pm in the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.
Peter Zarrow will present the paper “Utopianism and Moralities of the Self: Views of Chinese Radicals, 1900-1925.”
All are welcome to attend. Please feel free to forward this message to interested colleagues. Please join us after the seminar for dinner at a location to be announced.
Looking ahead to April, our April speaker will be Brook Ziporyn. To avoid conflicting with the annual AAS conference, the April 2016 meeting will convene on April 22.
