I’d like to announce the publication of my new book Ziran: The Philosophy of Spontaneous Self-Causation. Targeted specifically at students, this book takes a key concept form early Chinese metaphysics—ziran 自然—and applies it to several fields of contemporary scholarship.
Category Archives: Recently Published
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.
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.
Two New Books by Bo Mou
(1) Bo Mou (Jan 2019), Semantic-Truth Approaches in Chinese Philosophy: A Unifying Pluralist Account (Lexington Books).
This monograph book explains a distinctive pluralist account of truth (jointly-rooted perspectivism) in the context of cross-tradition philosophical engagement for two closely related purposes:
- to enhance our understanding and treatment of the truth concern as one strategic foundation of various representative movements of thought (the Yi-Jing philosophy, Gongsun Long’s philosophy, Later Mohist philosophy, classical Confucianism, and classical Daoism) in classical Chinese philosophy that are intended to capture “how things are”, and
- to explore how the relevant resources in Chinese philosophy can contribute to the contemporary exploration of the philosophical issue of truth in philosophically interesting and engaging ways.
More information here.
(2) Bo Mou (ed.) (2018), Philosophy of Language, Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy: Constructive Engagement (Brill).
From the constructive-engagement vantage point of doing philosophy of language comparatively, this anthology volume explores:
- how reflective elaboration of some distinct features of the Chinese language and of philosophically interesting resources concerning language in Chinese philosophy can contribute to our treatment of a range of issues in philosophy of language and
- how relevant resources in contemporary philosophy of language can contribute to philosophical interpretations of reflectively interesting resources concerning the Chinese language and Chinese texts. The foregoing contributing fronts constitute two complementary sides of this project.
More information here.
New Book: Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Xunzi
I am pleased to share the news that Eric Hutton’s much-anticipated Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Xunzi has been published. Click here for more information and to download the back matter and front matter for free (this includes the introduction).
A list of chapters and contributors is below the fold.
The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism
From Princeton University Press, what looks to be a very useful resource:
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The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism
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Where to buy this ebook
New book on Chinese religion and philosophy
Prof. SHAN Chun (University of Politics and law in Beijing; International Confucian Association) has published a new book with Springer titled Major Aspects of Chinese Religion and Philosophy. Those with institutional access to SpringerLink should be able to get the full text on-line; everyone should be able to access at least the Table of Contexts and the abstracts of each chapter. It is a broad, synthetic account, appreciative rather than historically or philosophically critical, that represents one contemporary Chinese approach to China’s religio-philosophic traditions.
Translation of Korean Buddhist Works Online
A team of scholars has published — and made freely available on-line — an extensive set of translations from Korean Buddhism. The homepage is here. The translation are excellent, are accompanied by substantial introductions, and include the classical Chinese original text. Robert Buswell’s Preface to the series follows.
Reminder of Free Dao Downloads
Just a quick reminder that the journal Dao gives out free promotional downloads of their top five downloaded articles at any given time. Here is the link (freebies are at the bottom of the page). There are some great articles right now on that list!
New de Bary Anthology
Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics from Columbia University Press. Looks like an interesting collection of material previously unavailable in one (affordable) volume. Here’s the publisher’s announcement:
Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics is an essential, all-access guide to the core texts of East Asian civilization and culture. Essays address frequently read, foundational texts in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, as well as early modern fictional classics and nonfiction works of the seventeenth century. Building strong links between these writings and the critical traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, this volume shows the vital role of the classics in the shaping of Asian history and in the development of the humanities at large. Continue reading →
