Category Archives: Resources

Ph.D. Programs in Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong

The Philosophy Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong is calling for applications for its Ph.D. programs that start from Fall 2020. The CUHK has a world-renown program in philosophy, equally strong in Chinese philosophy, analytic philosophy, and Continental philosophy. In the QS Subject Rankings in the most recent three years, it is ranked as the best philosophy program in Asia (it was ranked at the 30th, 34th, and 28th world-wide respectively in the last three years).

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Harvard Yenching Library Chinese materials added to Ctext.org

Donald Sturgeon reports that thanks to the support of Harvard Yenching Library, over 5 million pages of scanned materials from the Yenching Library collection have been added to the Library section of the ctext.org site, including high quality images from the Chinese Rare Books Collection. See http://ctext.org/library.pl?if=en&collection=139. Approximate transcriptions created using the ctext.org OCR procedure have also been added to the Wiki, making these materials full-text searchable. In future he hopes to collaborate with other libraries to include materials from their Chinese language collections.

Update to MARKUS Chinese text analysis platform

Hilde De Weerdt writes: A belated new year present for all who work with classical Chinese texts.

The MARKUS platform has gone through a major update during the past few months. You can now create an account, upload content, add customized tags and comments and notes of different kinds, select which reference sites you want to display, convert Chinese to western dates, and, last but not least, import text directly from your ctext.org account. We have added new videos to show most of these features under “HowTo.” More will be added and Chinese translations of these will be added as well.

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Major Update to Chinese Text Project

News from Donald Sturgeon, who has used optical character recognition to provide extraordinary searchable access to pre-modern Chinese texts online:

Chinese Text Project: over ten million pages of pre-modern Chinese texts now searchable online

A major update to the site has been made by applying OCR to over ten million pages of transmitted texts stored in the Library, linking scanned texts where possible to digital editions that follow them. Over 3000 existing texts have been successfully linked, allowing side-by-side display and textual searching of scanned texts.

Additionally, around ten thousand new texts and editions have also been transcribed for the first time using OCR. While these transcriptions inevitably contain many errors, they make it possible for the first time to search the scanned texts and immediately locate information within them. All newly transcribed texts have been added to the Wiki – please help by correcting errors when using these resources.

For further details, please see the OCR instructions.

Hansen’s MOOC on edX

Chad Hansen has created a MOOC on edX called “Humanity and Nature in Chinese Thought,” available here. Here is some copy from the course description:

Think along with Classical Chinese masters as they explore and debate how and where we can find ethical guidance in nature.

We make ethical or behaviour guiding right / wrong judgments all the time but have you ever wondered where Ethics comes from, what it is about and why it is important? This course provides an introduction to traditional Chinese ethical thought and focuses on the pervasive contrast in the way Chinese and Westerners think about ethical guidance or guidance concerning what is right and what is wrong, good or bad.  Traditional Western orthodoxy uses the metaphor of a law – in its most familiar popular form, the command of a supernatural being backed by a threat of eternal punishment or reward – to explain ethical guidance. The Classical Chinese philosophers by contrast were all naturalists. They talked about ethical guidance using a path metaphor – a natural dào…