Dear Colleagues,
The inaugural issue of Comparative Political Theory is now available. This new journal explicitly welcomes submissions dealing with East Asian thought. Please find the table of contents below as well as a link to the full text: HERE.
Dear Colleagues,
The latest issue of the Journal of Chinese Humanities (JOCH) is now available. Please find the table of contents below as well as a link to the full text: HERE.
We welcome papers on pre-Song China from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including anthropology, archaeology, art history, history, literature, philosophy, and religion. Please send short abstracts of individual papers (250 words) to Stephan N. Kory (skory@ufl.edu) by August 1, 2021. For all abstract submissions, please mark the subject line as “SEECR Submission 2021.”For more information about SEECR, please visit the SEECR website:
January 20-21, 2022 (online)
Chinese philosophy is often considered as a pragmatic, intrinsically “political” discourse, more oriented towards the stabilization of a community (be it social, cultural or institutional) and the establishment of an organic, well-functioning state apparatus than to the understanding of the metaphysical realm of thought.
This is a largely biased and simplistic reduction of its thematic richness and its high level of theoretical sophistication, yet the formative centuries of Chinese thought – amidst the turmoil of the Warring States – undeniably urged the main intellectual actors of the time to a reflection on how to rebuild the lost “political order”.
And yet, even as China is becoming a global power, Chinese political thought is rarely allowed to participate in discussions beyond the disciplinary “wall” of Sinology and Asian Studies and their categories of thought. In other words, if Plato, Machiavelli or Rousseau are unanimously considered to speak the universal language of “political philosophy”, the reflections on power, authority and legitimacy offered by Laozi, Han Fei or Mencius tend to remained confined to a specialized (sometimes still considered and treated as “exotic”) Chinese context.
This workshop, jointly organized by the University of Naples “L’Orientale”- Centre for East Asian Studies, Tallinn University and EURICS-European Institute for Chinese Studies, intends to fill this gap and foster an interdisciplinary dialogue among disciplines by inviting sinologists, political philosophers, and intellectual historians to discuss Chinese political thought (of any period), favoring a focus on its comparative and/or global potential. Contributions focusing on more than one country, area, or period are also encouraged.
Jana S. Rošker’s Interpreting Chinese Philosophy: A New Methodology has been published by Bloomsbury.
Understanding Chinese philosophy requires knowledge of the referential framework prevailing in Chinese intellectual traditions. But Chinese philosophical texts are frequently approached through the lens of Western paradigms. Analysing the most common misconceptions surrounding Western Sinology, Jana Rošker alerts us to unseen dangers and introduces us to a new more effective way of reading Chinese philosophy.
10th June 2021: Prof. Keith Knapp (The Citadel) presenting “The Birth of Popular Confucianism: Evidence from Dunhuang of the Creation of the Twenty-four Filial Exemplars.”
The Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge holds a series of talks each term whose overall theme links with Dunhuang and/or the Silk Road. These take place via Zoom on Thursdays and require pre-registration. This week’s talk will begin at 5pm UK Time (BST), lasting an hour with time allocated afterwards for questions, debate, and discussion.
We welcome listeners from all fields who feel that these talks may help their own research or who are curious to know about the diverse topics covered. This seminar series is organised by Dr Imre Galambos with the generous support of the Glorisun Global Network and Dhammachai International Research.
To register for this week’s talk, please follow this link:https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIodOytrTkpEtBYrzlCaz3_OTikd3n4KMJk
If prompted to enter a passcode, please enter: Dunhuang
A new journal, publishing both Chinese-language and English-language articles on Confucianism, has been established jointly by the International Confucian Association and Tsinghua University: 《国际儒学（中英文）》 or International Studies on Confucianism. More information, including the Table of Contents of the first issue, is here.
Winner: Shu-shan Lee, “ ‘What Did the Emperor Ever Say’—The Public Transcript of Confucian Political Obligation,” Dao 19. 2: 231-250
What is the Confucian conception of political obligation? While there is a widespread view
that it demands people’s absolute obedience to their rulers, there are also scholars arguing
that it includes people’s duty to correct rulers. In this award-winning essay, Shu-shan Lee
shows that the former lacks textual support, while the latter confuses Confucian scholar-
officials’ political duty with commoners’ political obligations. Instead, Lee argues,
convincingly, that imperial Confucian political obligation is a conditional theory of
paternalistic gratitude: common people’s obedience to their rulers is an expression of, and
thus is conditional upon, their rulers’ benevolent care for them. This ground-breaking
conception of Confucian political obligation results from Lee’s careful study, integrating
multi-faceted perspectives, philosophical and historical, theoretical and empirical, and
ancient and contemporary. It is the type of research that Dao aims to promote.
