Moral Cultivation in the Premodern World: Craft and Transformation in Later Stoics, the Zhuangzi, and Zen

Yale’s Global Philosophy Reading Group warmly invites you to a symposium entitled Moral Cultivation in the Premodern World: Craft and Transformation in Later Stoics, the Zhuangzi, and Zen. The symposium will take place next Thursday, April 4th in HQ 136, from 3:30 to 6:00 PM, with a reception (food from House of Naan, Prosecco, and sparkling water) to follow. Please see the description, program, and abstracts below for more details. We hope to see you there!

If you know in advance that you’ll attend, please send a quick email to james.brown-kinsella@yale.edu so we can order enough food and drink for the reception.

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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.

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Moral Sense Test for Ethicists

For those who are ethicists by profession–you at least teach or have taught it, I think, would allow you to clear the bar–Eric Schwitzgebel (author of The Splintered Mind) has a Moral Sense Test he’d like you to take. His subject recruitment post is here, a copy of which is pasted below. Also, if you know of any ethicists who aren’t hep to the bloggin, send them Eric’s link; he needs a lot of ethicists to take this test.

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(From Eric Schwitzgebel, UC Riverside, Dept. of Philosophy)

New Version of the Moral Sense Test, Especially Designed for Philosophers

Fiery Cushman at Harvard and I are running a new version of the “Moral Sense Test”, which asks respondents to make moral judgments about hypothetical scenarios. We’re especially hoping to recruit people with philosophy degrees for this test so that we can compare philosophers’ and non-philosophers’ responses. So while I would encourage all readers of this blog to take the test (your answers, though completely anonymous, will be treasured!), I would especially appreciate it if people with graduate degrees in philosophy would take the time to complete it.

The test should take about 15-20 minutes, and people who have taken earlier versions of the Moral Sense Test have often reported it interesting to think about the kinds of moral dilemmas posed in the test.

Here’s the link to the test.