I’ve recently finished a paper entitled “The Limitations of Ritual Propriety: Ritual and Language in Xunzi and Zhuangzi.” The paper is a contribution to a special issue of Sophia: International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Metaphysical Theology and Ethics (51:2, 2012) that will be devoted to ritual in Chinese philosophy. Here’s an abstract of the paper: (more…)

HKU students: The PHIL1034 course page is here.

I’ve belatedly posted this preprint of a paper written between 1998 and 2005 and published in Philosophy East & West 57.4 (2007): 420–56, because I think it makes a significant contribution to a debate highlighted recently in Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy. Unfortunately, the Dao discussion took place without any reference to the arguments in this paper, nor to the linguistic work by Dan Robins on which some of these arguments are based.

The paper critiques Chad Hansen’s “mass noun hypothesis,” arguing that though most Classical Chinese nouns do function as mass nouns, this fact does not support the claim that pre-Qín thinkers treat the extensions of common nouns as mereological wholes, nor does it explain why they adopt nominalist semantic theories. The paper shows that early texts explain the use of common nouns by appeal to similarity relations, not mereological relations. However, it further argues that some early texts do characterize the relation between individuals and collections as a mereological relation. It includes a detailed review of the literature on the mass noun hypothesis up to 2005.

For an abstract and full-text preprint, see this page.

I’ve posted a preprint of a forthcoming paper on the concept of truth in Mohist dialectics, including the Mozi core books and the dialectical texts. The paper discusses Chad Hansen’s well-known claim that Chinese philosophy has no concept of truth. I affirm two of Hansen’s key claims, namely that early Chinese thought overall has a practical or pragmatic orientation and that early Chinese philosophy of language focuses on subsentential expresssions such as terms or phrases rather than on subject-predicate sentences. However, I argue that neither of these points entails that the Mohists are unconcerned with truth, or concerned only with some pragmatic or ethical normative status other than truth, and that the Mohist dialectical texts clearly employ concepts whose expressive role corresponds to that of truth. The full paper is available here.

Update: The conference program is here.

Later this month I’ll be attending an international workshop in Singapore called “Global Themes in Ethical Naturalism,” hosted by the Department of Philosophy of the National University of Singapore, June 27–28. My talk will be entitled “Chinese Naturalism and the Limits of Ethics.” An abstract follows. (more…)

I will be offering two undergraduate courses in the 2011–2012 academic year:

Semester 1: PHIL2420 Chinese Philosophy: Metaphysics

Semester 2: PHIL1034 Introduction to Philosophy: Ethics and Politics, East and West

A postgraduate reading group will be arranged for PHIL2420.

Joseph Chan, of HKU’s Department of Politics and Public Administration, has organized a mini-workshop on Confucian Political Philosophy to be held 29 April 2011 (at 2 pm)  in the PPA dept library. The speakers will be Joseph himself and Daniel A. Bell, of Tsinghua University, along with four commentators: Ci Jiwei and Fan Ruiping, on Joseph’s paper, and P. J. Ivanhoe and myself, on Daniel’s. Joseph’s topic is “Interplay between ideal and nonideal thinking in early Confucian political thought: A reconstruction and application,” while Daniel’s is “Confucianism and nationalism: A reconciliation.” I’m sure we’ll have some lively discussion.

UPDATE: Anyone who would like the text of my remarks is welcome to contact me.

Update: The web page for the workshop is here.

The Department of Philosophy of the University of Hong Kong will be holding a workshop entitled “Happiness and the Dao: Ancient Greek and Chinese Approaches to Ethics,” March 25–26, 20111. The workshop is organized by Patrick Hawley, Chair of the Department of Philosophy. Presenters will include A. A. Long, Nicholas D. Smith, Lisa Raphals, Yong Huang, Chad Hansen, Siu-fu Tang, Timothy O’Leary, and myself. My talk will be entitled “Rational Souls or Virtuoso Performers? λόγος versus Dào-dé 道德 in Ancient Greek and Chinese Thought.”

The workshop announcement follows. (Continued…)

I was the kick-off speaker at a recent conference in Taiwan entitled “英美哲學觀點下的中國哲學研究”—or “Chinese Philosophy from the Perspective of Anglo-American Philosophy.” Although the conference was held December 17–18 at National Cheng Chih University 國立政治大學 in Taipei, I only recently noticed the website here. This was an enjoyable event that gave me the great pleasure of meeting up with a dozen or more old friends from Taiwan. I presented my forthcoming paper on “Knowledge and Error in Early Chinese Thought.”

An exciting event for those of us who work on Chinese logic is the upcoming workshop on “The History of Logic in China” scheduled for November 24–25 in Amsterdam. The workshop is organized by Prof. Johan van Benthem and Dr. Fenrong Liu and hosted by the International Institute for Asian Studies. My contribution will be an ambitious paper called “Distinctions, Judgment, and Reasoning in Classical Chinese Thought” that I’ve kept on the back burner for almost ten years now. Although ideas from the paper have appeared in several of my articles, I’m happy to finally present the whole thing. I’ll post a draft of the paper here eventually. In the meantime, an abstract follows. (Continued…)

Update: This paper appears in Asian Philosophy 21.1 (2011): 97–121. For a related blog discussion, see this.

I’ve just returned from an August 27 conference at Chonnam 全南 University in Gwangju 光州, Korea, entitled “Reflection on Philosophical Roots of Korean Emotion,” which covered Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. For me this was an interesting and unusual event, as most of the presentations were in Korean, with simultaneous interpretation. I’m grateful to Prof. Yonghwan Chung and the other organizers, who arranged a very successful program. It was a pleasure to see old friends such as Hagop Sarkissian and Georg Moeller and to meet many new colleagues from Korea, China, and Japan.

My contribution to the conference was an extension of recent work I’ve done on Zhuangzi. A precis follows. (Read more…)

A long-term research interest of mine is to bring classical Chinese epistemology into dialogue with contemporary epistemology. I’ve just posted a preprint of one contribution to this project, an extensively revised version of my paper “Knowledge and Error in Early Chinese Thought.” The paper is forthcoming in Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy.

The editing work on our forthcoming anthology, Ethics in Early China, is about done. The volume is edited by myself, Dan Robins, and Timothy O’Leary and will be published by HKU Press. A table of contents is available here.

Update (May 8, 2010): A pdf preprint of the Introduction is available here.

On April 23, 2010, the “Philosophy, Therapy, and Medicine” research cluster of HKU’s Centre for the Humanities and Medicine will hold a research workshop entitled “Death: Philosophy, Therapy, Medicine.”  The workshop is organized by my colleague Barbara Dalle Pezze. I’ll be giving a talk entitled “Xúnzǐ and Zhuāngzǐ: Two Approaches to Death in Classical Chinese Thought,” as part of a panel on “Death, Dying, and Bereavement: Cross-cultural Considerations.” An abstract follows. (Read more…)

I’ve posted a discussion of the significance of Zhuangist political thought here at “Warp, Weft, and Way.” To my knowledge, this is among the few discussions of Daoist political philosophy available on line.

I was asked recently to recommend a textbook or two on Classical Chinese. Although I myself don’t teach language courses, my understanding is that two recent textbooks are both quite good. Read on…

On Dec. 10–11, 2009, the HKU Department of Philosophy hosted a quite successful international conference on comparative philosophy: “Happiness East & West.” Details are here.

The conference organizer was my colleague Timothy O’Leary. Much thanks to Timothy for planning the event and to the Louis Cha Fund, the HKU Faculty of Arts, and the HKU School of Humanities for their sponsorship.

My own contribution to the “Happiness” conference is called “Wandering the Way: A Eudaimonistic Approach to the Zhuangzi.”

Update (Jan 3 2010): A working draft of my paper is here. A précis follows. Read on…

Manyul Im has transformed his very successful Chinese Philosophy Blog into a new group blog devoted to Chinese and comparative philosophy. The new blog is called “Warp, Weft, and Way.” (Manyul’s old blog will remain online as an archive.) As one of the administrators of the new blog, I encourage everyone — especially students — to visit and to comment on posts, if you have observations or arguments to offer or questions to raise.

From June 25–28, I will be attending what promises to be quite an interesting workshop hosted by Professors Carine Defoort and Nicolas Standaert at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven entitled “The Many Faces of Mozi: A Synchronic and Diachronic Study of Mohist Thought.” Despite the title, the workshop actually focuses on the “Dialogue” and “Summary” books of the Mozi, not the core essays. My own paper is on the ethical thought of the Mohist “Dialogues,” specifically how they differ from the core essays. An abstract follows.

Read more…

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.