Chris Fraser 方克濤

Our recent anthology Ethics in Early China, published by HKU Press, is available through Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and similar sites. For the table of contents and Introduction, see this page.

In October 2010, a short documentary called “Opening Dao” by Gennaro Ambrosino was released in which I am interviewed discussing classical Daoism. The film is a bit of a mixed bag, but I hope my part came out well. I actually spoke mainly about the Zhuangzi, but most of that material was cut in order to emphasize the Daodejing. Also interviewed is Chad Hansen, who hoped the waterfall behind him would help convey Daoist ideas; instead it mainly drowned out his voice! The film can be viewed here.

I was recently interviewed for a pair of RTHK radio shows in the fun and interesting series “The Big Idea,” hosted by the delightful Vanessa Collingridge. The most recent episode, on Daoism, aired January 21, 2012, and can be heard here. The other interviewee is my teacher and colleague Chad Hansen.

An earlier episode, on Happiness, aired November 26, 2011, and can be heard here. In this show, I’m paired with my colleague and good friend Timothy O’Leary, also of HKU.

The whole series is highly recommended. An episode about Confucianism with Sungmoon Kim and P. J. Ivanhoe of City University of HK can be heard 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. Continued…

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. A preprint can be downloaded here. 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.