Rutgers Workshop on Chinese Philosophy (RWCP) was launched in 2012. Co-directed by Tao Jiang, Dean Zimmerman and Stephen Angle, RWCP is designed to build a bridge between Chinese philosophy and Western analytic philosophy and to promote critical engagement and constructive dialogue between the two sides, with the hope of bringing the study of Chinese philosophy into the mainstream of philosophical discourse within the Western academy. It is run every other year, usually in late spring.
5th Rutgers Workshop on Chinese Philosophy: Chinese Philosophy and Virtue Epistemology
The 5th RWCP will be held on Friday, April 17, 2020. In this one-day workshop, six scholars of Chinese philosophy will engage two leading virtue epistemologists, Ernest Sosa and Linda Zagzebski. The program and papers will be available in the spring of 2020, one month before the workshop. RSVP will become available at that time as well, and it is required for attendance. Please stay tuned.
FAQs
1. Where can I park?
Details will be provided as we get closer to the day of the workshop.
2. How can I get to the event on public transportation?
Take the NJ Transit Northeast Corridor Line to New Brunswick (njtransit.com). Make sure the train stops at New Brunswick as some might skip it during rush hours.
Co-sponsored by Rutgers Global-China Office and the Confucius Institute.
ABSTRACT: The Shenzi Fragments, numbering a mere 3,000 or so characters in length, is all that remains of a work attributed to Shen Dao (ca. 350-275 BCE). While perhaps best known for his appearance in the Han Feizi as an advocate for positional power (勢 shi), he also makes an appearance in the Xunzi as one who is blinded by his focus on 法 fa (models, standards, laws). We will examine the fragments that discuss fa in an attempt to come to a deeper understanding of the role that these fragments see for the fa, how they are to be determined, and why Shen Dao took them to be central to a strong, stable, and flourishing state. The fragments, in classical Chinese with English translations (Harris 2016), are included here as a PDF attachment.
DATE: October 22, 2021
TIME: 7:00-8:30 pm
This seminar will take place via Zoom (please scroll down for the full invitation). Below you will find the link to join the meeting. The attached file is an instruction manual to help you familiarize yourself with the program. In addition to familiarizing yourself with the program’s basic functions, there are two things we ask you to do before the meeting can start. First, you will need to sign in by typing your name in the chat. Subsequently, we will have to agree on the privacy policy for the meeting. The privacy policy provided by the Columbia University Seminars Office will be read aloud. To indicate your agreement, you will raise your virtual Zoom hand in the Participants panel. In the manual, you will find step-by-step instructions of how to sign in and to raise your hand.
Lead Presenter: Eirik Lang Harris
Discussants: Alejandro Bárcenas (Texas State University), Yutang Jin (Princeton University), Mercedes Valmisa (Gettysburg College)
Note Regarding Donations: Due to COVID-19, donations are only accepted through Columbia University’s secure online giving form, Giving to Columbia.
THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY
Presents: Li Zehou on the ‘Deep Structures of Confucianism’
Lead Presenter: Andrew Lambert (College of Staten Island, CUNY)
Discussants: Robert A. Carleo III (East China Normal University), Emma Buchtel (Hong Kong Education University)
ABSTRACT: Contemporary Chinese intellectual Li Zehou’s cross-cultural methodology blends traditional Confucian thought with thinkers such as Kant and Marx. This seminar addresses the question of culture and its role in Li’s thought. Li has made several claims about how a settled cultural tradition influences the subjects within it. One such claim concerns the existence of ‘deep structures’ of Confucianism, as outlined in this preparatory reading. The idea is that culture, history, and social practice (collectively, a tradition) shape human psychology (including the formation of concepts, emotions, and values) in ways not always apparent to the subject. Within the Chinese tradition, Confucianism constitutes such a deep structure, and its effects cannot be captured by textual studies alone, nor studies of material culture. Rather, the deep structure is articulated in terms of an emergent shared subjectivity. Such traditions can evolve and ultimately dissolve; nevertheless, their effects are deep-rooted. This seminar meeting will aim to identify the parameters of Li’s ambitious theoretical framework and its plausibility, and to explore connections with current work in related fields, such as cultural and empirical psychology.
DATE: March 25, 2022
TIME: 6:30 – 8:00 pm EST
This seminar will take place via Zoom (please scroll down for the full invitation). Below you will find the link to join the meeting. Here is an instruction manual to help you familiarize yourself with the program. In addition to familiarizing yourself with the program’s basic functions, there are two things we ask you to do before the meeting can start. First, you will need to sign in by typing your name in the chat. Subsequently, we will have to agree on the privacy policy for the meeting. The privacy policy provided by the Columbia University Seminars Office will be read aloud. To indicate your agreement, you will raise your virtual Zoom hand in the Participants panel. In the manual, you will find step-by-step instructions of how to sign in and to raise your hand.
Note Regarding Donations: Due to COVID-19, donations are only accepted through Columbia University’s secure online giving form, Giving to Columbia.
Accessibility Statement: Columbia University encourages persons with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. The University Seminars participants with dis- abilities who anticipate needing accommodations or who have questions about physical access may contact the Office of Disability Services at 212.854.2388 or disability@columbia.edu. Disability accommodations, including sign-language interpreters, are available on request. Requests for accommodations must be made two weeks in advance. On campus, seminar participants with disabilities should alert a Public Safety Officer if they need assistance accessing campus.
PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE: https://universityseminars.columbia.edu/seminars/comparative-philosophy/
RSVP is required for both in-person and remote attendance. Click here to RSVP.
Rutgers Workshop on Chinese Philosophy (RWCP) was launched in 2012. It is designed to build a bridge between Chinese philosophy and Western analytic philosophy and to promote critical engagement and constructive dialogue between the two sides, with the hope of bringing the study of Chinese philosophy into the mainstream of philosophical discourse within the Western academy. It is run every other year, usually in late spring.
- Thursday, 12-2pm: Mini-Course Lecture 1: “Learning from Chinese Philosophy” (presents an overview of how Chinese philosophy was originally accepted into the Anglo-European canon but later excluded due to pseudo-scientific racism, along with brief overviews of several ancient Chinese philosophers, including Kongzi [Confucius], Mozi, Mengzi, and Zhuangzi)
- Thursday, 3-5pm: Mini-Course Lecture 2: “Mengzi’s Virtue Ethics” (introduces the Confucian Mengzi, and his conceptions of human nature, ethical cultivation, and the cardinal virtues)
- Friday, 10am-12pm: Mini-Course Lecture 3: “Zhuangzi’s Therapeutic Critique” (introduces the Daoist Zhuangzi, who presents arguments for skepticism and relativism that I argue are “therapeutic” rather than “systematic” in Rorty’s senses)
- Friday, 2-4pm: Mini-Course Lecture 4: “Zhu Xi & Wang Yangming on Weakness of Will (briefly introduces the medieval “Neo-Confucian” synthesis of Buddhism and Confucianism, and how two seminal Confucian philosophers took opposing views on the possibility of acting against moral knowledge)
This event will feature a thought-provoking panel discussion with sexual and reproductive justice experts on the value of the sexual and reproductive justice framework and how it can be applied to diverse stakeholders, settings, and contexts. Panelists will also highlight examples from around the world of momentum towards sexual and reproductive justice.
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration is required for both in-person and online attendance. For additional information, please visit the event webpage. Please email Malia Maier at mm5352@cumc.columbia.edu with any questions. All in-person attendees must follow Columbia’s COVID-19 policies.
Hosted by the Global Health Justice and Governance Program at Columbia University.
Poets and singers in a number of medieval vernacular languages reached non-native audiences and inspired speakers of other languages to compose in theirs; and many imagined their compositions enjoying a universality similar to that of cosmopolitan languages like Latin and Arabic. An interesting rationalization of these aspirations can be discerned in a short verse narrative of a well-known episode in the youth of Alexander the Great, conqueror of India, together with his tutor, the philosopher Aristotle. Not only does it involve Greeks and Indians singing French songs and cosplaying French lovers, but the philosopher is induced to pretend to be a horse and then justifies his behavior as “natural,” with far-reaching implications which this talk will explore.
Sarah Kay is Professor Emerita in the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University and Life Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge. In Spring 2023, she is Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Columbia Society of Senior Scholars.
This talk is presented by the Columbia Maison Française, Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, The Society of Senior Scholars, the Department of Music, and Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Conceptual misalignment is a pervasive phenomenon in the studies of Non-Western philosophy and the History of Philosophy (NW&HP). However, conceptual misalignment is often undetected, unsuspected, or seen as a hurdle that NW&HP materials need to overcome to contribute to contemporary discussions. Specifically, conceptual misalignment refers to the following: In the process of crystalizing NW&HP materials, a linguistic coordination of concepts is formed between the speaker, i.e., NW&HP, and its context of contemporary anglophone philosophy. However, in philosophically meaningful ways, the original NW&HP concept and its anglophone counterpart misalign. This misalignment is particularly intricate and hard to detect when it comes to emotion concepts, as they are thought to involve phenomenal and/or intentional features. Through investigating the concept of emotion in Chinese philosophy, I propose a refocusing on conceptual misalignment as a method of cross-cultural comparative and history of philosophy. Moreover, I argue that conceptual misalignment is an important resource for contemporary conceptual engineering and amelioration projects.
With responses from Andrew Lambert (College of Staten Island, CUNY)
RSVP is required for dinner. Dinner will take place at a nearby restaurant. Please contact Lucilla at lm3335@columbia.edu for further information.
Rutgers Workshop on Chinese Philosophy (RWCP) was launched in 2012. It is designed to build a bridge between Chinese philosophy and Western analytic philosophy and to promote critical engagement and constructive dialogue between the two sides, with the hope to diversify the practice of philosophy by bringing the study of Chinese philosophy into the mainstream of philosophical discourse within the Western academy. It is run every other year, usually in late spring.
Sixth RWCP, “New Voices in Chinese Philosophy,” will be held in person, with live streaming through Zoom, on Friday, April 28, 2023. Six junior scholars of Chinese philosophy, representing new voices in the field, will engage six more senior scholars. This year’s workshop is co-sponsored by Rutgers Global, Religion Department, Rutgers Center for the Philosophy of Religion, and Philosophy Department. RSVP is required for attendance, either in-person (limited to the room capacity) or online. Click here to register.
Program
8:20a.m. Breakfast
8:50a.m. – 9:00a.m. Welcoming Remarks
Karen Bennett, Chair of Philosophy Department, Rutgers University
9:00a.m. – 10:00a.m. “Relational Normativity: Williams’s Thick Ethical Concepts in Confucian Ethical Communities”
Presenter: Sai-Ying Ng (CUNY Graduate Center)
Commentator: Alex Guerrero (Rutgers University)
Moderator: Stephen Angle (Wesleyan University)
Rapporteur: Esther Goh (Rutgers University)
10:00a.m. – 10:15a.m. tea break
10:15a.m. – 11:15a.m. “Paradoxes in the Zhuangzi”
Presenter: Chun-Man Kwong (University of Oxford)
Commentator: Graham Priest (CUNY Graduate Center)
Moderator: Karen Bennett (Rutgers University)
Rapporteur: Adrian Liu (Rutgers University)
11:15a.m. – 11:30a.m. tea break
11:30a.m. – 12:30p.m. “A Mohist Theory of Reference”
Presenter: Susan Blake (Skidmore College)
Commentator: Jane Geaney (University of Richmond)
Moderator: Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers University)
Rapporteur: Esther Goh (Rutgers University)
12:30p.m. – 1:30p.m. Lunch (onsite)
1:30p.m. – 2:30p.m. “Wealth, Poverty, and Living a Moral Life: Confucius and Mencius”
Presenter: Frederick Choo (Rutgers University)
Commentator: Stephen Angle (Wesleyan University)
Moderator: Tanja Sargent (Rutgers University)
Rapporteur: Esther Goh (Rutgers University)
2:30p.m. – 2:45p.m. tea break
2:45p.m. – 3:45p.m. “Gratitude and Debt in Western and Confucian Ethics”
Presenter: Choo Lok-Chui (Nanyang Technological University)
Commentator: Frances Kamm (Rutgers University)
Moderator: Hagop Sarkissian (CUNY Baruch College)
Rapporteur: Esther Goh (Rutgers University)
3:45p.m. – 4:00p.m. tea break
4:00p.m. – 5:00p.m. “‘Flying by Not Having Wings’ — in and beyond the Zhuangzi”
Presenter: L. K. Gustin Law (University of Chicago)
Commentator: Lincoln Rathnam (Duke Kunshan University)
Moderator: George Tsai (University of Hawaii at Manoa)
Rapporteur: Esther Goh (Rutgers University)
The International Conference on Brain Informatics (BI) series has established itself as the world’s premier research conference on Brain Informatics, which is an emerging interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research field that combines the efforts of Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, Machine Learning, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to explore the main problems that lie in the interplay between human brain studies and informatics research.
The 16th International Conference on Brain Informatics (BI’23) provides a premier international forum to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse fields for presentation of original research results, as well as exchange and dissemination of innovative and practical development experiences on brain Informatics research, brain-inspired technologies and brain/mental health applications.
The key theme of the conference is “Brain Science meets Artificial Intelligence“.
The BI’23 solicits high-quality original research and application papers (both full paper and abstract submissions). Relevant topics include but are not limited to:
- Track 1: Cognitive and Computational Foundations of Brain Science
- Track 2: Human Information Processing Systems
- Track 3: Brain Big Data Analytics, Curation and Management
- Track 4: Informatics Paradigms for Brain and Mental Health Research
- Track 5: Brain-Machine Intelligence and Brain-Inspired Computing
Keynote Speakers
Professor Emery N. Brown
MIT, Massachusetts General Hospital, USA
Profile: Emery Neal Brown is the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a practicing anesthesiologist at MGH. At MIT he is the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and professor of computational neuroscience, the Associate Director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and the Director of the Harvard–MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. Brown is one of only 19 individuals who has been elected to all three branches of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, as well as the first African American and the first anesthesiologist to be elected to all three National Academies.
Professor Bin He
Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Profile: Bin He is the Trustee Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Professor of the Neuroscience Institute, and Professor by courtesy of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. He has made significant research and education contributions to the field of neuroengineering and biomedical imaging, including functional biomedical imaging, noninvasive brain-computer interface (BCI), and noninvasive neuromodulation. His pioneering research has helped transforming electroencephalography from a 1-dimensional detection technique to 3-dimensional neuroimaging modality. His lab demonstrated for the first time for humans to fly a drone and control a robotic arm just by thinking about it using a noninvasive BCI. He is an elected Fellow of International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering (IAMBE), American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), and IEEE. Dr. He served as a Past President of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering from 2013-2018, the Chair of the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering from 2018-2021. Dr. He has been a Member of NIH BRAIN Initiative Multi-Council Working Group from 2014-2019.
Professor John Ngai
NIH BRAIN Initiative, USA
Profile: John J. Ngai, Ph.D., is the Director of the NIH’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. Dr. Ngai earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry and biology from Pomona College, Claremont, California, and Ph.D. in biology from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons before starting his faculty position at the University of California at Berkeley. During more than 25 years as a Berkeley faculty member, Dr. Ngai has trained 20 undergraduate students, 24 graduate students and 15 postdoctoral fellows in addition to teaching well over 1,000 students in the classroom. His work has led to the publication of more than 70 scientific articles in some of the field’s most prestigious journals and 10 U.S. and international patents. Dr. Ngai has received many awards including from the Sloan Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, and McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience. As a faculty member, Dr. Ngai has served as the director of Berkeley’s Neuroscience Graduate Program and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. He has also provided extensive service on NIH study sections, councils and steering groups, including as previous co-chair of the NIH BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Consortium Steering Group. Dr. Ngai oversees the long-term strategy and day-to-day operations of the NIH BRAIN Initiative as it strives to revolutionize our understanding of the brain in both health and disease.
Professor Helen Mayberg
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, USA
Profile: Helen Mayberg is a neurologist recognized for her neuroimaging studies of brain circuits in depression and their translation to the development of deep brain stimulation as a novel therapeutic for treatment resistant patients. Born and raised in Southern California, she received a BA in Psychobiology from UCLA and a MD from the University of Southern California, then trained in Neurology at Columbia’s Neurological Institute in New York and did a research fellowship in nuclear medicine at Johns Hopkins. She had early academic appointments at Johns Hopkins and the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio, held the inaugural Sandra Rotman Chair in Neuropsychiatry at the University of Toronto, the first Dorothy C. Fuqua Chair in Psychiatric Imaging and Therapeutics at Emory University and is now the Mount Sinai Professor of Neurotherapeutics at the Icahn School of Medicine where she is founding Director of the Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics. She is a member of the both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine as well as the National Academy of Inventors and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Vinod Goel
York University, Canada
Profile: Vinod Goel is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at York University, Toronto, Canada. He completed his PhD in cognitive science at UC-Berkeley, and received postdoctoral training in neuroscience at the NIH (NINDS) and the Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology, Institute of Neurology, UCL, UK. He has made significant empirical contributions to our understanding of the roles of prefrontal cortex in real-world problem solving and reasoning, hemispheric asymmetry in prefrontal cortex, and models of rationality, using the methodologies of fMRI and lesion studies. He has most recently completed a book reconstructing the role of rationality in human behavior entitled “Reason and Less: Pursuing Food, Sex, and Politics” (The MIT Press, 2022). His current project is to explore the implications of this work on our understanding of reason and legal responsibility.
Professor Amy Kuceyeski
Cornell University, USA
Profile: Amy Kuceyeski is an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Neuroscience in Radiology at Weill Cornell Medicine and the Computational Biology Department at Cornell University. She is the director of the Computational Connectomics (CoCo) Laboratory and the Machine Learning in Medicine group at Cornell. Over the past 14 years, she has been working to understand the human brain using quantitative modeling approaches, including machine learning, to map anatomical and physiological characteristics to behavior. Specifically, she is interested in understanding how brains recover from injury so we can devise strategies, possibly via non-invasive neuromodulation, to support natural recovery processes. She also performs research at the intersection of biological and artificial neural networks that aims to understand how human brains process incoming visual information.
Professor Patrick Purdon
Harvard Medical School, USA
Profile: Patrick L. Purdon, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School and the Nathaniel M. Sims Endowed Chair in Anesthesia Innovation and Bioengineering at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Purdon received his A.B. in Engineering Sciences from Harvard College in 1996, his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1998, and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from MIT in 2005. Dr. Purdon’s research in neuroengineering encompasses the mechanisms of anesthesia, Alzheimer’s disease and brain health, anesthesia and the developing brain, neural signal processing, and the development of novel technologies for brain monitoring. He has published over 90 peer-reviewed publications, is an inventor on 16 pending patents, and is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Dr. Purdon has won numerous awards, including the prestigious National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award.
Important Dates
- 15 April 2023: Full paper submission deadline
- 20 April 2023: Workshop proposal deadline
- 10 May 2023: Abstract presentation submission deadline
- 30 May 2023: Final paper and abstract acceptance notification
- 20 Jun 2023: Accepted paper and abstract registration deadline
- 1-3 Aug 2023: The Brain Informatics Conference
Paper Submission and Publications
Full Paper (Regular):
1. 9-12 pages are strongly encouraged for the regular papers including figures and references in Springer LNCS Proceedings format(https://www.springer.com/us/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines). Over length papers will be charged for 100$ per page.
2. All papers will be peer-reviewed and accepted based on originality, significance of contribution, technical merit, and presentation quality.
3. All papers accepted (and all workshop & special sessions’ full-length papers) will be published by Springer as a volume of the Springer-Nature LNAI Brain Informatics Book Series(https://link.springer.com/conference/brain).
Abstract (Only for Workshops/Special Sessions):
Research abstracts are encouraged and will be accepted for presentations in an oral presentation format and/or poster presentation format. Each abstract submission should include the title of the paper and an abstract body within 500 words. The abstract will not be included in the conference proceedings to be published by Springer.
Journal Opportunities:
High-quality BI conference papers will be nominated for a fast-track review and publication at the Brain Informatics Journal, (https://braininformatics.springeropen.com/) an international, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary Open Access journal published by Springer Nature. Discount or no open access article-processing fee will be charged for BI conference paper authors.
Special Issues & Books Opportunities:
Workshop/special session organizers and BI conference session chairs may consider and can be invited to prepare a book proposal of special topics for possible book publication in the Springer-Nature Brain Informatics & Health Book Series (https://www.springer.com/series/15148), or a special issue at the Brain Informatics Journal.
Poster-Conference Publication
1. Accepted full papers will be selected to publish in the Brain Informatics Journal upon revision.
2. Discount or no article-processing fee will be charged for authors of Brain Informatics conference (https://braininformatics.springeropen.com/).
3. The organizers of Workshops and Special-Sessions are invited to prepare a book proposal based on the topics of the workshop/special session for possible book publication in the Springer-Nature Brain Informatics and Health book series (http://www.springer.com/series/15148).