THE COLUMBIA SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY
Welcomes:
TAO JIANG (Rutgers University)
With responses from:
ESKE MØLLGAARD (University of Rhode Island)
Please join us at Columbia University’s Religion Department on FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23rd at 5:30PM for his lecture entitled:
“Between Philosophy and History: The Challenge of Authorship to Classical Chinese Philosophy in the Western Academy”
The tension between philosophical and historical inquiries has been a perennial problem. Within the modern academy, the disciplines of philosophy and history are protected by their respective institutional norm and practice, without much need for interaction. However, Chinese philosophy, situated between Sinology and philosophy in the western academy, has encountered extraordinary challenges from both Sinologists (most of whom are historians) and (Western) philosophers. At the root of the difficulty facing Chinese philosophy lies its very legitimacy, torn between the historicist orientation of Sinology and the presentist orientation of mainstream contemporary Western philosophy. Such divergent disciplinary norms have put scholars of Chinese philosophy in a difficult position. On the one hand, they have to defend the philosophical nature, or even the philosophical worthiness, of classical Chinese texts in front of contemporary Western philosophers whose interests tend to be more issue-driven and in the philosophical integrity of ideas, rather than the historicity of ideas. At the same time, these scholars of Chinese philosophy, when dealing with Sinologists, need to justify the basic premise of their philosophical approach to the classics due to the historical ambiguity and compositional instability of these texts.
This presentation focuses a particular aspect of Sinological challenge to the modern project of classical Chinese philosophy through the lens of authorship, using the Zhuangzi as a case study. It explores profoundly troubling philosophical implications for texts whose authorship is in doubt as it undermines the legitimacy of the project of Chinese philosophy, at least in the eyes of many Sinologists. In order to counter such a challenge, I develop a new heuristic model of authorship and textuality in order to carve out a more robust intellectual space for the philosophical discourse on Chinese classics from the dominant historicist Sinological discourse. To do so, I propose a heuristic model to distinguish two sets of scholarly objects operative in Sinology and philosophy respectively, namely original text versus inherited text, historical author versus textual author, and authorial intent versus textual intent. These two sets of scholarly objects are related, at times overlapping but often irreducibly distinct, with the former in the pairs belonging to Sinologists and the latter to philosophers.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23
5:30-7:30 pm
Rm. 101, 80 Claremont Ave, Columbia University
Hagop Sarkissian (City University of New York, Baruch College | Graduate Center) will present his paper
“Experimental Philosophy and the Confucian Philosophical Tradition: A Brief History and Comparison.”
ABSTRACT:
Projects in contemporary experimental philosophy can be fruitfully divided into three broad types (Sarkissian and Nichols 2016): 1) Psychological Modeling aims to uncover the psychological mechanisms that underwrite and generate the application of concepts (such as free will and intentionality); 2) Extended Conceptual Analysis attempts to expand, verify, and strengthen traditional armchair methods by gathering data from a wider range of competent users of relevant concepts; and 3) Philosophical Restrictionism aims to curtail the ambition of traditional philosophical methods by showing that they recruit processes that are, in some way or other, unreliable. The latter two projects share in common a suspicion of traditional armchair analysis, or the reliability of methods that rely on intuition to a significant degree.
Experimental philosophy as so described is a development of the last twenty years or so—a reaction against many of the methods that gained prominence in Anglo-American philosophy departments during the last half of the 20th century. Hence, it is natural to think of experimental philosophy as a movement that has developed only at a certain time and place. In this paper, though, I argue that it is possible to see this basic dynamic—that is, the tension between intuition-driven philosophical methods on the one hand, and suspicion-driven experimentalism on the other—as expressed in a tradition far removed from the current context.
Historically, philosophers working within the Confucian tradition of Chinese thought have been divided about not only the substantive commitments of Confucian ethics, but also the proper methods of acquiring moral knowledge. Indeed, this latter division can be seen as analogous to the contemporary divide in Anglo-American analytic philosophy. A debate emerges in the classical period of Chinese thought among the Confucian thinkers Mengzi (or Mencius, ca. 4th century BCE) and Xunzi (ca. 3rd century BCE) concerning the proper role of innate knowledge or intuition on the hand, and systematic investigation on the other, in moral development. After lying dormant for several centuries, this debate re-emerges in later Neo-Confucian thinkers such as Zhu Xi (12th century CE) and Wang Yangming (15th to 16th century CE), who develop this dynamic in a sophisticated manner. I outline this debate, suggest reasons for its emergence and persistence, and assess the extent to which it is similar to (or departs from) the contemporary experimental philosophy debate.
All are welcome to attend. More information is available from the organizers: Ari Borrell , Tao Jiang, On-cho Ng, or Deborah Sommer.