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.
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)
Our friends from Université de Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne return for a third installment of their symposium Arts & Pragmatism: From Ordinary Aesthetics to Post Creation.
This day-long symposium will be chaired by Yann Toma and Sandra Laugier. From the organizers:
We have noticed it during the two previous symposia of our program: the pragmatist philosophy and in particular Dewey defends the idea that aesthetics must not only be considered as the search for truths about art and its creations but also as what concerns the experience of the persons with an artwork (a sensitive and active experience). The reception would thus be the dynamic experience of an incarnated observer, acting, feeling in his senses and his affects what is the work and what it makes him feel.
The political stake of the pragmatist aesthetics is to make sure that the strong aesthetic experiences remain open and accessible to the largest public and become even a «matter of ordinary conversation». It is then a matter of thinking about shared experience as a transmission of values, an important phenomenon for the moral, political, “educational” reflection of adults» (Cavell 1979, 1981, Shusterman, Laugier 2019, 2023, Gerrits 2020). Thus, this question of pragmatism addresses societal issues that concern all audiences, not just from a broadcast/transmission perspective. By focusing on experience and agency, this way of approaching pragmatism involves the cultural audience in a broad way to the point where it engages mediums such as television and in general digital cultures.
The concept of Post-Creation, insofar as it plays a form of exteriority to an original Creation, has all its place in a world where the strong aesthetic experiences remain open and accessible to a wider public. It is a question of placing the creation beyond what is biased, in the heart of a form of Third State of the artistic act in charge of a heuristic and critical potential, towards a form extracted from the zone of influence of the world of the art as such. The idea of Post-Creation tends towards the universal that would be the fact of conceiving the creation beyond any not institutionalized academism. We will see how a possible emulation between the ordinary aesthetic and the shared experience of the Post-Creation is articulated and played, where the experience of the creation produces knowledge and transforms what is out of the specific field of perception of the art in so many new acting and reflexive spaces. In that, the influence of the artistic creation on whole sections of the society, domains of perception until now inaccessible, becomes a stake of opening which results from the transformation of a form of ordinary aesthetics in a Post-Creation freed from the aesthetic channels of the contemporary art.
Program:
10:30AM : Opening Yann Toma, Sandra Laugier and François Noudelmann
11:00AM – 1:00PM : Panel I Pragmatism and the Project of an Ordinary Aesthetics
Chair : Yann Toma
Andrew Brandel (Penn State University) From the Aesthetics of the Everyday Life to Ordinary Aesthetics.
Barbara Formis (Panthéon-Sorbonne University) Doings and redoings of the Identical.
Sandra Laugier (Panthéon-Sorbonne) Ordinary Creation and Shared Culture.
Emmanuel Kattan (Columbia University) What happens when nothing happens: Chantal Akerman, Francis Ponge, Marisa Merz and the emergence of time.
1:00PM – 3:00PM : Lunch Break
3:00PM – 6:00PM : Panel II Pragmatism, Post-Creation
Chair : Sandra Laugier
Yann Toma (Artist/Panthéon-Sorbonne University) Post-Creation, a new way of making creation
The example of L’Or bleu.
Jung Hee Choi (artist and author of «Manifest Unmanifest») Dream House.
Dan Thomas (United Nations Global Compact), The importance of Art and Perception in the Diplomatic Way.
Warren Neidich (Artist and Founding Director Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art) The Brain Without Organs and the Ecocene.
This event is organized with the support of Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Politique scientifique program, and La Maison Française at New York University
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 philosophy of art, as practiced in the western world, has tended to have two divided homes: in analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. Within the analytic tradition, the philosophy of art has recently undergone a revival with the emphasis on perception. This has more closely aligned art theory to science and questions of biology as well as to issues within psychology. The continental tradition has traditionally drawn upon phenomenology’s first-person experience with its ties to embodied perception as well as the social and historical concerns of the social aspect of art. In the realm itself of visual art, the state of (so-called) post-post modernism has resulted in both the dissolution of belief in progress and even, according to some art critics, a lamentable stagnation. But many philosophers of the last century, beginning with Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Nelson Goodman, etc., have suggested that art needs to be thought of within its social, pragmatic, or epistemological functions, suggesting perhaps a need to think of art outside the confines of modernism’s stylistic revolutions and formalist issues. Relatedly, the pluralism within science could be accessed as model for this enterprise. Multiple views on a phenomenon are required due to the complexity of the enterprise, and the practice of both making art and of perceiving it might be in that category. This conference seeks to bring these strands, the analytical and the continental ones, together and evaluate how to move forward with art theory in an age of globalization.
We welcome submissions on these possible questions:
1. Should we value a diversity of perspectives in art theory? If so, what is the value? If not, why not?
2. Are there aspects of art that we presume to be universal that are, in fact, culturally situated?
3. How should different ways of experiencing art be characterized?
4. What is the epistemological function of art?
5. How does the monetary role in art affect both the artist and the perceiver of art?
6. How do the mechanics of seeing (e.g., gist perception, peripheral vision, etc.) affect how we experience art?
7. How does the practice of making art relate to the first-person experience?
8. What role does Husserl’s “bracketing” have in the viewing or making of art?
9. Are there specific non-western traditions that provide a better explanatory solution for the role of art than have the competing paradigms of continental and analytic?
We welcome your participation and look forward to your contributions. Papers should not extend over 45 minutes. Q & A are 15 minutes.
To submit anonymized abstract BY JULY 15, 2024: papers: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe5c9bmoBYb3hCAb0YWWfzV0BLWbhig2PD5VeKU358VA3RKGw/viewform?usp=sf_link
We are pleased to announce that the 2024 meeting of the Northeast Conference on Chinese Thought (NECCT) will be held on November 2-3 at Baruch College, City University of New York. This annual meeting is an opportunity for scholars of Chinese thought (broadly construed) from across the northeast US (also somewhat broadly construed) to gather and share their research. As we are interested in generating interdisciplinary discussions, we welcome work of any disciplinary/methodological orientation that bears on Chinese thought.
- When: Saturday, November 2-Sunday, November 3, 2024
- Where: Baruch College, CUNY, New York, NY
- Format: Approximately fifteen thirty-minute slots. We ask that presenters plan for a twenty-minute presentation and allow for a ten-minute Q&A.
- Meals, Travel, and Accommodations: Presenters will be provided with lunch and dinner at the conference. Presenters are expected to pay for their own travel and accommodations.
- Submissions: Please email your paper proposals by July 31st to nell.evans@baruch.cuny.edu with the subject line “NECCT 2024 Submission”. The paper proposal should be a one-page document with a title and abstract. It should be anonymized for review. We expect to have the schedule finalized by August 15th.
We are grateful for the generous financial support of CUNY Graduate Center and the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College.
Please direct any questions about the conference to Hagop Sarkissian (hagop.sarkissian@baruch.cuny.edu) or Wenqing Zhao (zhaowenqing711@gmail.com).
We look forward to hearing from you!
NECCT Organizing Committee:
Stephen Angle (Wesleyan University)
Mick Hunter (Yale University)
Andrew Lambert (CUNY College of Staten Island)
Ellen Neskar (Sarah Lawrence College)
Thomas Radice (Southern Connecticut State University)
Hagop Sarkissian (CUNY Graduate Center/Baruch College CUNY)
Christopher Yang (Brown University)
Wenqing Zhao (Baruch College, CUNY)