Schedule | Papers and Abstracts | Participants

Mini-Conference on Neo-Confucian Moral Psychology

83rd Annual APA Pacific Division Meeting
April 8-12, 2009, Westin Bayshore, Vancouver, CA


Invitation

This year’s Pacific Division meeting of the APA features a mini-conference on China’s neo-Confucian philosophers, whose fundamental concerns dovetail with important issues in contemporary moral psychology and Western virtue ethics. Experts from all three of these areas will gives papers and comments. All attendees of the Pacific Division meeting are welcome.


About neo-Confucianism

Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200)

The Chinese philosophers under scrutiny--the neo-Confucians--are a large and prolific group of thinkers who lived and wrote in the 11th through 18th centuries of dynastic China. They generally saw themselves as defenders of Confucianism but were highly influenced by Buddhist and Daoist metaphysics and theories of moral agency. Their philosophical interests were wide-ranging, but they were especially attentive to issues that concern moral cultivation, moral perception and reasoning, and the psychological structure of the virtues.

Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472-1529)

Mini-conference Format
This mini-conference consists of a series of four panels scheduled for Saturday (April 11) and Sunday (April 12). Each panel features papers by two to three specialists in neo-Confucian ethics, and each presenter is paired with a commentator who is a prominent specialist in contemporary moral psychology, Chinese philosophy, or Western virtue ethics.

One hour will be devoted to each presentation, which will be divided as follows:
Presentation: 20-25 minutes
Comments: 5-10 minutes
Discussion: 25-35 minutes

Papers will be posted on this web site on March 11. Attendees are welcome (and encouraged) to read them in advance. All papers have been written so as to be of interest to (and accessible to) a broad audience.

Organizing Committee
Stephen Angle (Wesleyan University)
Yong Huang (Kutztown University)
Philip J. Ivanhoe (City University of Hong Kong)
Pauline Lee (Washington University)
Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
Justin Tiwald (SF State University)

The organizers are grateful to the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association for a grant in aid of this mini-conference.

The organizers would also like to thank two co-sponsors, the Association of Chinese Philosophers in North American (ACPA) and the International Society for Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Philosophy (ISCWP).

Contact the organizers to RSVP or ask for more information about the conference.