丁香园AV

by Tessa Whittle

Will you tell me a bit about the Asian Philosophy Workshop you hosted last April?

I called this one the first annual Asian philosophy workshop, because I hope it will continue. It is a workshop organized by me and the two other faculty members working in Asian philosophy 鈥� and . The idea in general is to host a workshop on the West Coast specifically geared toward people who want to make connections between Asian philosophy and the way that philosophy is done in western departments. But I want that idea to be very broadly interpreted 鈥� I don鈥檛 want to add too many constraints. This year the topic was Chinese Metaphysics. It was a two-day workshop that took place in April, where we had 6 speakers from across North America (including one from Hong Kong, who is currently visiting Stanford).

Why did you decide to start organizing it?

I鈥檝e been working in Chinese philosophy, which is a newish interest for me and has historically been underrepresented in philosophy departments in North America. There are a few big conferences that the people who work in Chinese philosophy go to, like the , which are great, but I thought that there should be more. As far as I know there isn鈥檛 one on the west coast that is held regularly. So, I was hoping to have this be the west coast version of one of these conferences.

I also thought we had a great opportunity to make Vancouver a sort of known hub for Asian philosophy in general. We have three people working on Asian philosophy in our department. Other than (which is like, where Asian philosophers are trained), that is a really high percentage. In addition to the people working in Asian philosophy at UBC, that makes the lower mainland really concentrated on these research interests. So, I thought 鈥渓et鈥檚 draw attention to the work being done in this area here.鈥�

That would be really cool, it's great to have a concentration of people working together on shared interests. Why did you choose the topic Chinese Metaphysics specifically this year?

Well, first off, that鈥檚 what I鈥檓 working in. But there aren鈥檛 that many people who work in metaphysics in Chinese philosophy, so I thought it would be interesting.

I should also note that Chinese philosophy is a broad term, it鈥檚 like calling something Greek philosophy.

Right, there are so many different schools and eras.

Yeah exactly. So, for instance, there are people who work on classical Chinese philosophy. That actually gets over-represented, I think. And then there is a lot of neo-Confucianism, and there are people working in Chinese philosophy today. So, we got to cover a broad range of time periods in the workshop.

Since the topic isn鈥檛 unified by a historical era, can I ask if there any uniting threads thematically?

I don鈥檛 think I could give you one uniting thread per se. I do think there is more centrality of themes in Chinese philosophy than there is in western philosophy because the tradition is fairly unified around Confucianism and Chinese Buddhism and some more recent modern Chinese thought. So, I think there is more that makes it distinctively 鈥淐hinese philosophy鈥� as opposed to western philosophy.

There is also a long commentarial tradition in Chinese philosophy that provides some centrality of themes 鈥� a lot of philosophy was done historically as commentaries on previous texts from previous thinkers. So, you鈥檒l have a series of thinkers commenting on the classic Confucian texts, and people responding to those commentaries, and then the commenters becoming well known in their own right.

There was actually a talk on one of those commenters: gave a talk on , who is one of the leading commenters on the Daoist Philosopher, . There are very prominent schools (including Daoist schools) that don鈥檛 operate through commentary, but that sort of practice was common.

On the topic of the theme, how else did it manifest itself? Any other talks stand out?

There was a pretty wide array of them. gave a talk called 鈥淐ompletion, Heaven鈥檚 Regularities, and Human Creation of the Cosmos鈥� that related some Classical Chinese philosophical ideas back to astronomical ones, which was very interesting. And of course, there was talk on AI personhood, which was great.

One thing that stood out was Peter Tan鈥檚 talk. He was essentially trying to invent the field of Chinese philosophy of science, so that was kind of cool. There鈥檚 not enough work on that because we don鈥檛 train enough people on Chinese philosophy in western philosophy departments. So, he鈥檚 like 鈥渉ere, I am going to make this field.鈥� That was really interesting.

Those all sound cool, it sounds like it went well this year!

I thought it went great. We had a core group of people who attended throughout, so it felt very collegial. I actually specifically marketed it as a workshop to try to cultivate a relaxed vibe. I wanted people to think 鈥渢hese are work in progress papers, we are collaborating on this, we are going to get to help each other with this work.鈥� And I thought that went really great. There was a lot of chatting between talks and at the meals, which we were able to share because of generous funding from our sponsors.

Who were your sponsors?

We had a lot of support not only from the department but from some offices at 丁香园AV. For instance, the David Lam center is a center for Asian studies here at 丁香园AV, which the three organizers are affiliated with. They were really supportive, and we hope to do more with them at the future. We also had support from the , the Faculty of Arts and Social Science Dean鈥檚 office, and the Office of the Provost and Vice President, Academic. All that info is also on , along with this year鈥檚 schedule and other info, if you want to check it out.

Do you have any plans yet to organize it next year?

Since we have three organizers, the idea is to rotate who takes the lead. So next year Qiu has committed to organizing it. Whoever takes the lead will choose a topic if they鈥檇 like and send out invitations and all that. We鈥檒l advertise it on our website and through the department closer to the time, so keep an eye out!