Friday, April 3

 

12:00-2:00 Midday Panel Chair: Ellie Hua Wang	1. Tim Connolly, “Confucianism and Transformative Education” 2. Hagop Sarkissian, “Reciprocity’s Only Appearance in the Mengzi” 3. Polly Chou, “On Ordinary Anger in the Mencius: Moral Cultivation, and the Resources of yi (義)” 4. Naiyi Hsu, “Moral Perfectionism and Political Agency in Early Confucian Philosophy”
2:00-2:15 – Break
2:15-3:45 Afternoon Panel  Chair: Tim Connolly	5. Zhang Borong, “Rethinking ‘Hard to Nurture’: Gender, Class, and Ritual Constraints in Analects 17:25” 6. Ori Tavor, “Eschatological Optimism in Contemporary Daoist Utopian Thought” 7. Yuanfang Dai, “Disquiet in the House of Chinese Philosophy: On the State of the Field of Comparative Feminist Philosophy”
3:45-4:00 – Break
4:00-5:30 Keynote Address Chair: Mercedes Valmisa	8. Brook Ziporyn, “Paeans and Polemics in the Mirror Ball: A Late Ming Case-Study in Ambivalent Tiantai and Tiantai Ambivalence”

  

Saturday, April 4

 

9:00 -10:30 Morning Panel Chair: Yuanfang Dai	9. Li Kang, “Performative Metaphysics: A Chinese Chan Buddhist Approach” 10. Samuel Cocks, “According with Things: Volition, Freedom, and Enlightened Activity in Chan Buddhism” 11. Ewa Rzanna, “The Pric(z)e of Adaptability: Qu Yuan’s Fisherman and the Challenge of the Social”
10:30-10:45 – Break
10:45-12:15 Midday Panel Chair: Julianne Chung	12. Ellie Hua Wang, “From Feeling to Fitting: A Fivefold Model of Ethical Understanding in Mencius, Zhuangzi, and Xunzi” 13. Stephen Walker, “How to Be Caring and Careful: Ren 仁 and Yi 義 in Context” 14. Thomas Clark Jackson, “Notes on Tao Yuanming’s Orchestration of Ethical and Existential Life”
12:15-1:45 - Lunch
1:45-3:15 Afternoon Panel  Chair: Stephen Walker	15. Julianne Chung, “That’s Entertainment? Flexible Absorption in the Qiwulun and Beyond” 16. Ren Songyao, “Open-mindedness: Insights from the Zhuangzi” 17. Rose Novick, “Three Ways of Looking at a Big Bird”
3:15-3:30 – Break
3:30-5:00 Afternoon Panel Chair: Rose Novick	18. Rachel Zhou, “Deep into the Depth of the Misty Rain” 19. Frankie Chik, “Thinking with Beasts: Animal Set-Phrases and Argumentation in Classical Chinese Philosophy” 20. Jane Bennett, “The Style of Becoming: On Dao, Nature, and Sweeping”

Sunday, April 5

 

11:00-12:30 Midday Panel Chair: Samuel Cocks	21. Season Blake, “Mohist Dialectics on Communication” 22. Brian Hoffert, “The Butterfly’s Dream: Early Daoist Mysticism and Zhuangzi’s ‘Transformation of Things’” 23. Olive Lee, “Saying or Not Saying? The Sage and Language in Wang Bi’s Philosophy”
12:30-1:30 – Lunch
1:30-3:00 Afternoon Panel  Chair: Hagop Sarkissian	24. Yi Ching Tam, “Embracing Western Music through Confucian Logics: The Case of Kang Youwei’s ‘Travelogue of Denmark’”     25. Sara Rubio, “Are Human Lifespans Fated? Revisiting the Mengzi 孟子 in Light of Warring States and Han Sources” 26. Wenwen Li and Brian Bruya, “The Origin of Mencius’s View of Qi”
3:00-3:30 Closing Remarks/ Business Meeting

 

Paper Abstracts (in order of presentation)

 

Tim Connolly (East Stroudsburg University): “Confucianism and Transformative Education”

What does it mean for education to be transformative? On a view defended by Paul and Quiggin, transformative education provides epistemic transformation – the replacement and expansion of conceptual frameworks—which in many cases can lead to personal transformation. While this view offers a powerful argument for those who think that education should involve more than the training of particular skills, it also faces the criticism that its notion of transformation is too dramatic: incoming students are not in a place where they can consent to be transformed in such a manner, and there is also the danger that a student’s worldview will be undermined without any new values to take its place.

In this paper, I explore an alternative model of “transformation through education” (jiaohua 教化) found in the Xunzi, focusing on its notion of education as a comprehensive yet cumulative process that relies on individual commitment. Drawing on perspectives regarding Confucian education in the modern world articulated by Charlene Tan and Kwong-loi Shun, I argue that by situating education within a lifelong process of development that is integrated with the larger world, Confucian transformative education can help address the challenges that confront Paul and Quiggin’s model.

 

Hagop Sarkissian (Baruch College, CUNY): “Reciprocity’s Single Appearance in the Mengzi”

The Analects treats reciprocity (shu 恕) as foundational to Ruist ethics, and the Mohists built their entire system on reciprocity principles operating through universal standards. Yet Mengzi mentions this core concept exactly once, in 7A4. Standard translations make the problem worse: they render 7A4 as three disconnected maxims about metaphysical resources, sincerity, and benevolence, leaving the passage’s closing claim about reciprocity unmotivated.

This paper argues that 7A4 presents Mengzi’s technical specification of reciprocity, one that operates through differentiated relational structures rather than universal standards. Resolving key grammatical ambiguities in the passage—particularly in 備於我 and 反身而誠—reveals a progressive argument rather than a series of disconnected claims. This reading connects 7A4 to Mengzi’s critique of Mohist universalism in 3A5 and to the cascade of relational failures in 4A12, showing that Mengzi’s single use of shu marks where he replaces an underspecified principle with a precise account of how reciprocity generates conditions for tenderheartedness (ren 仁).

 

Polly Chou (National Chengchi University): “On Ordinary Anger in the Mencius: Moral Cultivation, and the Resources of yi (義)”

This paper examines whether “ordinary anger” (as it initially arises in everyday contexts and is often visibly expressed, e.g., 艴然) has moral significance in the Mencius. Ordinary anger is commonly dismissed as morally suspect: in 2B12, the petty person’s anger at being disregarded appears untrained and prone to conflict. Yet 2A1 presents a puzzling case: Zeng Xi displays anger when compared to Guan Zhong, a reaction that looks structurally similar to the petty person’s affective outburst. I argue that the Mencius distinguishes morally significant anger from merely disruptive anger by its normative basis. Zeng Xi’s anger is not merely wounded pride it reflects a refusal to be aligned with what he takes to be an unrighteous exemplar, and thus manifests the sense of shame and indignation, one of the four sprouts. On this reading, anger is fallible and can misfire in judgment or performance, but when grounded in the sense of shame and indignation and subsequently regulated through cultivation, it functions as a motivational resource for the enactment of 義 rather than a purely negative passion.

 

Nai-Yi Hsu (National Taiwan University): “Moral Perfectionism and Political Agency in Early Confucian Philosophy”

Early Confucian philosophy demands both lifelong moral perfection and active political participation. These demands are traditionally seen as mutually reinforcing: moral cultivation naturally grounds effective political agency. However, I argue that moral perfectionism can psychologically undermine political action under conditions of epistemic uncertainty, when agents cannot guarantee their actions will be faultless. The problem arises when faultlessness is understood in consequentialist terms: if one cannot be certain an action will cause no harm, refraining appears preferable. The more conscientious the agent, the greater the paralysis. I propose two solutions. First, redefine moral perfectionism by distinguishing dispositional from consequentialist faultlessness and by recognizing its global versus local dimensions. This allows agents to pursue lifelong excellence while accepting fallibility in particular acts. Second, reimagine political agency by moving from authority-centered models, in which agents bear primary responsibility, toward participatory conceptions in which responsibility is distributed. This shift lowers the psychological threshold for action. Together, these revisions preserve Confucian moral-political continuity while removing barriers to acting despite uncertainty. I conclude by suggesting a reconfiguration of the Confucian virtue profile, highlighting courage, humility, trust, and hope that enable political engagement without abandoning moral seriousness in a world of growing ambiguity and complexity.

 

Borong Zhang (Indiana University Bloomington): “Rethinking “Hard to Nurture”: Gender, Class, and Ritual Constraints in Analects 17:25”

Passage 17:25 of the Analects has frequently been cited and criticized, especially since the May Fourth movement, as notorious evidence of Confucian misogyny, given that Confucius appears to group nǚzǐ 女子 (“women”) together with xiǎorén 小， traditionally read as the petty men, and declare them “hard to nurture” (nányǎng 難養). This paper advances a new interpretation of the passage, reading it not as an instance of essentialist sexism but as a lament over the practical difficulty of educating non-elites within the Confucian ritual framework. Reading xiǎorén in this context as a social category of commoners rather than as a moral category of petty men helps us see that they shared a similar social position within ritually circumscribed roles—roles from which elite men, such as Confucius, were required to maintain a certain degree of distance. The real problem, therefore, does not lie in any supposed natural inferiority of women or commoners, but in the structural demands of ritual hierarchy itself. Ritual order requires that all members of society understand ritual norms (zhī lǐ 知禮) and their proper roles within them in order for the Confucian ideal to be realized; this requirement, in turn, obligates ruling elites to educate them. Yet the same ritual system simultaneously mandates the preservation of social distance both between genders and across hierarchical echelons as a condition of ritual propriety.

Confucius’s frustration in Analects 17:25 thus exposes a deeper double bind within early Confucian political ethics: the very mechanisms designed to sustain moral order can also complicate the extension of education to those ritually segregated from dominant elites. This reading invites feminist critiques of Confucianism to move beyond essentialist interpretations of gender and instead attend to the structural dynamics of ritual hierarchy and dependence that shape the roles of traditionally marginalized groups within the Confucian moral order.

 

Ori Tavor (University of Pennsylvania): “Eschatological Optimism in Contemporary Daoist Utopian Thought”

Faced with adversity, religious thinkers throughout history have often resorted to visions of a postmillennial utopia, a perfect new society built upon the wreckage of an old, faulty world. In China, the key term associated with this idea was the Great Peace (Tàipíng), an egalitarian utopian society that inspired numerous rebels, revolutionaries, and radical activists over the last two millennia. This talk will focus on the eschatological model presented by contemporary Chinese utopian thinker Guo Yongjin. An ordained Buddhist monk turned self-help guru and prolific interpreter of the Daodejing, Guo responded to the current ecological crisis by founding a small utopian eco-village in Zhenjiang Province in 2013. Through a close reading of his published lectures, this talk will demonstrate that his brand of millenarian utopianism offers an optimistic eschatological vision that places the fate of the planet in humanity’s hands and identifies the knowledge stored in the Daodejing as the key to solving its problems. After tracing Guo’s text-centered non-messianic millenarian utopianism to ideas first promulgated in the medieval Scripture of Great Peace, this talk will highlight some broader conclusions about the enduring legacy of classical Chinese apocalyptic discourse in the 21st century.      

 

Yuanfang Dai (Michigan State University): “Disquiet in the House of Chinese Philosophy: On the State of the Field of Comparative Feminist Philosophy”

There has been an increasing scholarship on Confucian philosophy and women since the mid-1990s. A group of scholars who study Chinese philosophy suggest that Confucian scholars engage gender issues. Although scholars in general agree that Confucianism is oppressive to women, some of them seek to prove that Confucianism is compatible with feminism. In arguing for the compatibility of Confucianism and feminism, some philosophers focus on care ethics, and others find textual evidence to prove that early Confucianism is not as oppressive to women as later Confucianism. In this paper, I chart the rise and development of Chinese and comparative feminist philosophy. I argue that we may want to distinguish politicized Confucianism from philosophical Confucianism, recognizing that women’s problems as a social problem cannot be solved at the philosophical level. Therefore, it is helpful for comparative feminist philosophy to connect with feminist theories. As a social practice and part of the ideology package of social norms, Confucianism has been oppressive to women. As a philosophy and a normative claim, it might shed new light on our understanding of how feminism, conceived mainly as a Western and “imported” idea, interacts with Chinese traditional values and in what ways this kind of interaction affects contemporary Chinese women.

 

Brook Ziporyn (University of Chicago): “Paeans and Polemics in the Mirror Ball: A Late Ming Case-Study in Ambivalent Tiantai and Tiantai Ambivalence”

This talk will consider a polemical text published in the last year of the Ming dynasty, the Pixieji 闢邪集 (Collection of Refutations of Vicious Doctrines), the body of which consists of critiques of Catholic doctrine as transmitted to China by the Jesuit missionaries Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) and Giulio Aleni (1582-1649).  Its author, a self-identifying Confucian scholar named Zhong Zhenzhi 鐘振之, offers a sustained and detailed engagement with issues of teleology, eternity, Heaven, God, souls and evil, critiquing the metaphysical foundations of Christian belief from a broadly Neo-Confucian point of view.  While there is much of philosophical interest in both the content and argumentative method evident in these critiques, the format of the text introduces further complications, consisting as it does of a preface by a Buddhist monk named Shi Dalang 釋大朗and an appendix consisting of an exchange of letters between Zhong Zhenzhi and another Buddhist monk, named Jiming Chanshi 際明禪師.  The talk comes with a surprise ending, revealing this text to be a complex literary exercise in the deeply ambivalent engagement of mutually opposed positions and the inherent self-reversing multiplicity of any position-taking identity, performing rather than explicating some of the most distinctive philosophical moves of prior Chinese thinking.

 

Li Kang (Washington and Lee University): “Performative Metaphysics: A Chinese Chan Buddhist Approach”

Chinese Chan Buddhism is known for its emphasis on everyday life and caution against discursive thinking—characteristics often viewed as taking the opposite stance to metaphysics. This perception reflects an unfortunately narrow conception of metaphysics as constructing abstract theories representing objective reality. But this may be neither the only nor the best approach under certain circumstances. In this paper, I uncover metaphysical assumptions essential to Chan Buddhist practice and develop Chan practice as an alternative way of doing metaphysics: performative metaphysics, where metaphysical insights can only be enacted and performed rather than theorized and represented. Specifically, Chan’s performative approach is best understood through the lens of conceptual engineering—the deliberate design, evaluation, and implementation of concepts for certain purposes. This framework, increasingly prominent in contemporary social metaphysics, illuminates what Chan practitioners are doing. Drawing from Buddhist skillful means—the method of strategically adapting methods to benefit others—I develop a Chan Buddhist theory of conceptual engineering where concepts are evaluated not by representational accuracy but by their capacity to reduce suffering. This paper thus shows that Chan Buddhism not only coexists with metaphysics but actively enriches contemporary debates about metaphysical practice as transformative conceptual intervention rather than mere representation.

 

Samuel Cocks (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse): “According with Things:  Volition, Freedom, and Enlightened Activity in Chan Buddhism”

This paper explores the Chan Buddhist concept of “according with things” through the writings of Dahui and Zhongfeng Mingben, emphasizing its significance for volition, freedom, and enlightened action. In this tradition, enlightenment and freedom are closely connected: freedom means both liberation from a fixed self and a transformed way of engaging with lived experience. I suggest that for Dahui and Zhongfeng, enlightened activity entails a reorientation of control—not its removal—shifting from personal command to embodied, relational responses within specific situations.

The paper first analyzes how challenging the belief in a separate self reshapes agency, emphasizing that the “softening” of self-driven control occurs within social and evaluative contexts rather than solely in private experience. It then addresses a tension within Chan’s anti-dualism: while action is described as effortless, awakened activity remains purposive and temporally extended, suggesting a nuanced role for intention.

To clarify, I reference recent neuroscience as a conceptual guide. Evidence suggests that volitional processes can operate on networks separate from those that are self-referential, and that voluntary actions are often supported by intersubjective engagement. This supports a model of agency that is not based on a narrativized will. In this view, “according with things” describes a form of freedom rooted in transformed, relational control rather than the abolition of volition.

 

Ewa Rzanna (Institute for Study and Documentation of Polish Literature): “The Pric(z)e of adaptability: Qu Yuan’s Fisherman and the challenge of the Social” 

In the paper I offer a philosophical interpretation of the Fisherman dialogue, attributed to Qu Yuan, focusing on the individual’s confrontation with the challenge posed by the other as a similar yet distinct entity. I conceptualize this relationship through the Janus-faced mechanism of imitation and competition: the recognition of a fundamental human sameness that transforms into a drive to distinguish oneself, not only along the horizontal axis of equality but, more decisively, along the vertical axis of superiority. By bringing to light the ethical/political, epistemological, and ontological layers of the problem, I seek to clarify the theoretical and practical dimensions of the imitative and competitive impulses, and to outline the strategies available to an intellectually and morally sovereign agent for navigating these forces. To contextualize the argument developed from the Fisherman dialogue, I place it in conversation with pertinent passages from Confucius and Mencius on the one hand, and from Zhuangzi – who  composed his own version of the Fisherman - on the other, while also drawing on Chinese folk traditions to add further depth to the analysis. Simultaneously, I refer to parallel texts by Plato, who in his own way addresses the problems of socially stimulated imitation and competition. 

 

Ellie Hua Wang (National Chengchi University): “From Feeling to Fitting: A Fivefold Model of Ethical Understanding in Mencius, Zhuangzi, and Xunzi”

This paper proposes a fivefold model of ethical understanding in early Chinese thought, showing how Mencius, Zhuangzi, and Xunzi link understanding (zhi 知) to fitting action (yi 宜) through dynamic, situated responsiveness rather than detached reasons or fixed standards. Feeling is treated not as a private state but as the medium of ethical salience—what calls for response, feels out of place, and demands adjustment. Ethical understanding is the cultivated capacity to transform affective uptake into fitting action across five dimensions: temporal attunement, spatial positioning, contextual particularity, historical embeddedness, and inner regulation of emotion, attention, and expression.

Mourning, burial, and remembrance provide a high-pressure test case where this responsiveness becomes publicly legible. Mencius 3A5 (“the heart reaches the face”) exemplifies affective immediacy and embodied posture. Zhuangzi 6.7 and 18.2 resist emotional fixity, highlighting the need for flexible re-attunement. Xunzi’s “Discourse on Ritual” introduces niche construction: ritual as a world-making infrastructure that trains and stabilizes feeling, aligns expectations, and enables repair through shared forms.

Ethical understanding, on this view, is not deduction from principles but enacted attunement, scaffolded by ritual rhythms. This model offers a relational alternative to reason-based moral theories and invites a re-imagination of ethical life as both cultivated and co-constructed.

 

Stephen Walker (University of Chicago): “How to Be Caring and Careful: Ren 仁 and Yi 義 in Context”

The Huainanzi foregrounds a striking range of attitudes about the value and importance of ren 仁 and yi 義. Sometimes the writers make it sound like ren/yi are indispensable for would-be leaders (or for functional people in general); sometimes they dismiss ren/yi and disparage those who cultivate or cherish them. This presentation will argue that what unites these various remarks is the text’s pervasive “root-branches” motif, according to which moral values and virtues branch off from deeper aspects of our personalities and give rise to further branchings-off in turn. When the writers praise and promote ren/yi, they’re crediting these virtues as the proximate source of certain things we value. When they dismiss and disparage ren/yi, their point is to remind us that these virtues come from somewhere more ultimate and grounding than themselves—something that bears as little resemblance to them as soil does to fruit. For the Huainan writers, the pre-moral impulses, affinities, and pleasures that drive and structure your moral values and virtues are constantly proliferating of their own accord in subtle, complicated ways. If you want to be more caring and careful, they would say, work on understanding and facilitating those paths of growth rather than on aiming directly for their products.

 

Thomas Clark Jackson (Indiana University): “Notes on Tao Yuanming’s Orchestration of Ethical and Existential Life”

How do we live in a world that contains so much uncertainty? This is a question we often ask ourselves in contemporary life; it is also a central theme in the work of Tao Yuanming. This paper argues that Tao’s work provides distinct methodological resources that we can employ as we face these challenges. The first is the creative use of moral exemplars from the past; the second is grounding ethical reflection in everyday experience. Tao never arrived at a single definitive resolution to human problems. What he did develop, however, was a distinctive way of living with these challenges.

This paper builds on previous scholarship that sees Tao as a philosopher of humanistic endurance by arguing that Tao makes an important and distinctive contribution to ethical and existential thought through his orchestration of methodological approaches. Tao draws on multiple philosophical traditions as well as his own lived experience to develop responses to the vicissitudes of life. While I do not argue that Tao’s conclusions are universally applicable, I do argue that the methodology he employs is worthy of emulation.

 

Julianne Chung (York University): “That’s Entertainment? Flexible Absorption in the Qiwulun and Beyond”

The second chapter of the Zhuangzi 莊子, the Qiwulun 齊物論—variously translatable as “The Sorting Which Evens Things Out” (Graham 2001), “Discussion on Making Things Equal” (Watson 2003, 2013), “Equalizing Assessments of Things” (Ziporyn 2009, 2020), and “Discourse on Evening Things Out” (Fraser 2024)—is widely remarked upon for its ingenious, if perplexing, incitements for those who engage it to appreciate apparent contradictions. As obscure as that may be, the point, such as it is, of doing this is perhaps even more obscure, especially as it might relate to philosophical exploration.

With an eye to improving contemporary debates, inside and outside of the academy, this paper cashes out the attitude involved in accepting what present as propositions within the Qiwulun as entertainment, a specific sort of acceptance distinguishable from belief. This term is particularly apt because it captures two important dimensions of human thought, as: i) pleasurable in and of itself, and ii) more broadly flexible with respect to connecting with others whose perspectives may present as different from one’s own. It argues that the notion of entertainment can hence enhance enjoyment of our personal, intrapersonal, and interpersonal intellectual activity, and enrich its functionality by promoting a capacity for flexible absorption. 

 

Ren Songyao (University of Texas at Dallas): “Open-Mindedness: Insights from the Zhuangzi”

A family of structurally similar accounts in contemporary philosophy, which I call the standard account, defines open-mindedness as the disposition to take seriously novel intellectual items. Since open-mindedness, when exercised appropriately, is helpful for attaining epistemic goods, such as true beliefs, knowledge, and understanding, it is hailed as an intellectual virtue. Drawing on insights from the Zhuangzi, this paper argues that the standard account is restrictive and fails to capture important instances of open-mindedness. In particular, open-mindedness also involves moving beyond conscious deliberate thought in order to attend to other parts of the self, such as the non-conscious mind and the body. The Zhuangists think that these parts can yield forms of tacit knowledge that elude the full grasp of the conscious deliberating mind. By suspending conscious agency and opening ourselves to them under appropriate circumstances, we can tap into their hidden wisdom in ways that help us achieve our goals more effectively.

 

Rose Novick (University of Washington): “Three Ways of Looking at a Big Bird”

The Zhuangzi begins with a giant fish named Kun transforming to a giant bird named Peng. Peng contrasts starkly with a litany of small, scornful creatures. What are we to make of this big bird?

Three basic readings drive historical and contemporary commentary. One reading regards Peng as merely one creature among many, not inherently better than the quail or cicada. Another reading regards Peng as a model of the fully realized sage. A third reading highlights parallels between Peng and Liezi to argue that Peng is a limited being. Each reading has clear textual support; none accounts for the passage as a whole.

I defend a reading that harmonizes all three interpretations. Following a suggestion of Lian Xinda (to conclusions he rejects), I track the dramatic action of the passage. On this basis, I argue that the passage asks the reader to consider all three readings seriously, attending to their relations (both conflicting and harmonious) without fully resolving in favor of any one reading. Exemplifying Zhuangzi’s method of “goblet speaking”, all three readings co-exist in resonant tension around the passage’s empty center: Peng’s silence.

Time permitting, I may argue that my reading is anticipated by Wang Fuzhi’s peerless commentary.

 

Rachel Zhou (Johns Hopkins University): “Deep into the Depth of the Misty Rain”

Responding to anthropogenically amplified water crises on this planet, the attention of Ecocriticism has been turning to water. However, the figure of water in this turn, despite the flow, still insinuates a thing-like quality to water and tends to highlight water’s dramatic, violent and (hyper)visible/spectacular activities. This paper thus turns to a pervasive image of water in classical Chinese poetry: “the misty rain” which offers a different way to imagine, live with/in and relate to water. Misty rain is depicted neither as transparent, empty or invisible nor as so thick or dense as to be wholly passive or static. It is instead often described as deep. With a close and creative reading of a cluster of classical Chinese poems including Yuan Jie’s “The Boatman’s Song”, Huangfu Ran’s “In Reply to Zhang Zhongyi” and Li Qunyu’s “Crows Caw at Night”, this paper explores the textures of  the depth of the misty rain and asks what movements and activities, spatial and atmospheric effects as well as affective registers are enabled by the deep misty rain. In so doing, this essay re-theorises and lightens “depth” which is associated with metaphors of roots and foundations and used to oppose “surface.”

 

Frankie Chik (Wesleyan University): “Thinking with Beasts: Animal Set-Phrases and Argumentation in Classical Chinese Philosophy”

This paper proposes a new entry point into the history of human–animal relations in premodern China: the dense cluster of animal-based set phrases—idiom-like expressions, stock comparisons, and parabolic mini-scenes—that pervade Warring States and early imperial philosophical writing. While scholarship has illuminated animals in ritual, political cosmology, and material practice, animal figures in philosophical discourse are still too often treated as mere “metaphors” or cultural ornament. I argue instead that these animal set phrases operate as micro-arguments, compressing claims about causality, normativity, and social order into portable rhetorical forms. Through close readings of representative passages from the Mengzi, Xunzi, and Zhuangzi (with comparative control texts from other pre-Qin masters), I reconstruct three recurring argumentative operations. First, animal phrases anchor analogical reasoning by stabilizing “similarity” as an evidential bridge across species. Second, they presuppose and contest taxonomic boundaries (human vs. birds-and-beasts), showing how moral hierarchy is produced through classification rather than simply assumed. Third, they naturalize—or disrupt—models of governance and self-cultivation by projecting animal behavior onto human institutions, turning animal life into an epistemic resource for thinking about desire, training, and rule. Methodologically, the paper combines philological attention with argumentation analysis to show how human–animal similarity is repeatedly made, negotiated, and weaponized in debate.

 

Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University): “The Style of Becoming: On Dao, Nature, and Sweeping”

It is hard to imagine an ethics that does not in some way involve a physics. As a onto-story about the natural way of things, a physics influences images of the good way of living. This connection pertains not only to Nature conceived as providential or as governed by anthropocentric natural laws, but also to nature as a set of physical processes unbiased with regard to the happiness or survival of any individual or group. This essay turns to the Zhuangzi, one of the source texts of Chinese daoism, as an example of a process-oriented philosophy whose non-anthropocentric cosmos can nevertheless serve as a kind of guide for human behaviors. In light-hearted, absurdist tones, Zhuangzi encourages connecting to the propensities of a cosmos conceived as an ongoing and self-transforming process (dao 道). Zhuangzi offers many examples of characters tuning into the style of creativity that is dao.  Prompted by an apparently throw-away line about a man who swept the courtyard of the house of a Sage, I develop Zhuangzi’s hint that one such way to arrive with dao is to practice sweeping dust. This small, mundane act iterates its style of freely responsive wandering. The proposition is that sweeping with a broom, as a style of action, is a fractal of the continuous, self-compositions of the cosmos. This may suggest to ecological activists today a model of “action” that is less an enactment of intention or a quest for a targeted object than a practice issuing from subtle attentiveness to one’s milieu and oriented toward inflection more than causation.

 

Season Blake (Occidental College): “Mohist Dialectics on Communication”

This paper argues that the Mohists provide a novel account of communication between two interlocutors, based on giving examples; this account differs from those of prominent interpreters of the Mohist Dialectical Chapters, like Chris Fraser and A.C. Graham, which focuses on the genesis of the reference of words in a large cultural context. I first argue that term ‘ju’ 舉 means ‘to give examples’. Then, focusing on particular passages, I describe how the Mohists think disagreements can potentially be resolved, namely by focusing on examples that both interlocutors take to be instances of a kind, and discussing the important features of the kind on that basis. While this use of examples does not “fix” or fully disambiguate the reference in ways that causal theorists of reference discuss, such exchanges do nevertheless give us an idea of the information that two interlocutors might have to agree on in order to communicate at all—the basis of “what is known” in order to come to understand “what is not [yet] known”, as the Mohists put it. As such, it provides a way of filling out Grice’s idea of shared information in order for the communicative intention to be understood.

 

Brian Hoffert (North Central College): “The Butterfly’s Dream: Early Daoist Mysticism and Zhuangzi’s ‘Transformation of Things’ 

The Zhuangzi opens with a tale of transformation in which an enormous fish becomes an equally enormous bird before rising thousands of miles into the air and flying off towards the Pool of Heaven. Most would agree that this metamorphosis is a metaphor for spiritual transformation, though the precise details are not clarified in the Zhuangzi. This paper will therefore begin by analyzing the Neiye (Inward Training), an early Daoist text that provides a more detailed account of a self-cultivation technique that appears to be closely related to key ideas in the Zhuangzi, including the principle of wuwei (non-action). By examining parallels between the Neiye and the Zhuangzi, I hope to clarify the mystical foundations of Zhuangzi’s approach to self-cultivation. I will then go on to explore a second transformation tale in which Zhuangzi dreams that he is a butterfly only to “awaken” to the question of whether it was he who dreamt the butterfly or the butterfly who now dreams him. I will ultimately argue that these metamorphoses—the so-called “transformation of things”—represent a distinctive feature of early Daoist self-cultivation as well as one of the Zhuangzi’s most significant contributions to the Chinese intellectual tradition.

 

Olive Lee (National Taiwan University): “Saying or not Saying? The Sage and Language in Wang Bi’s Philosophy”

Beginning with the question of saying (you yan 有言) and not saying (wu yan 無言) , this paper adopts a linguistic approach to reconsider the role of language in Wang Bi’s theory of the sage. It argues that the sage is not only ontologically superior to ordinary people but also translates the ineffable Dao into intelligible language, thereby guiding others toward action and enacting it within a community. In this sense, language is not incidental to sagehood. Without language, the transition from metaphysical insight to enactment remains incomplete.

Although classical texts and Wang Bi’s annotations often describe the sage as not speaking (bu yan 不言), without words (wu yan 無言), or even discarding words (fei yan 廢言), the very transmission of these texts over centuries reveals a persistent reliance on language. This apparent tension calls for clarification.

 This argument proceeds in two steps. First, the sage is situated within the realm of you (有), through which the ideal presence of wu (無) is rendered manifest. As such, language cannot be simply abandoned, since the sage must operate within the domain of expression. Second, turning to Wang Bi’s account of words (yan 言), images (xiang 象), and intentions (yi 意) in Zhouyi Lueli (周易略例), I argue that words and images are not discarded but function as provisional yet necessary means of guidance. Images in particular mediate between words and intentions, linking expression to meaning. Interpretation, therefore, does not proceed without limit but unfolds within a framework shaped by the sage. Through this structured use of language, the Dao is not merely expressed but becomes present in the world, enabling its realization within human society without lapsing into arbitrariness.

 

 

Yi Ching Tam (University of Pittsburgh): “Embracing Western Music through Confucian Logics: The Case of Kang Youwei’s ‘Travelogue of Denmark’”    

Chinese musical modernity has commonly been understood through the lens of a “Western impact-Chinese response” model in both Sinophone and Anglophone scholarship. However, studies across various fields of Chinese studies (e.g., Wang 2004, Leung 2025) have shown that the phenomenon of Chinese modernity has been far more multifaceted and complex than what a Eurocentric “impact-response” historiographical model can capture.

In part inspired by these studies, I analyze a passage that addresses music and music history from “Travelogue of Denmark” (1904) by Kang Youwei (1858-1927), the influential political thinker and reformer, in order to demonstrate how his endorsement of Western music over contemporaneous Chinese music is to a considerable extent justified based on (neo-)Confucian ideas about music. They are, namely, the evaluation of music based on its moral-political effects, and the qi-based materialist-universalist conception of music. I further show how the scientistic logic of linear-progressive development is subsumed into the commonplace Confucian trope of musical and societal decline after the ancient golden age of the “Three Dynasties,” a reinterpretation that renders the said trope substantially altered. In the last part, I briefly discuss how these ideas continued to influence later elite Chinese nationalist musical discourses and practices in some key respects.

 

Sara Rubio (Princeton University): “Are Human Lifespans Fated? Revisiting the Mengzi 孟子 in Light of Warring States and Han Sources”

Re-examining early views on ming 命 (“mandate”, also “allotment” or “fate”) in light of Han and Warring States interpretation challenges the assumption that early Confucianism considered lifespans as “fated.” Many contemporary scholars read ming in the Mengzi as delimiting a sphere of things beyond human control and in the hands of Heaven from a sphere of inner self-cultivation that serves to encourage the acceptance of one’s lot. Yet Han sources such as the Yangzi Fayan 揚子法言 (6.11) and the Lunheng 論衡 (30.27) debated the Mengzi’s views in 7A.2 on the role of human conduct in one’s death. The Tsinghua manuscript “Xin shi wei zhong” 心是謂中 suggests that lifespans are the result of the combined agency between Heaven and the individual. Taking this into account, I will re-examine the Mengzi’s views on ming. I will argue that they are better understood as attributing natural death to a process of self-cultivation that involves understanding the workings of Heaven, while the cutting short of one’s allotted lifespan arises from the negligence of this process. This reading situates the text at the outset of the development of views that rendered humans capable of accessing Heaven’s creative and retributive powers from within.

 

Wenwen Li (Shandong University) and Brian Bruya (Eastern Michigan University): “The Origins of Mencius’s View of Qi”

Scholars have long been mystified by Mencius' discussion of qi 氣, variously tracing it to influences from the Guanzi, the Laozi, and the Zhuangzi, and yet such purported links are all highly tenuous and any intellectual historical association is speculative at best.

In Mencius' brief passage on qi, he associates qi with emotions (qing 情) and the heartmind (xin 心), asserting that all are led by thoughts and feelings (zhi 志). We find similar associations in the Confucian Guodian excavated manuscripts, which predate the Mencius. And in the Shanghai Museum unearthed manuscripts, an entire essay (Parent of the People, Min zhi fumu 民之父母) is devoted to explaining the relationship among zhi, qi, emotions, and ritual propriety (li 禮). The Dialogues of Confucius also shares a version of this essay.

In this paper, we propose that there is now sufficient evidence that in looking for antecedents of Mencius' discussion of qi, we can shift attention away from Guanzi, Laozi, and Zhuangzi and toward the unearthed texts and, especially, the Dialogues of Confucius, the latter of which may be the crucial link between Mencius and Confucius with regard to this specific set of concepts.