The East Asian Studies Center 50th Anniversary Conference presents:
Michael Puett
Harvard University
Title: Dispositions, Rituals, and Human Flourishing: Theories from Classical China
Time: 4:45-5:45 PM
Abstract: Many of the understandings about the self and the world that have become dominant in the world today – ranging from academic theories in the humanities and social sciences to commonsensical assumptions – derive from concepts and problematics inherited from relatively restricted parts of the globe. Some can be traced back to the Greco-Roman tradition, many from more recent Protestant understandings. In response to this, one of the most exciting recent developments has been the attempt to explore the enormous body of ethical, social, economic, and political theory that has been generated in cultures throughout the world and to bring this body of theory into conversation with those understandings that have become widely accepted.
This paper will attempt a small contribution to this larger project by discussing the theories concerning the self and human flourishing that developed in the classical Chinese tradition. These theories are among the most complex and powerful in global philosophy. I will explore these visions in relationship to those views that have developed in recent Euro-American thought, and will argue that they have much to offer contemporary discussions.
Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese Anthropology and History at Harvard University. His interests are focused on the inter-relations between anthropology, history, philosophy, and religion, with the hope of bringing the study of China into larger historical and comparative frameworks. He is the author of The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China and To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China, as well as the co-author, with Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, and Bennett Simon, of Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity.
Free and Open to the Public
This event is sponsored in part by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant to The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center. Additional sponsors include: East Asian Studies Center, Institute for Chinese Studies, Institute for Japanese Studies, Institute for Japanese Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Department of History, Office of International Affairs.