Stephen Angle is a specialist in Chinese philosophy with particular interests in moral and political thought, as well as in the methodology of cross-tradition philosophy. He has several essays either recently published or in press, in both English and Chinese, that draw on Confucianism and Western virtue ethics. Angle’s first book, Human Rights and Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry (Cambridge, 2002), explored the ways in which neo-Confucian traditions interacted with interpretations of Western ideas in the growth of Chinese human rights discourse. In various essays since then, he has continued to treat Chinese philosophical resources as live, significant parts of a “rooted” global philosophy. During the seminar Angle will draw on his experience using and developing electronic resources to support scholarly research. Finally, Angle is a prize-winning teacher, receiving Wesleyan University’s highest teaching award, the Binswanger Prize, in May, 2006.

Michael Slote holds an endowed chair in ethics at the University of Miami. He is a leader among contemporary Western virtue ethicists and has, over the past three decades, been a major presence in the field of ethics generally. A Member of the Royal Irish Academy and former Tanner lecturer, his publications include From Morality to Virtue (Oxford, 1992), Morals from Motives (Oxford, 2001), and The Ethics of Care and Empathy (Routledge, 2007), as well as a great number of articles and encyclopedia entries on virtue ethics and ethics more generally. Some of this work is in the Aristotelian tradition, but more recently he has been advancing a contemporary version of Humean/sentimentalist virtue ethics. He is perhaps the only contemporary philosopher whose interests and expertise cover both of the forms of virtue ethics that are relevant to the cross-fertilization of Chinese and Western ethical thought; and he has a long history of working with Chinese Ph.D. students seeking to bring together their own cultural/ethical roots and newer philosophical developments in the West.

Seminar Co-Directors

Guest Lecturers

May Sim is an associate professor of philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross.  She is the contributing editor to The Crossroads of Norm and Nature: Essays on Aristotle's Ethics and Metaphysics and From Puzzles to Principles?: Essays on Aristotle's Dialectic.  Her most recent book is: Remastering Morals with Aristotle and Confucius.  She is currently working on a book on Confucian human rights.

Bryan van Norden is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Chinese & Japanese at Vassar College. He received in B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. from Stanford University (both in philosophy). He is the author and editor of many works, including Virtue Ethics & Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and The Mengzi with Selections from Commentaries (Hackett Publishing, forthcoming).

Shirong Luo received his Ph.D. from University of Miami. He taught Chinese philosophy and comparative ethics at Mount Holyoke College. Currently, he teaches Asian philosophy, philosophy of art, world religions, and Greek philosophy at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the author of “Relation, Virtue, and Relational Virtue: Three Concepts of Caring,” Hypatia 22.3 (2007).

Eric Hutton holds B.A. in Classics and Asian Languages from Stanford University, an M.A. in East Asian Languages from Harvard University, and a  Ph.D. in Philosophy from Stanford University (2001). He currently teaches  in the Philosophy Department at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. His primary areas of research and teaching are early Chinese thought, Greek philosophy, and ethics.