Organized by the DKU Humanities Research Center in cooperation with the Vattimo Archive and Center at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), the Weakening Strategies: Vattimo and Chinese Thought (September 30, 2022) was a one-day symposium that aimed to advance comparative understanding of the concept of weakness, in conversation with the Vattimo’s philosophy and Chinese thought. Panel two was chaired by DKU Humanities Research Center’s co-director James Miller and featured East China Normal University’s Professor of Philosophy Liangjian Liu, University of Turin’s Research fellow Erica Onnis, and Loyola University Andalusia’s Associate Professor of Philosophy Mario Wenning. Each of the speakers brought their own perspectives and interpretations into how Daoist theories work with Vattimo’s thought and work. Continue reading “Student Report on Weakening Strategies: Vattimo and Chinese Thought”
This research talk is part of the Third Space Lab brown bag lunch research talk presented by the Humanities Research Center. The program is broadly associated with research projects related to languages, cultures, and intercultural communication.
Artist-in-Residence at DKU is supported by Humanities Research Center, Division of Arts and Humanities, and DKUNST Art on Campus, convened and organized by DKU’s Associate Director of Arts, Professor Zairong Xiang.
This event features HRC Advisory Board members: Prof Prasenjit Duara and Prof Selina Lai-Henderson.
Time and Date: Friday October 21, 10:30 AM BJT Speaker: Prasenjit Duara, Oscar L. Tang Family Distinguished Professor of East Asian Studies, Duke University Moderator: Selina Lai-Henderson, Assistant Professor of Humanities, Duke Kunshan University Zoom ID: 942 0378 1977, Passcode: CSCC
Abstract Contemporary world politics is structured around the world order of nation-states in turn founded largely upon a Newtonian cosmology and an associated worldview. I develop a conceptual framework around the ‘epistemic engine’ which organizes and circulates the cosmological and institutional structures of Enlightenment modernity. Subsequently, I explore how the imperial Chinese world order– functional until at least the late 19th century–reveals a different cosmology shaping a different world order and politics. I also explore the contemporary PRC view of the world order probing the extent to which its historical experiences can be seen to re-shape the hegemonic epistemic engine. In the final section, I draw from a paradigm of ‘oceanic temporality’ to grasp counter-finalities generated by the epistemic engine on the earth and the ocean itself. Can the counter-flows of social movements allow us to imagine a post-Enlightenment, planetary cosmology?
Biography
Dr. Prasenjit Duara
Prasenjit Duara is the Oscar Tang Distinguished Family Chair Professor of East Asian Studies at Duke University. He was born and educated in India and received his PhD in Chinese history from Harvard University. He was previously Professor and Chair of the Dept of History and Chair of the Committee on Chinese Studies at the University of Chicago (1991-2008). Subsequently, he became Raffles Professor of Humanities and Director, Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore (2008-2015). He was President of the Association for Asian Studies, USA from 2019-2020.
In 1988, he published Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (Stanford Univ Press) which won the Fairbank Prize of the AHA and the Levenson Prize of the AAS, USA. Among his other books are Rescuing History from the Nation (U Chicago 1995), Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Rowman 2003) and most recently, TheCrisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge 2014). He has presented over 150 keynote and distinguished lectures globally since 1996 and his work has been widely translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and the European languages. He was awarded the doctor philosophiae honoris causa from the University of Oslo in 2017.
The DKU Humanities Research Center (HRC) invites proposals from all DKU/Duke faculty and affiliates working on humanities-related projects. Projects should be based at DKU and/or connect Duke and DKU faculty.
Proposals should be sent to Professor James Miller by November 15, 2022.
You are cordially invited to attend theTSL BrownBag Lunch Research Talk by Dr. Layla Shelmerdineon Analysis of Effective Interaction in the Virtual Classroom
Join us for our next Superdeep meeting, in which Nathan Hauthaler (AH | Philosophy) will cast on “Anscombe on Basic Action: Doubts about Doubts”.
As always, everyone is welcome to join; no prior knowledge of philosophy is required. And, as always, snacks and refreshments will be served at the meeting.
This Interdisciplinary Conversation was part of “Religion and Politics,” presented by the Humanities Research Center and the Division of Arts and Humanities, in collaboration with the Undergraduate Studies program.
Reported by Mateja Bokan, Class of 2026
The Religion and Politics lecture and discussion were the first opportunity for DKU students in Barcelona to experience the offerings of the University and the Humanities Research Center. Divided into two parts, the guest lecture and a live discussion, students were able to apply, reevaluate, and extend their knowledge on secularization using Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan as an example of how politics and religion work together in our society. Continue reading “Student Report: Religion and Politics – An Interdisciplinary Conversation”
This special lecture was part of “Religion and Politics” presented by the Humanities Research Center and the Division of Arts and Humanities, in collaboration with the Undergraduate Studies program.
Reported by Cody Schmidt, Class of 2025
Photographed by Jesse Campbell, Class of 2025
Professor Robert Yelle, chair of religious studies at Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich, Germany joined Duke Kunshan professors Rasoul Namazi and James Miller on September 26 to present a lecture based on his writing “Hobbes the Egyptian: The Return to Pharaoh, or the Ancient Roots of Secular Politics.” A question-and-answer session was held after the presentation. The lecture was the first of a two-part series hosted by Yelle, Namazi, and Miller titled Religion and Politics, with its follow-up being held later that afternoon.
In his lecture, he examined Hobbes’s ideas of secularization and the story of Pharaoh from the Bible. Yelle began with the frontispiece for Leviathan. The “Mortal God,” a ruler physically made of his subjects and holding a bishop’s staff in one hand and a sword in the other, is depicted as standing over his country, wielding the powers of church and state. Yelle argues that this “Mortal God” is a representation of the book’s namesake, the Leviathan, a sea monster that aided in Pharaoh’s oppression of the Hebrews.
“The Leviathan was armed with the many bodies of the citizens, their heads here appearing [in the frontispiece] as scales. [This] had become an appropriate epithet for a king or a leader of an army… Hobbes meant to invoke Pharoah and, in fact, if you just look at the Hebrew Bible, there are various places where a clear identification is made between Pharoah and the sea monster.”
During Hobbes’s time of the English Civil War, this religious image of the oppressive Leviathan and Pharaoh would be used to justify the revolutionary acts occurring, using the Exodus as parallel imagery for their war. Hobbes provides a critique and reversal of this justification, which Yelle explains was to reject such religious political revolution and embrace the philosophy of social contract theory with a ruling sovereign power.
Q&A session with Maggie Li
Reported by Zishuo Wu, Class of 2024
Tonight’s first screening in the 2022 academic year, Ascension (Kingdon, 2021) is an Oscar-nominated American documentary depicting class inequality in China. After screening the splendid realistic observational documentary, the producer of Ascension, Maggie Li, was invited to the Question & Answer session hosted by DKU Humanities Research Center.
Maggie began this session by introducing her contribution to the documentary. “There exist two kinds of producers,” said Maggie, “the first kind invests money and contributes nothing else; the other kind works on every part of the production.” As a producer of the second kind, Maggie made sure everything in the movie was working — communicating with organizations, companies, and individuals about their appearance in the documentary, and proofreading the translation and edits made to the film. The production took four years in total. With almost everything done by only a team of three people, the success of the documentary is unbelievable. She also shared that she was majoring in nano-science, though ended up working in filming industries.
