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6Political Intimacy and Self-Governance in the Dialogues of Confucius: An Exploratory Study on the Philosophical Potential of the Kongzi Jia YuDao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 23 (2): 223-249. 2024.The Dialogues of Confucius (Kongzi Jia Yu 孔子家語) is an unexplored resource for the philosophy of Confucius. In this article, I make a first attempt at mining its riches. Focusing on Chapters 21 and 32, I reconstruct a multilevel theory of governing that is a cyclic process proceeding from the moral psychology of the individual to social organization, to the society as grounded in natural processes, and to the metaphysics of the natural processes themselves, thus adumbrating a metaphysics of moral…Read more
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23Ziran: The Philosophy of Spontaneous Self-CausationSUNY Press. 2022.Ziran, an idea from ancient Daoism, defies easy translation into English but can almost be captured by the term "spontaneity." It means "self-causation," if "self" is understood as fundamentally plural, and "causation" is understood as sensitivity and responsiveness. Applying ziran to the fields of action theory, attention theory, and aesthetics, Brian Bruya uses easy-to-read, straightforward prose to show, step-by-step, how this philosophical concept from an ancient tradition can be used to adv…Read more
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14Zhuangzi Speaks: The Music of Nature (edited book)Princeton University Press. 1992.During a period of political and social upheaval in China, the unconventional insights of the great Daoist Zhuangzi pointed to a way of living naturally. Inspired by his fascination with the wisdom of this sage, the immensely popular Taiwanese cartoonist Tsai Chih Chung created a bestselling Chinese comic book. Tsai had his cartoon characters enact the key parables of Zhuangzi, and he rendered Zhuangzi's most enlightening sayings into modern Chinese. Through Tsai's enthusiasm and skill, the earl…Read more
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To Render Ren: Saving AuthoritativenessIn Ian M. Sullivan & Joshua Mason (eds.), One corner of the square: essays on the philosophy of Roger T. Ames, University of Hawaiʻi Press. 2021.
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16On Not Meeting in SavannahJournal of Chinese Philosophy 47 (3-4): 269-270. 2020.Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Volume 47, Issue 3-4, Page 269-270, September–December 2020.
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18Fostering Wisdom in the Classroom, Part 2Teaching Philosophy 41 (4): 349-380. 2018.Advances in both the science and theory of wisdom have made it possible to create sound wisdom curricula and test them in the classroom. This article is a report of one such attempt. We developed a curriculum consistent with theories of wisdom that espouse the following five methods: challenge beliefs; prompt the articulation of values; encourage self-development; encourage self-reflection; and groom the moral emotions—facilitated by the reading of narrative or didactic texts and fostering a com…Read more
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17New Life for Old Ideas (edited book)The Chinese University Press. 2019.Over five decades, Donald J. Munro has been one of the most important voices in sinological philosophy. Among other accomplishments, his seminal book The Concept of Man in Early China influenced a generation of scholars. His rapprochement with contemporary cognitive and evolutionary science helped bolster the insights of Chinese philosophers and set the standard for similar explorations today. In this festschrift volume, students of Munro and scholars influenced by him celebrate Munro’s body of …Read more
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57Fostering Wisdom in the Classroom, Part 2: A CurriculumTeaching Philosophy. 2018.Advances in both the science and theory of wisdom have made it possible to create sound wisdom curricula and test them in the classroom. This article is a report of one such attempt. We developed a curriculum consistent with theories of wisdom that espouse the following five methods: challenge beliefs; prompt the articulation of values; encourage self-development; encourage self-reflection; and groom the moral emotions—facilitated by the reading of narrative or didactic texts and fostering a com…Read more
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1Action without Agency and Natural Human Action: Resolving a Double ParadoxIn The Philosophical Challenge from China, Mit Press. pp. 339-365. 2015.In the philosophy of action, it is generally understood that action presupposes an agent performing or guiding the action. Action is also generally understood as distinct form the kind of motion that happens in nature. Together these common perspectives on action rule out both action without agency and natural action. And yet, there are times when action can seem qualitatively both natural and lacking a sense of agency. Recently, David Velleman, referring to work by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi a…Read more
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63The Philosophical Challenge from China (edited book)MIT Press. 2015.This collection of new articles brings together major scholars working at the intersection of traditional Chinese philosophy and mainstream analytic philosophy. For some 2,500 years, China's best minds have pondered the human condition, and yet their ideas are almost entirely ignored by mainstream philosophers and philosophy programs. The proposed volume is intended to take a step in remedying that situation by directing sinological resources to current topics in philosophy and doing so in a m…Read more
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882In this Introduction, I identify seven discrete aspects of attention brought to the fore by by considering the phenomenon of effortless attention: effort, decision-making, action syntax, agency, automaticity, expertise, and mental training. For each, I provide an overview of recent research, identify challenges to or gaps in current attention theory with respect to it, consider how attention theory can be advanced by including current research, and explain how relevant chapters of this volume o…Read more
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109The Tacit Rejection of Multiculturalism in American Philosophy Ph.D. Programs: The Case of Chinese PhilosophyDao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 14 (3): 369-389. 2015.At the confluence of the philosophy of education and social/political philosophy lies the question of how we should educate the next generation of philosophy professors. Part of the question involves how broad such an education should be in order to educate teachers with the ability to, themselves, educate citizens competent to function in a diverse, globalized world. As traditional Western education systems from elementary schools through universities have embraced multicultural sources over th…Read more
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58Ethnocentrism and Multiculturalism in Contemporary PhilosophyPhilosophy East and West 67 (4): 991-1018. 2017.There has recently been much talk of the dangers of implicit bias and speculation about how to diminish it.1 I took a couple of the implicit bias tests on the Harvard website2—tests on bias toward women and toward African Americans—and found to my dismay that I am not as unbiased as I would hope to be. My own implicit bias can have significant ramifications toward my colleagues and co-workers and especially toward my students—I don't want my personal biases to negatively influence their educatio…Read more
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38Wisdom Can Be Taught: A Proof-of-Concept Study for Fostering Wisdom in the ClassroomLearning and Instruction 58 106-114. 2018.We undertook a short-term longitudinal study to test whether a set of methods common to current theories of wisdom transmission can foster wisdom in students in a measurable way. The three-dimensional wisdom scale (3D-WS) was administered to 131 students in five wisdom-promoting introductory philosophy courses and 176 students in seven introductory philosophy and psychology control courses at the beginning and end of the semester. The experimental group was divided in two (“Wisdom 1” and “Wisdom…Read more
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89Is Attention Really Effort? Revisiting Daniel Kahneman’s Influential 1973 Book Attention and EffortFrontiers in Psychology 9. 2018.Daniel Kahneman was not the first to suggest that attention and effort are closely associated, but his 1973 book Attention and Effort, which claimed that attention can be identified with effort, cemented the association as a research paradigm in the cognitive sciences. Since then, the paradigm has rarely been questioned and appears to have set the research agenda so that it is self-reinforcing. In this article, we retrace Kahneman's argument to understand its strengths and weaknesses. The centra…Read more
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67Fostering Wisdom in the Classroom, Part 1: A General Theory of Wisdom PedagogyTeaching Philosophy 41 (3): 239-253. 2018.This article reviews the literature on theories of wisdom pedagogy and abstracts out a single theory of how to foster wisdom in formal education. The fundamental methods of wisdom education are found to be: challenge beliefs; prompt the articulation of values; encourage self-development; encourage self-reflection; and groom the moral emotions. These five methods of wisdom pedagogy rest on two facilitating methods: read narrative or didactic texts and foster a community of inquiry. This article i…Read more
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78Mechanisms of Mind-Body Interaction and Optimal PerformanceFrontiers in Psychology 8. 2017.Based on recent findings, we propose a framework for a relationship among attention, effort and optimal performance. Optimal performance often refers to an effortless and automatic, flow-like state of performance. Mindfulness regulates the focus of attention to optimal focus on the core component of the action, avoiding too much attention that could be detrimental for elite performance. Balanced attention is a trained state that can optimize any particular attentional activity on the dual-proces…Read more
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94Aesthetic Spontaneity: A Theory of Action Based on Affective ResponsivenessDissertation, University of Hawai'i. 2004.This dissertation is an attempt to analyze an indigenous concept of early Chinese Philosophy in its own context, interpreting it outside of a contemporary Western philosophical framework , then to comb the history of Western philosophy for related concepts, in order to finally enrich the contemporary philosophical landscape by incorporating this concept through a useful and familiar set of conceptual tools. ;The concept in question is ziran, rendered spontaneity, a central notion of early Chines…Read more
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337What Is Self-Consciousness?In Labirinti della mente: Visioni del mondo, Società Bibliografica Toscana. pp. 223-233. 2012.In this article, I delineate seven aspects of the process of self-consciousness in order to demonstrate that when any of the aspects is compromised, self-consciousness goes away while consciousness persists. I then suggest that the psychological phenomenon of flow is characterized by a loss of self-consciousness. The seven aspects are: 1) implicit awareness that the person and the self are identical; 2) awareness of an event or circumstance in the world internal or external to the person; 3) a…Read more
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57Review of Kern's Text and Ritual in Early China (review)China Review International 14 (2): 338-354. 2007.In this full length review, I create a running parallel between Martin Kern's Text and Ritual in Early China and Mark Edward Lewis' Writing and Authority in Early China. Both books cover the nexus of texts and their sociopolitical milieu, with Kern's book acting as a sort of update to Lewis'. I group the articles in Kern's book under the following headings: Texts and Authority (Nylan, Falkenhausen, Brashier), Textual Emergence (Boltz, Kern), and Ritual in Literary Genres (Schaberg, Csikszentm…Read more
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294Chaos as the Inchoate: The Early Chinese Aesthetic of SpontaneityIn Grazia Marchianò (ed.), Aesthetics & Chaos: Investigating a Creative Complicity, . 2002.Can we conceive of disorder in a positive sense? We organize our desks, we discipline our children, we govern our polities--all with the aim of reducing disorder, of temporarily reversing the entropy that inevitably asserts itself in our lives. Going all the way back to Hesiod, we see chaos as a cosmogonic state of utter confusion inevitably reigned in by laws of regularity, in a transition from fearful unpredictability to calm stability. In contrast to a similar early Chinese notion of chaotic …Read more
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292Emotion in pre-Qin ruist moral theory: An explanation of "dao begins in Qing"Philosophy East and West 53 (2): 271-281. 2003.There is a view that Ruists never put much emphasis on qing and even saw it in a negative light. This is perhaps a misunderstanding, especially in regard to pre-Qin Ruism. In the Guodian Xing zi ming chu, the passage "dao begins in qing" (dao shi yu qing) plays an important role in our understanding of the pre-Qin notion of qing. This article concentrates on the "theory of qing" in both pre-Qin Ruism and Daoism and attempts a philosophical interpretation of "dao begins in qing," and in the proce…Read more
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293Li Zehou's Aesthetics as a Marxist Philosophy of FreedomDialogue and Universalism 13 (11-12): 133-140. 2003.After being largely unknown to non-siniphone philosophers, Li Zehou's ideas are gradually being translated into English, but very little has been done on his aesthetics, which he says is the key to his oeuvre. In the first of three sections of this paper, I briefly introduce the reader to Kant's aesthetics through Li's eyes, in which he develops an implicit notion of aesthetic freedom as political vehicle through the notions of subjectivity, universalization, and the unity of the cognitive facul…Read more
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56Emotion in pre-Qin ruist moral theory: An explanation of "dao begins in qing"Philosophy East and West 53 (2): 271-281. 2003.: There is a view that Ruists never put much emphasis on qing and even saw it in a negative light. This is perhaps a misunderstanding, especially in regard to pre-Qin Ruism. In the Guodian Xing zi ming chu, the passage "dao begins in qing" plays an important role in our understanding of the pre-Qin notion of qing. This article concentrates on the "theory of qing" in both pre-Qin Ruism and Daoism and attempts a philosophical interpretation of "dao begins in qing," and in the process offers philos…Read more
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344Strawson and Prasad on Determinism and ResentmentJournal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 18 (3): 198-216. 2001.P. F. Strawson's influential article "Freedom and Resentment" has been much commented on, and one of the most trenchant commentaries is Rajendra Prasad's, "Reactive Attitudes, Rationality, and Determinism." In his article, Prasad contests the significance of the reactive attitude over a precise theory of determinism, concluding that Strawson's argument is ultimately unconvincing. In this article, I evaluate Prasad's challenges to Strawson by summarizing and categorizing all of the relevant arg…Read more
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267Effortless Attention: A New Perspective in the Cognitive Science of Attention and Action (edited book)MIT Press. 2010.This is the first book to explore the cognitive science of effortless attention and action. Attention and action are generally understood to require effort, and the expectation is that under normal circumstances effort increases to meet rising demand. Sometimes, however, attention and action seem to flow effortlessly despite high demand. Effortless attention and action have been documented across a range of normal activities--from rock climbing to chess playing--and yet fundamental questions abo…Read more
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317Qing (情) and Emotion in Early Chinese ThoughtMing Qing Yanjiu 2001 151-176. 2001.In a 1967 article, A. C. Graham made the claim that 情 qing should never be translated as "emotions" in rendering early Chinese texts into English. Over time, sophisticated translators and interpreters have taken this advice to heart, and qing has come to be interpreted as "the facts" or "what is genuine in one." In these English terms all sense of interrelationality is gone, leaving us with a wooden, objective stasis. But we also know, again partly through the work of Graham, that interrelati…Read more
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753Appearance and Reality in The Philosophical Gourmet Report: Why the Discrepancy Matters to the Profession of PhilosophyMetaphilosophy 46 (4-5): 657-690. 2015.This article is a data-driven critique of The Philosophical Gourmet Report, the most institutionally influential publication in the field of Anglophone philosophy. The PGR is influential because it is perceived to be of high value. The article demonstrates that the actual value of the PGR, in its current form, is not nearly as high as it is assumed to be and that the PGR is, in fact, detrimental to the profession. The article lists and explains five objections to the methods and methodology of t…Read more