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A six-week seminar for fifteen college and university faculty to bring Confucian and neo-Confucian texts into dialogue with recent work in Western virtue ethics.

Virtue ethics treats individual character and motivation as central to our understanding of ethical phenomena, an emphasis that one also finds within the main traditions of Chinese philosophical thought. We propose a six-week seminar aimed at philosophers interested in virtue ethics, but with little or no background in Chinese philosophy. Our goals are to develop the capacity of Western-trained philosophers to draw on Chinese sources in their on-going philosophical research, and to facilitate the development of cross-cultural dialogue and professional relationships. The principal activity of the seminar will be intensive, guided reading and discussion of core texts from both classical Confucianism and neo-Confucianism. Having collectively worked through various challenges to putting the two traditions into dialogue, participants will be invited to participate in a major international conference on Chinese philosophy and virtue ethics, to be held in Beijing in the spring of 2009.