Giving a talk at Stockton University

I’ll be giving a talk on April 12th at Stockton University titled “Truth and Chinese Philosophy,” which I am currently co-authoring with Jamin Asay (Purdue University). An abstract of the paper follows:

A longstanding debate within comparative philosophy concerns what role (if any) the notion of truth plays in ancient Chinese philosophy. In this paper we advance a new methodology for exploring how truth figures into ancient Chinese texts. We rely on the notion of a minimal characterization of truth that offers a theoretically neutral starting place for our inquiry. Then we demonstrate how to use that method when approaching ancient Chinese texts, and how it accounts for not only where but also why truth appears in that canon. As a result, we identify a number of minimalist truth predicates that are operant in those texts, and use them to discuss the alethic phenomena that do and do not arise in the ancient Chinese philosophical tradition. This methodology, we offer, can be used as a springboard for identifying and studying alethic phenomena in other philosophical traditions as well, making it a useful tool for comparative philosophy.