Global Philosophy
Yale’s Global Philosophy Working Group is a welcoming forum for presentations of research from faculty and graduate students on philosophical traditions from around the world. Through these discussions, we hope not only to catalyze research on understudied corners of the discipline but also to refine our hermeneutic approach to global philosophical traditions within the Western academy.
In the past, we have organized about six talks per term, inviting professors from East Coast universities like Princeton to discuss topics such as the role of artifice in late Han Dynasty (c. 25-220 AD) philosophy and methodology in comparative philosophy. Graduate students from Yale and neighboring institutions like Harvard have presented topics such as a comparison of ancient Chinese and Greek views on how best to explain natural phenomena and preternatural horrors, an examination of political and philosophical views of water in ancient China, and a critique of an early medieval Chinese view of the aesthetics of music.
Occasionally, we sponsor larger events such as our Spring 2024 symposium, Moral Cultivation in the Premodern World: Craft and Transformation in Later Stoics, the Zhuangzi, and Zen, which featured invited speakers David Machek (Lecturer and Privatdozent, Universität Bern and Research Fellow, Charles University) and Christopher Gowans (Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University) as well as responses from Yale graduate students Lizzie Davis (CLSS & PHIL) and James Brown-Kinsella (EALL & PHIL).
In previous semesters, we have also met as a reading group to examine weakness of will, skepticism, and monism across a variety of global philosophical traditions.
If you are interested in coming to our events or presenting your own research, please write to james.brown-kinsella@yale.edu to join our mailing list. We welcome proposals for presentations on any topic of philosophical interest, broadly conceived, from any tradition of any part of the world. The more regions, periods, and topics we add to our mental maps, the better!