More than 15 Invited Speakers, Including:
Emeritus Professor Chad Hansen (HKU)
Professor Lee Yearley (Stanford)
Professor P. J. Ivanhoe (City U., HK)
Professor Michael Nylan (Berkeley)
Professor Jiyuan Yu (SUNY, Buffalo)

Theme:
Hong Kong is in a unique geographical and cultural position to facilitate an exchange of ideas between Chinese and Western philosophical traditions. This conference aims to exploit and highlight that advantage by promoting a global dialogue on happiness that will address our shared human concern with well-being.

To develop this dialogue, the first step is to uncover the extent to which the Chinese and Western philosophical traditions have been talking about the same topics and considering the same ideas. In the Western tradition, a concern with happiness marks a pair of rival approaches to ethics and politics, and we seem to find a similar debate within the Chinese tradition.

On the one hand, in the Western tradition a utilitarian approach stresses external measures of happiness or individual well-being, distinguishes sharply in principle between an individual’s promoting their own well-being and their promoting the aggregate well-being of the community, and seeks an empirically objective critique of received ideas about personal ethics and political institutions. In the Chinese tradition this consequentialist line of thinking characterizes especially the Mohist school.

On the other hand, a rival line of thinking that is represented especially by prominent Confucians and Daoists in China and Aristotle and the Stoics in the West, sees happiness as the realization of one’s own nature, or living in accord with nature as a whole. Thinkers who follow this approach, in both traditions, stress reliance on intuitive sensibility, and tend to associate a person’s happiness or well-being closely with their moral goodness.

Based on the belief that many resonances exist between the ways this debate has developed in the two traditions, this conference aims to address three broad questions:

1. To what extent is it true that Chinese philosophers and Western philosophers engaging in these debates are addressing the same topics?

2. How does the Western discussion of happiness most directly address distinctive leading ideas of the Chinese philosophical tradition, such as ritual, reverence, minimalism, or the primacy of relationships?

3. Can Chinese ideas help solve philosophical problems about the ethics of happiness that have troubled the West, and vice versa?

Conference Convenor:
Dr Timothy O’Leary
Department of Philosophy
University of Hong Kong

For further information, contact: Ms Novia Wong