Time：June 11th, 15:00-17:00
Speaker：Stephen C. Angle 安靖如（维思大学）
Further details are available on the event poster.
Key Themes：
Recently, some advocates of progressive Confucian political philosophy have argued for the inclusive nature of Confucian citizenship. In related ways, both Sungmoon Kim's "Confucian active citizenship" and my own "Confucian nei-wai citizenship" stress that such citizens have responsibilities that are not limited to a "public" realm that is sharply delineated from a "private" realm. Furthermore, these responsibilities may go beyond action to expectations about the attitudes citizens should hold toward the plight of their fellow citizens (and perhaps even further afield). It is natural to wonder whether such a conception of citizenship is too demanding. On the one hand, we might worry that such a conception of Confucianism will be normatively unattractive to the majority of citizens, or even push Confucianism in the direction of an elitist meritocracy. On the other hand, we might also worry that allowing public or political concerns to bleed into our personal and affective lives has problematic effects on democracy itself. For example, Robert Talisse has argued that when we allow the categories, allegiances, and struggles of politics to overwhelm our social lives, it can undermine many of the most important social goods that democracy is meant to deliver. In this talk I argue that built into the very idea of nei-wai citizenship is an ideal of harmony between the interconnected-yet-distinct aspects of our inner, more personal persona and our outer, more public persona. This dynamic underlies the reasonably demanding and psychologically balanced conception that is modern Confucian citizenship.
Speaker Profile：
Stephen C. Angle is Mansfield Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University, where he has taught since 1994. Angle’s research and teaching focus on Confucian philosophy, including both its history and its current and future development. He has received a number of international fellowships and awards, and is a past President of the International Society for Comparative Study of Chinese and Western Philosophy. Angle is the author or co-author of five books, the most recent of which is Growing Moral: A Confucian Guide to Life (Oxford, 2022). He has also co-edited and contributed to three others, including Progressive Confucianism and Its Critics: Dialogues from the Confucian Heartland (co-edited with Yutang Jin, Routledge, 2025).
