Our seminar will have several components.

The core of the seminar is the Textual Seminar, which will meet three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings) for two and a half hours. Each week will be devoted to a particular Confucian thinker:

• Week One -- Confucius and the Analects
• Week Two -- Mencius
• Week Three -- Xunzi
• Week Four -- Zhu Xi
• Week Five -- Wang Yangming
• Week Six -- Dai Zhen

In addition, during the seminar or in supplemental meetings, we will also cover a variety of supporting topics, including:

use of specialized electronic resources relevant to Chinese philosophy;
relevant background in Chinese history;
basics of the Chinese language and the various systems for romanizing it;
state of scholarship on particular texts; and
the large topic of translation, both of texts and of particular terms.

A preliminary schedule with specific texts and readings is available here.

A second component of the seminar will be four guest lectures held in the afternoons. Specialists in our texts will provide additional perspectives on who to think about them as resources for virtue ethics. A listing of the guest lecturers and some brief information about them can be found under the "Directors and Lecturers" tab to the left.

Finally, each Thursday afternoon we will have a Virtue Ethics Colloquium for three hours, in which we discuss specific examples of recent work in virtue ethics that are suggestive of possibilities for constructive dialogue with the Chinese materials we have been reading.