PULLMAN, Wash. — The Department of Philosophy at Washington State University’s College of Liberal Arts will sponsor the 41st Annual Potter Memorial Lecture Thursday (Sept. 12) at 7:30 p.m.
The guest speaker, Professor Philip J. Ivanhoe of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, will present “Filial Piety as a Virtue” in Kimbrough Hall, Room 101. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Filial piety, the natural obligations a child has to his/her parents, was a core virtue in early Confucianism. Since that time, philosophers’ opinions of this notion range from “an ‘unavoidable’ part of life” to the contemporary Western philosopher’s view of “unwarranted and even oppressive.”
Ivanhoe defends filial piety by drawing on certain features of early Confucianism and, over the course of the lecture, will show how the conception of filial piety can help one understand other features of traditional Chinese thought.
On Friday (Sept. 13) at 3:15 p.m. in Avery Hall’s Bundy Reading Room, Professor Ivanhoe will discuss how traditional Chinese views on the relationship between literature and ethics can contribute to contemporary debates on those topics.
Ivanhoe is a member of the philosophy and Asian languages and cultures departments at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His work focuses on Chinese views in a variety of areas, and he has authored numerous books and articles.
For more information, contact the Department of Philosophy at (509)35-8611 or send an e-mail to philo@wsu.edu.
