Developing Virtue, East and West

We welcome you to our conference site, and to the conference itself, and hope you can participate. Our conference is motivated by the conviction that big and important questions in the Humanities have essentially multi-disciplinary answers. Furthering and improving such answers is the reason why we are bringing leaders from across several disciplines to Cal State Fullerton. We thank our many sponsors for the funding needed to make this event possible (see below), and invite you to consider some of the questions addressed in the presentations of our invited speakers:

Social-psychological studies indicate that there are differences in the ways that virtues are conceived and developed across the world. What are these differences, especially pertaining to the Far East and the West? Given the presence of these and other cross-cultural differences, should it be the job of interdisciplinary researchers to identify univocal concepts of moral virtues like 'humility' or 'justice'? Are intellectual and moral virtues acquired in significantly different ways across cultures? If so, how? How ought developmental differences across cultures influence interdisciplinary research on virtues? What roles do emulation, education, and critical thinking play in the development of moral virtue across cultures? Is one's social and political environment as important to development of virtue as language? Or is a culture's ancestral pathogen load, or whether one's culture used the plow or the hoe more important in explaining cross-cultural moral differences? How have cultures with and without High Gods influenced subsequent moral development? Are interdisciplinary researchers engaged in cross-cultural work on morality successfully avoiding the WEIRD problem--referring to the exclusive use in psychological studies of participants from Western educated individualist rich and democratic cultures? How can one tradition learn from another?

These questions and their many presuppositions form the focus of talks at our conference. The conference will take place over two days on Thursday and Friday June 19 and 20, 2014. We will bring to campus 20 leading scholars (10 as speakers, 10 as chairs) from across the world from departments including Philosophy, Education, Neuroscience, Psychology, all of whom use empirical work to address questions about the development of virtue. You are invited to join us. Should you have questions after taking a look at the pages supporting the conference, please email us with your questions, or simply registerhere.