JOURNAL ARTICLES

& Book Chapters

 

Effortless Action or wu-wei

This was the focus on my first monograph (2003), and I have since returned to the topic recently armed with new insights gleaned from cognitive science. Effortless action, or unselfconscious spontaneity, is also central to the psychology of virtue ethics, which portrays truly virtuous action as arising in an wu-wei fashion.

I have recently become convinced that the link between virtue and spontaneity is centrally related to certain human cooperation problems, such as how to reliably identify genuine cooperators and unmask free-riders. This is the topic of my first popular book, Trying Not to Try (Crown/Random House, March 2014); I am also working on an academic article on the topic and have preliminary plans to explore these issues empirically with colleagues in the cognitive sciences.

Asterisks indicate refereed publications; sole-authored unless otherwise indicated.

Featured

Reber, Rolf and Edward Slingerland. “Confucius Meets Cognition: New Answers to Old Questions,” (PDF) Religion, Brain and Behaviour 1.2: 135-145 (June 2011). *

Co-authored piece with a cognitive psychologist exploring how recent work in psychology bears upon the paradox of wu-wei in the Analects.

“Crafts and Virtues: the Paradox of Wu-wei in the Analect,” in Confucius Now: Contemporary Encounters with Confucius, ed. David Jones, 109-136. LaSalle, IL: Open Court Press, 2008.

“The Problem of Moral Spontaneity in the Guodian Corpus,” (PDF) Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 7.3 (Fall 2008): 237-256. *

An updated statement of themes explore in my 2003 Effortless Action, exploring new evidence from a corpus of archeological texts.

“Distinguishing the Perspective of Religious Insider From That of Academic Outsider: A Response to ‘評斯林格蘭對《老子》無為之詮釋’ [‘A Critique of Slingerland’s Interpretation of Wu-wei in the Laozi’],” 中國哲學與文化 (The Journal of Chinese Philosophy and Culture) 1 (April 2007): 321-326.

“Effortless Action: the Chinese Spiritual Ideal of Wu-wei,” (PDF) Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68.2 (June 2000): 293-328. *

Article version of my dissertation project.