Archive - October 15, 2023

  Socrates in Sichuan: Chinese Students Search for Truth, Justice, and the (Chinese) Way Peter J. Vernezze (China 2006-08) Potomac Books April 2011 212 pages $10.01 (Kindle); $9.49 (Hardback)   When Peter J. Vernezze took a leave of absence from his position as a philosophy professor to serve as a Peace Corps Volunteer in China, he supplemented his main task―teaching English―with leading a weekly philosophical discussion group with Chinese undergraduate and graduate students at Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu. In each session the students debated topics as diverse as the status of truth, the meaning of life, the reality of fate, the definition of sanity, the necessity of religion, and the value of romantic love. Each of the twenty-five chapters of Socrates in Sichuan focuses on the topic of one evening’s discussion, which was always in the form of a question: How are ancient conceptions of virtue holding up in . . .