Janus Project: Classics between East Asia and the West

19th-20th June 2025

Impression by Ross Moncrieff

The Janus Project on Classics between East Asia and the West held its annual conference this year focused on the theme of moral education, with a particular emphasis on how confluences of the two classical didactic traditions played out in early modern Latin texts written in or about East Asia. Over the course of this two-day conference, held on the 19th and 20th June 2025, a number of speakers from history, classics, east Asian studies, philosophy, and literature came together in Oxford, both in-person and online, to discuss the classical posing of such didactic questions and investigate to what extent the answers given to them were able to cross the cultural and linguistic boundaries of the early modern world.

The conference’s nineteen speakers broadly took two approaches to the topic. One was comparative, putting the two classical traditions of Chinese and Graeco-Roman visions of moral education side-by-side with each other to identify similarities and differences between them. One of the two keynote speakers, Dr Jingyi Jenny Zhao (University of Cambridge), examined the similar ways in which both classical Chinese and Graeco-Roman texts identified a prenatal influence of motherly behaviour on their unborn children: the more virtuous the behaviour of the mother during pregnancy, the more sagelike her unborn child. A mother’s role in the education of a virtuous prince thus extended far earlier than his formal tuition—and indeed even his birth.

Another five papers broadly touched on similarly comparative themes. Dr Hin Ming Frankie Chik (University of Pittsburg) contrasted the ideals of the teacher in Confucian texts compared to the Platonic symposium while Dr Benjamin Huff’s (Randolph-Macon College) paper argued that the Mencian vision of human nature can helpfully supplement that of Aristotle. There were two other papers also comparing Aristotle’s philosophy with ancient Chinese thought: Xing Hao Wang’s (University of Chicago) paper, which argued for a reading of Aristotle as an adherent of “virtue politics” in the model of the Confucian philosopher Xunzi; and Wenzhen Jin (University of Vienna), which compared the conceptualisation of rhetoric by Aristotle and Han Feizi, the Chinese legalist philosopher. Dr Matthew Walker (Yale-NUS) took a different tack, drawing a parallel between the marginalisation of Xenophon and Confucius in modern Western philosophy as a result of the subordination of ethics to metaphysics and epistemology after Kant.

Despite the diversity of such approaches to the comparative study of classical Chinese and Graeco-Roman philosophical traditions of moral education, a clear common thread running throughout all of these papers was the commensurability of such cross-cultural comparison: even if there were serious differences of opinion between the two traditions, all the papers proceeded on the assumption that the two philosophies were tackling similar questions, and that as such their varying answers can be brought into dialogue with each other and with the present.

In the early modern world, it was the Jesuits who most famously attempted to facilitate such a dialogue between the classical traditions of East and West, and it was they who dominated the second of the two broad approaches to the topic: examining direct connections between Chinese and European classical traditions of moral education from the early modern world onwards. Our other keynote speaker, Professor Thierry Meynard (Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou) focused on the strategies for the moral and political education of a prince presented in the seventeenth-century China Jesuit Alfonso Vagnone’s book Zhiping xixue, Governance according to Western Learning (c. 1630). Vagnone conveyed key elements of late scholastic political theory to a Chinese audience, including its repudiation of divine right monarchy and its emphasis upon the mutual obligations of subject and ruler, while nevertheless adapting it to the centralised imperial political culture of late Ming China, for example downplaying scholastic considerations of alternative forms of constitution to monarchy. Vagnone was thus, like all his Jesuit confreres, walking a delicate balance between presenting European thought in its own terms and accommodating it to the expectations of his Chinese readers. 

There was an unsurprisingly large amount of other papers also focused on the China Jesuits. Vagnone was the subject of a further paper by Yu Wang (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), which highlighted the Stoic sources of much of Vagnone’s pedagogical philosophy. Dr Elisa Della Calce and Dr Simone Mollea (University of Turin) co-presented a paper on Graeco-Roman classical inspirations for the educational strategies presented in the Jesuits’ 1687 Latin translation of the Confucian classic, Zhongyong (The Doctrine of the Mean). Dr I Xuan Chong (University of St. Andrews), meanwhile, examined the impact of Daoist thought on the controversial early-eighteenth century Jesuit figurists, who tried to make esoteric Chinese classics such as the Book of Changes compatible with Christianity. Dr Giulia Falato (University of Parma) demonstrated how a seventeenth-century Chinese translation of Aesop’s fables presented a warning against political disharmony, while Dr Valentina Yang (KU Leuven) examined how the Jesuits’ Chinese converts mingled Christian and indigenous Chinese concepts of moral education in seventeenth-century Chinese morality books. From these little-known converts at the bottom of the social ladder, we returned to the imperial elite with Dr Andrew Hui’s (Yale–NUS) paper on the Kangxi emperor’s study of Euclid—taught, it is no surprise, by Jesuit missionaries.

A panel of three papers from graduate students at the University of Lisbon and New University of Lisbon focused on Jesuit translations, with Kim-Bảo Đặng (New University of Lisbon) examining the China missionary Alvaro Semedo’s influence on Christian translations in Vietnam; João Riso (University of Lisbon) sharing his detailed study of a seventeenth-century Latin-Chinese manuscript dictionary; and Wu Di (University of Lisbon) exploring how the Jesuits learned about Confucianism through the Latin annotations made on the Confucian Four Books by the China Jesuit Francesco Brancati.

A final panel took a rather different approach, examining how Jesuit and other writings on China were received and understood in Europe. Dr Yue Zhuang (University of Exeter) traced Confucian ideas transmitted to Europe by the Jesuits into the writings of the late-seventeenth century English statesman and essayist, Sir William Temple. Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa (University of Oxford), meanwhile, compared how Jesuit writings on Chinese and Indian chronology were read in eighteenth-century Europe. Anqi Fang (University of Cambridge) discussed the exoticisation of Chinese female writers in nineteenth-century European literature.

All these papers on early modern and later connections between China and Europe were understandably more sceptical of the ease of commensurability between the two traditions than the comparative papers. Ambiguities in translation were particularly emphasised as a constant presence in such cross-cultural exchange that both distorted and creatively reinvented the presentation of one tradition to the other. Nevertheless, it was also clear that fundamentally similar interests in moral education underlying both traditions helped to facilitate commensurate dialogue between them: translations might shake up the terms of discussion, but the recurrence of interests in moral education on both sides of the early modern East-West exchange demonstrates the vitality of this central pedagogical, philosophical, and political question across early modern cultures.

Overall, the conference successfully managed to tackle the question of moral education between cultures from a wide range of different approaches and disciplines, from comparative philosophy, to political theory, to linguistic philology, to literary reception. Given how relatively little scholarship there has been tackling the topic of moral education East and West, the rich diversity of papers and discursive engagement at the conference served to highlight just how much more there is to do in this exciting new field.