Richard Madsen is distinguished Professor of Sociology the University of California, San Diego, specializing in sociology of China. [1]
Madsen received his A.B. at the Department of Philosophy at Maryknoll College and his B.D. (1967) and M.Th. (1968) at Maryknoll Seminary. He then moved to Taiwan to study at the Chinese Language Institute in Fu Jen Catholic University (1968-1970) and at the Department of Sociology at National Taiwan University (1970-1971). Upon his return to the United States, he completed his M.A. in Religious Studies (1972) and Ph.D. in Sociology (1977), both on East Asia from Harvard. [2]
He joined the University of California, San Diego since 1983 and was promoted to Professor in 1985. He was Chair of the Program in Chinese Studies between 1984 and 1987. He was a co-director of a Ford Foundation project to help revive the academic discipline of sociology in China and was Director of UC Fudan Center at the School of Global Policy and Strategy. [3]
He is the recipient of several book awards, including a Jury Nominee for the Pulitzer Prize in General Non-fiction and the L.A. Times Book Award for Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985), as well as the C. Wright Mills Award for Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (1984). [4]
Moral relativism or ethical relativism is a term used to describe several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different peoples and their own particular cultures. An advocate of such ideas is often labeled simply as a relativist for short. In detail, descriptive moral relativism holds only that people do, in fact, disagree fundamentally about what is moral, with no judgment being expressed on the desirability of this. Meta-ethical moral relativism holds that in such disagreements, nobody is objectively right or wrong. Normative moral relativism holds that because nobody is right or wrong, everyone ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when considerably large disagreements about the morality of particular things exist.
Mores are social norms that are widely observed within a particular society or culture. Mores determine what is considered morally acceptable or unacceptable within any given culture.
Self-ownership, also known as sovereignty of the individual or individual sovereignty, is the concept of property in one's own person, expressed as the moral or natural right of a person to have bodily integrity and be the exclusive controller of one's own body and life. Self-ownership is a central idea in several political philosophies that emphasize individualism, such as libertarianism, liberalism, and anarchism.
Arend d'Angremond Lijphart is a Dutch-American political scientist specializing in comparative politics, elections and voting systems, democratic institutions, and ethnicity and politics. He is Research Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is influential for his work on consociational democracy and his contribution to the new Institutionalism in political science.
Shelly Kagan is Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, where he has taught since 1995. He is best known for his writings about moral philosophy and normative ethics. In 2007, Kagan's course about death was offered for free online, and proved to be very popular. This led to him publishing a book on the subject in 2012. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.
Robert Neelly Bellah was an American sociologist and the Elliott Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his work related to the sociology of religion.
Thomas A. Metzger is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is the son of the German philosopher Arnold Metzger. He specializes in the intellectual and institutional history of China, studying both the premodern and modern periods. His current research focuses on contemporary China's moral-political discourse and its historical roots, dealing with both China and Taiwan. He also has written on U.S.–China policy issues and has lectured widely in English and Chinese in the United States, Europe, Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong.
Steven Michael Lukes is a British political and social theorist. Currently he is a professor of politics and sociology at New York University. He was formerly a professor at the University of Siena, the European University Institute (Florence) and the London School of Economics.
Robert John Wuthnow is an American sociologist who is widely known for his work in the sociology of religion. He is the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, where he is also the former Chair of the Department of Sociology and Director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion.
Richard Newell Boyd was an American philosopher, who spent most of his career teaching philosophy at Cornell University where he was Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters Emeritus. He specialized in epistemology, the philosophy of science, and the language and mind.
Lifestyle enclave is a sociological term first used by Robert N. Bellah et al. in their 1985 book, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. In the glossary of the book, they provide the following definition: "A lifestyle enclave is formed by people who share some feature of private life. Members of a lifestyle enclave express their identity through shared patterns of appearance, consumption, and leisure activities, which often serve to differentiate them sharply from those with other lifestyles." This term is contrasted with community, which Bellah et al. claim is characterized by social interdependence, shared history, and shared participation in politics.
Susan L. Shirk is an expert on Chinese politics and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State during the Clinton administration. She was in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. She is currently a professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. She is also a Senior Director of Albright Stonebridge Group, a global strategy firm, where she assists clients with issues related to East Asia. She is married to Samuel L. Popkin, another prominent UCSD professor.
Troy Smith Duster is an American sociologist with research interests in the sociology of science, public policy, race and ethnicity and deviance. He is a Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology at University of California, Berkeley, and professor of sociology and director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University.
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is a multi-university lecture series in the humanities, founded in 1978, at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, by the American scholar Obert Clark Tanner. In founding the lecture, he defined their purpose as follows:
I hope these lectures will contribute to the intellectual and moral life of mankind. I see them simply as a search for a better understanding of human behavior and human values. This understanding may be pursued for its own intrinsic worth, but it may also eventually have practical consequences for the quality of personal and social life.
David Garland is Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and professor of sociology at New York University, and professorial fellow in Criminology at Edinburgh Law School. He is well known for his historical and sociological studies of penal institutions, for his work on the welfare state, and for his contributions to criminology, social theory, and the study of social control.
Jeff Schweitzer is an American non-fiction author, scientist, political commentator and proponent of scientific skepticism. His published works are largely devoted to the interrelationship between politics, morality, religion and science. He is a blogger for The Huffington Post.
Sheilaism is a shorthand term for an individual's system of religious belief which co-opts strands of multiple religions chosen by the individual usually without much theological consideration. The term derives from a woman named Sheila Larson, who is quoted by Robert N. Bellah et al. in their book Habits of the Heart as following her own "little voice" in a faith she calls "Sheilaism".
Pragmatic ethics is a theory of normative philosophical ethics and meta-ethics. Ethical pragmatists such as John Dewey believe that some societies have progressed morally in much the way they have attained progress in science. Scientists can pursue inquiry into the truth of a hypothesis and accept the hypothesis, in the sense that they act as though the hypothesis were true; nonetheless, they think that future generations can advance science, and thus future generations can refine or replace their accepted hypotheses. Similarly, ethical pragmatists think that norms, principles, and moral criteria are likely to be improved as a result of inquiry.
Ann Swidler is an American sociologist and professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Swidler is most commonly known as a cultural sociologist and authored one of the most-cited articles in sociology, "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies".
Paul G. Pickowicz. is an American historian of modern China and Distinguished Professor of History and Chinese Studies at University of California at San Diego. He specialises in the history of China in the 20th century.