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The Annual Best Essay Award

Dao has established The Annual Best Essay Award, with the first award given in 2008 for the best essay published in Dao in 2007. In addition to a certificate of achievement, the award comes along with a prize of $1,000.

The award winners are also noted in the website of this journal as well as the website of Springer, the publisher of this journal. The award ceremony is held each year at the American Philosophical Association Annual Meeting (Eastern Division), where a special panel on the theme of the award winning essay is held. 

The selection process consists of two stages. At the beginning of each year, a nominating committee of at least three editorial members, who have not published in Dao in the given year, is established. This committee is charged with the task of nominating three best essays published in the previous year. These three essays are then sent to the whole editorial board for deliberation. The final winner is decided by a vote by all editorial board members who are not authors of the nominated essays. The result of the selection is announced toward the end of March each year.

2013 Dao Annual Best Essay Award Winner

Amy Olberding, "Confucius' Complaints and the Analects' Account of the Good Life" Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 12.4: 417-40

"Confucius' Complaints and the Analects' Account of the Good Life" is a highly original and thought provoking interpretation of the Analects focusing on an internal tension in the text. Its insightful reflection on a cluster of often neglected passages, in which Confucius seems to complain of the life he leads, feels its sorrows, admits his fallibility, and even possesses some despair, yields a convincing alternative reading that questions and illuminates the kind of exemplar Confucius is supposed to be and the way the Analects serves as an ethical guide for ordinary people. It exemplifies the type of research that Dao aims to promote.

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2012 Dao Annual Best Essay Award Winner

Carine Defoort, "Instruction Dialogues in the Zhuangzi: An 'Athropological' Reading" Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 11: 459-78

This essay provides a fresh reading of the ancient Chinese Daoist classic Zhuangzi. While the author claims that it is a non-philosophical reading, it turns out to be a philosophical reading that is most appropriate to the Zhuangzi and perhaps many if not all other ancient Chinese classics. The Zhuangzi authors, just like many other classical Chinese philosophers, were not so much interested, if at all, in theory building as in transformation of the person. Through a focus on the formal characteristics of the dialogues, careful textual analyses, perceptive interpretations, and coherent arguments, Dr. Defoort convincingly shows that the instruction of the Zhuangzi’s masters hint at the importance of non-teaching in various senses; it also focuses on attitudes and skills (knowing how) rather than knowledge (knowing that). The essay thus breaks ground not only in our interpretation of the Zhuangzi but also in our understanding of philosophy per se. It is the type of work that Dao promotes.

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2011 Dao Annual Best Essay Award Winner

Edward Slingerland, "Metaphor and Meaning in Early China" Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 10: 1-30

This is a ground-breaking essay. Slingerland debunks a fairly common assumption that Chinese way of thinking is metaphoric, while the Western way of thinking is logical, an assumption shared by both earlier Orientalists, who claimed the superiority of the Occidental, and more recent “reverse Orientialists,?who claim the superiority of the Oriental. In contrast, using his expertise in contemporary cognitive sciences, Slingerland argues convincingly that metaphor is a universal and fundamental feature of human cognition. What makes the Chinese way of thinking unique is thus not that it is metaphoric but that early Chinese thinkers were more self-aware of the metaphoric nature of language, while modern Western thinkers are more self-deluded about what they are doing. The essay as a whole is thus original in its interdisciplinary, comparative, and philosophical natures. It is the type of work that Dao aims to promote.

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2010 Dao Annual Best Essay Award Winner

KIM Myeong-seok, "What Ceyin zhi xin (Compassion/ Familial Affection) Really Is?" Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy IX.4: 407-425

Cogently connecting the idea of ceyin zhi xin to pertinent current western philosophical conceptions of emotions, Kim sheds on it a new and comparative light by arguing that it should be understood as a concern-based, cognitive construal. Marshaling rich evidentiary resources from the Mengzi itself and other texts, Kim advances his new interpretation while judiciously accommodating and critiquing previous commentators on Mencian thinking. His essay shows a firm command of the original texts and secondary readings and demonstrates sensitive and reasonable use of western analytic constructs. It is a significant contribution to the study of Mengzi in particular and Confucian moral psychology in general.

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2009 Dao Annual Best Essay Award Winner

Kim Sungmoon, "Self-Transformation and Civil Society: Lockean vs. Confucian" Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy VIII.4: 383-402.

In this contribution to the on-going dialogue between Confucianism and liberalism, Sungmoon Kim breaks the ground by going beyond the common contrast between the two as one between communitarianism and individualism. Kim argues that, while both aim at a society free from anti-social passions, Confucianism is unique in incorporating ritual propriety, instead of liberal self-control, in its idea of self-cultivation. His examination of the liberal view of the individual and society is balanced and substantial, and his contrast between Confucian self-cultivation and Lockean self-transformation is subtle and revealing. Kim's work represents the type of comparative philosophy that Dao promotes."

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2008 Dao Annual Best Essay Award Winner

Justin Tiwald, "A Right of Rebellion in the Mengzi?" Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy VII.3: 269-282

In this clearly written and analytically exercised essay, Justin Tiwald challenges the received opinion that Mengzi endorses people’s right for popular rebellion. Instead, Tiwald argues that, for Mengzi, people are only sometimes permitted to participate in a rebellion and not to decide when a rebellion is warranted, which suggests an intriguing division of deliberative labor. This interpretation makes Mengzi’s political philosophy more coherent than the traditional ones. This philosophically well argued position is based on solid historical and textual scholarship, representing the type of quality work that Dao aims to promote.

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2007 Dao Annual Best Essay Award Winner

Erin M. Cline, "Two Senses of Justice: Confucianism, Rawls, and Comparative Political Philosophy" Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy VI.4: 361-381

In this penetrating article, Erin M. Cline chooses an important but often neglected aspect of John Rawls’s theory of justice, his view of sense of justice, and brings it into dialogue with the idea of moral sense discussed in the Analects. As the result, there emerges not only a fresh understanding of both Rawls’s sense of justice and Confucius?moral sense but also a new appreciation of how a sense of justice develops. This article displays Cline’s scholarly rigor, philosophical depth, and broad knowledge of both Chinese and Western philosophy. It represents the type of comparative work that Dao promotes.

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