East, West, and Home Again: Jóhann P. Árnason’s Historical Sociology

PROGRAMME 13:00-15:30

13:00 Opening of the symposium
Guðmundur Oddsson

13:10 The Wide World of Árnason
Geir Sigurðsson, University of Iceland

13:30 The Czechoslovak Roots of J. P. Árnason’s Social Theory
Ľubomír Dunaj, Slovak Academy of Sciences and Czech Academy of Sciences

13:50 Between Sage and Sociologist: Jóhann Páll Árnason and the Question of Confucian Modernity
Professor Jana S. Rošker, University of Ljubljana

14:10 From Geopolitics to a Civilizational Dialogue: Jóhann P. Árnason and Historical Sociology
Roger T. Ames, Peking University

14:30 Civilizational analysis - the state of debate and the unfinished tasks
Jóhann Páll Árnason, La Trobe University

15:00 Roundtable discussions

Geir Sigurðsson

Geir Sigurðsson studied philosophy, sociology, and Chinese studies in Iceland, Germany, Ireland, the United States, and P.R. China. He defended his PhD in philosophy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2004 and is currently a professor of Chinese studies and transcultural philosophy at the University of Iceland. Among his most recent publications are four co-edited volumes: Jóhann P. Árnason’s essay collection Austur, vestur og aftur heim (2024, with Ágúst Þór Árnason); Contemporary Interpretations and Readings of the Yijing: The Changes in Our Times (2025, with Tze-ki Hon); Four Exemplars of Ru 儒 (Confucianism): Beyond Comparative Philosophy (2025, with Paul D'Ambrosio, Hans-Georg Moeller, and Dimitra Amarintadou); and Imaginary Worlds and Imperial Power: The Case of China (2025, with L'ubomír Dunaj).

Ľubomír Dunaj

Ľubomír Dunaj is a research fellow at the Department of History of Slovak Philosophical and Political Thinking, Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, as well as a researcher at the Department of Political Philosophy and Globalization Research, Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. His research lies at the intersection of social and political philosophy, social theory, and ethics, which he approaches from the perspective of critical social theory, pragmatism, hermeneutics, and historical sociology. He obtained his PhD from Comenius University in Bratislava in 2013 and spent time as a researcher at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, and Fudan University in Shanghai. In 2019-2025, he worked as a Post-Doc at the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna. He is Editor-in-Chief of Pragmatism Today and a member of the editorial board of Filozofia — Journal for Philosophy. His areas of specialization are social and political philosophy, ethics, and social theory. The most recent books he coedited are Imaginary Worlds and Imperial Power: The Case of China (with G. Sigurðsson), 2025. Interkulturelle Phänomenologie. Georg Stengers Werk im Gespräch (with M. Ates), 2024; Civilization, Modernity, and Critique: Engaging Jóhann P. Árnason’s Macro-Social Theory (with K. C. M. Mertel and J. Smith), 2023; Hans-Herbert Kögler’s Critical Hermeneutics (with K. C. M. Mertel), 2022.

Jana S. Rošker

Professor Jana S. Rošker studied Sinology and obtained her PhD degree from the University of Vienna. She is the first Slovene Sinologist, and a co-founder and long-standing Head of the Department of Asian Studies at the University in Ljubljana (Slovenia). Her academic interests include Chinese epistemology, Chinese logic, and Modern New Confucianism. In these research areas, she has published thirty books and over two hundred articles and book chapters. She is the chief editor of the journal Asian Studies, current president of the International Society for Chinese Philosophy (ISCP), and the cofounder, first president, and honorary member of the European Association of Chinese Philosophy (EACP.

Roger T. Ames 安樂哲

Roger T. Ames 安樂哲 is Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University, Senior Academic Advisor of the Peking University Berggruen Research Center, and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Hawai’i. He is a former editor of Philosophy East & West and the founding editor of China Review International. Ames has authored several interpretative studies of Chinese philosophy and culture: Thinking Through Confucius (1987), Anticipating China (1995), Thinking from the Han (1998), and Democracy of the Dead (1999) (all with D.L. Hall), Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary (2011), Human Becomings: Theorizing Persons for Confucian Role Ethics (2020), and most recently, Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy (2024). His publications also include translations of Chinese classics: Sun-tzu: The Art of Warfare (1993); Sun Pin: The Art of Warfare (1996) (with D.C. Lau); The Confucian Analects (1998) and The Chinese Classic of Family Reverence: The Xiaojing (2009) (both with H. Rosemont), Focusing the Familiar: The Zhongyong (2001), and The Daodejing (with D.L. Hall) (2003). He has most recently completed A Sourcebook in Classical Confucian Philosophy (2024) with its companion A Conceptual Lexicon for Classical Confucian Philosophy (2021) and has been promoting Philosophy of Family as a subdiscipline in philosophy.

Jóhann Páll Árnason

Jóhann Páll Árnason is a professor emeritus at La Trobe University in Melbourne. He earned a PhD in philosophy in 1970 from the University of Frankfurt. Árnason was funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Institute from 1970 to 1972 and taught sociology at Heidelberg University from 1972 to 1975. He taught for a summer semester at Bielefeld University in 1975 and simultaneously completed his Habilitation. From 1975 to 2003, Árnason held a position in the Faculty of Social Science at La Trobe University in Melbourne. From 2007 to 2014, Árnason taught in the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University in Prague. Since 2006, Árnason and his wife, María Jansdóttir, have lived in Akureyri in Northeast Iceland, where he has, among other things, taught in the Faculty of Social Science at the University of Akureyri. Árnason has been a visiting professor at various universities and research institutions in Germany, France, Japan, Sweden, and Italy. He was awarded a Forschungspreis from the Alexander von Humboldt Institute in 2008 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Iceland in 2011. Árnason has published multiple articles, book chapters, and books, most notably Praxis und Interpretation (1988), Social Theory and Japanese Experience (1997), Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions (2003), and The Labyrinth of Modernity: Horizons, Pathways and Mutations (2020).