Philosophical Ideas and Artistic Pursuits in the Traditions of Asia and the West is a workshop series designed to offer faculty members at College of DuPage the opportunity to use exemplary Western and Asian philosophical traditions as a lens through which to analyze the often lesser-known world of Asian arts and humanities.

Increasingly, community colleges are called upon to globalize their curriculum and prepare students to learn and live in an internationalized environment. The dynamics of globalization pose both opportunities and challenges for College of DuPage faculty. The sensitivity to understand, synthesize, and teach different ways of thinking about the world beyond one’s national borders is intrinsic to intellectual growth.

Art, in its multifaceted designs, sounds, and practices, is an exceptional medium for a systematic study, comparative analysis, and understanding of creative human activities, ideas, and worldviews conveyed in culturally diverse contexts. To pursue artistic endeavors by means of critical reflection of philosophical ideas and comparative analysis in the suggested mode will guide faculty in their ability to perceive, understand, and review complex artistic frameworks and ideas and to integrate those ideas into the classroom. While Asian artistic pursuits are generally less familiar to Western academics and scholars of the humanities, arts, and other disciplines, they represent an important and intellectually extensive body of aesthetic sensibilities, beliefs, and practices.

Selected Western and Eastern philosophical theories will provide a cross-cultural context in which faculty members will discuss aesthetic frameworks that have informed Asian cultural works and practices in the following categories: painting, sculpture, film, music, space (Chinese garden), poetry, literature, and the art of living (ethics and aesthetics).