Promotional poster for the new Chinese film "Confucius."

Post your comments below

The 3-D blockbuster “Avatar” got the boot from 2,000 movie theaters in China this weekend. And “Avatar” was huge in China. But the Chinese government puts limits on foreign film runs — and it has other priorities.

Now running on all those big screens: a big-budget biopic on the ancient philosopher — China’s “Great Sage” — Confucius. [The New York Times has this update on the movie duel.]

The Chinese Communist Party has increasingly embraced Confucianism as a path to “harmony” and “order.” Admirers say it’s a natural return of the sage. Critics say it’s Chinese autocrats looking for cover.

This hour, On Point: The return of Confucius — and his new place in contemporary China.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us in our studio is Tu Weiming, professor of Chinese history and philosophy and of Confucian studies at Harvard University. He spent the last six months in China, where he is starting the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University. He written extensively on Confucius.

From New York we’re joined by Xudong Zhang, professor of East Asian studies and comparative literature at New York University. He is author of “Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: The Last Decade of China’s Twentieth Century.”

And from Berkeley, Calif., we’re joined by Minxin Pei, senior associate in the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College, where he is also professor of government. He is author of “China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy.”

More links:

Update, 1/29: “China’s Zeal for ‘Avatar’ Crowds Out ‘Confucius’” — The New York Times reports that Chinese moviegoers preferred “Avatar” to “Confucius” in such numbers that “Chinese authorities appeared to have backpedaled this week on a decision to pull ‘Avatar’ from the nation’s 2-D movie screens in favor of ‘Confucius.’”

Watch the trailer for the film “Confucius”:

It’s bonus time again on Wall Street. And at the end of an epic year of meltdown, bailout, and economic pain, those bonuses are on track to be bigger than ever.

$140 billion is the estimate. In cash. In stock. The biggest bonus pool ever — at the end of a year that’s seen American taxpayers pony up massively for the banks.

When 7 million families face foreclosure and 25 million Americans can’t find full-time work, what’s right here? What’s wrong? What’s “just.”

This hour, On Point: political philosopher Michael Sandel on justice at bonus time.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Michael Sandel is a political philosopher and a professor government at Harvard University. He is the author of many books, including “The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering” and “Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.”  His latest book is “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” He has taught one of Harvard’s most popular courses, “Justice,” for more than two decades. More than 14,000 students have taken the course, which has been turned into a 12-part television series, currently airing on PBS channels across the country.

Nobel Prize-winning thinker Amartya Sen grew up well-off in an India where injustice was on everyday display. He’s been thinking about justice and injustice ever since. Not in one country, but the whole world.

Now, at 75, Sen is writing deeply on how to create justice — social justice — on a globalized planet.

A planet where no two cultures have just the same concept of justice.

A planet where long effort to build ideal institutions of justice have fallen painfully short.

This hour, On Point: A conversation with Amartya Sen, on the world we live in and the idea of justice.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Amartya Sen joins us in our studio. He is a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University and winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics. A son of Bengal, he is a longtime champion of the disadvantaged. His new book is, a kind of great summation, is “The Idea of Justice.” London’s Independent calls it “a monumental work.”

Ever since the notion of Original Sin, there has been a tug of war over the essential goodness of humankind.

But whether or not you believe that we’re innately given to be good, you might wonder how likely we are to do good — to practice, as our guest Adam Phillips puts it, acts of true kindness.

In an America with feuding, greedy housewives in prime time, and a business culture driven by reckless self-dealing, kindness hardly looks like a priority — much less an essential ingredient of human happiness, Phillips says, as it was once believed to be. He argues that we’ve grown afraid of kindness, wary of it — that it’s become dangerous to practice.

This hour, On Point: kindness, how we lost it, and the case for bringing it back.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Joining us from London is Adam Phillips, co-author, with historian Barbara Taylor, of “On Kindness.” He is a psychoanalyst in London and the author of twelve books, including “On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored,” “Going Sane,” and “Side Effects.”

And with us in our studio is Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic.

Post your comments below

In legend, at least, philosophers were once great sages who walked among the people. Plato and Socrates in the public square.

These days, they seem locked away in ivory towers, writing inscrutable treatises for each other.

Filmmaker Astra Taylor has sprung them from the tower. Taken today’s big-name philosophers and put them in the street, in the backseat of a car, on foot, in public — turned the camera on, and given our wise ones ten minutes each to tell us what they’ve got.

It’s funny. It’s fascinating. And maybe we need it.

This hour, On Point: Our philosophers, on the hoof, on film.

You can join the conversation. Do you live the examined life? Do we need our philosophers to climb down with us, into the streets? What would you ask a big thinker in the backseat?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from San Francisco is Astra Taylor. A writer and documentary filmmaker, her latest film is called “Examined Life: Philosophy Is in the Streets.”

And from Hanover, N.H., is Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic.

Image A for the afterlife, if we’ve got one at all, is pretty sketchy. Harps, clouds, angels, pearly gates. Fire and brimstone.

Maybe you picture something else. Strawberry fields. Bliss. Nothingness. Reincarnation.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman has a hobby of imagining afterlives. He’s pictured scores. Really thought them through. Now he’s put forty in a new book. Forty ways of thinking about the afterlife, if there is one.

God is he. God is she. God is they. God is gone. You’re young in heaven. You’re old. You’re a microbe.

This hour, On Point: Imagining the afterlife.

You can join the conversation. How do you picture it? Something? Nothing? Heavenly choirs?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

David Eagleman, neuroscientist at Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine and author of the new book “Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.” 

You can read four stories from “Sum” on the book’s website. And here are short summaries of all 40 stories.

“I think, therefore I am,” said the great mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes. And the world has never been the same.

Putting thought at the center of existence meant no more automatic acceptance of the word of kings or the divine. It meant scientific method, secular culture, modern life. And centuries of struggle between the champions of faith and reason. A struggle that is hot again today.

A new intellectual detective story tracks not just the ideas of Descartes but his actual bones through the philosophical battlefield and today’s headlines.

This hour, On Point: Faith, reason and Descartes’ bones.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Joining us from Atlanta is Russell Shorto. He’s a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and bestselling author the 2004 book “The Island at the Center of the World,” about Dutch Manhattan. His new book is, “Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason.”

You can read an excerpt from the book.

Post your comments below

“The best,” wrote the Irish poet Yeats, “lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

Philosopher Susan Neiman says the world may be a confusing place, full of clashing values, beliefs and interests, but there is still such a thing as moral clarity. The Bible’s Abraham had it, she says. The ancient wanderer Odysseus had it. Politicians on the left and the right in Washington, Tel Aviv, and Tehran claim to have it.

But a lot of liberals, she says, have lost it — or at least lost its vocabulary, concepts and conviction. Time for everyone to bone up, she says.

Neiman looks out on American politics and the “culture wars” and says everyone in this country could use a little moral clarity these days. The left, she says, has grown far too wary of the very ideas of good and evil, heroism, nobility, dignity. The right, she argues, has adopted a kind of fundamentalism that takes human reason out of moral conversation.

This hour, On Point: One philosopher’s take on politics, morality and values — with an eye on the November election.

You can join the conversation. Have you got it? Moral clarity? Do Republicans? Do Democrats? What do you turn to for a clear-eyed view of the good?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Susan Neiman, a professor of philosophy and director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. She is the author of “Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists.” You can read the book’s introduction at Neiman’s website.

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly.

Post your comments below

Forty years ago, on the backroads and high roads of the plains and mountain West, Robert Pirsig and his young son set out on a journey that became a quest and meditation.

But a meditation from the roaring seat of a motorcycle.

The journey and the search became a huge bestselling book: “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” A generation — and in the years since, much more — flocked to its message of peace and enlightenment within the wild clatter of technology. Of the Buddha in the gearbox.

This hour, On Point: On the road, again. Retracing the journey of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”

You can join the conversation. Did you read it way back then? Ten years ago? Yesterday? Did it change your life? What’s the appeal of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”? What’s the message you took away? Share your thoughts.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Denver is “Pirsig Pilgrim” Mark Richardson. He is a writer at the Toronto Star and author of the new book “Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” You can browse inside the book here.

Also joining us from Denver is Ron DiSanto. He’s a professor of philosophy at Regis University and co-author, with Father Thomas Steele, of a study of Pirsig’s philosophy titled “Guidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” You can browse inside it here.

More links:

The site robertpirsig.org is a good resource on Robert Pirsig’s philosophy, including this 2005 essay by Pirsig on what he called his Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ).

Here’s a short video trailer for a new DVD series on Pirsig and his philosophy, featuring Pirsig himself:

Man walks into a restaurant and asks: “How do you prepare your chickens?” And the cook responds: “Nothing special really. We just tell them they’re gonna die.” Bada boom. The human condition in a two-line joke about chickens.

Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein see philosophy today all over the world of humor. A world where Woody Allen and Wittgenstein, Seinfeld and Socrates could have a great time cracking wise. Their new book of high philosophy and low humor is a surprise bestseller.

This hour On Point: the authors of “Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes.”

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Thomas Cathcart, co-author of the new book “Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes.”

Daniel Klein, co-author of the new book “Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes.”

Twenty years ago, Chicago’s Allan Bloom made a bestselling splash with his book “The Closing of the American Mind,” arguing that American universities had walked away from the Western classics and dumbed down American higher education.

Now, former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman arrives to say that door is nearly shut. In his new book, “Education’s End,” Kronman says bad priorities, raging careerism, and political correctness have cut college kids off from learning the meaning of life.

This hour, On Point: Anthony Kronman asks, “What is college for?”

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Anthony T. Kronman, Yale law professor and author of “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.”

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly.

Robert Oden, president of Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.