Philosophy rocks!

ASIA: A national Chinese news magazine named him the "most influential foreign figure of the year”. Hundreds of thousands of fans watch his television show. Tickets to his live appearances in China, Japan and Korea sell out quickly. Are we talking about a rock star? Sort of.

Michael J. Sandel is a Harvard University political philosopher who teaches a class on “Justice”. Sandel packs 1,000 students in to his lecture halls at Harvard, and, despite the size of the crowds, discussions are lively, on topics including torture, income distribution, and same-sex marriage.

The lectures were turned into a TV series in the US in 2009. A translated version was shown in Japan, raising Sandel’s popularity to that of, well, a rock star. The University of Tokyo has created a class based on his ideas. In China, volunteer translators helped to add subtitles to the series. Sandel’s new book, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?, has sold a million copies throughout eastern Asia.

Students are keenly interested in both Sandel’s ideas and the way he presents them, say observers. "The philosophic thinking among the Chinese is mostly instrumentalist and materialistic," Dean Qian Yingyi of Tsinghua's School of Economics and Management told The New York Times. There is a "contemporary obsession on economic development in China."

Students are interested in Sandel’s ideas and the way he presents them.

Sandel himself has a simple yet global explanation for his popularity. "Students everywhere are hungry for discussion of the big ethical questions we confront in our everyday lives," he says. His aim is to connect students across cultures and national boundaries – "to think through these hard moral questions together, to see what we can learn from one another."