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48Tang Junyi on Mencian and Mohist Conceptions of MindNew Asia Academic Bulletin 19. 2006.Tang Junyi (T’ang Chun-i 唐君毅) was among the founders of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the first chair of the Department of Philosophy at CUHK, an influential scholar of Chinese philosophy, and one of the leaders of the New Confucian movement. In this article, I take issue with the line of interpretation he develops in a provocative 1955 study of Mencius and Mozi. Though I don’t make the connections explicit, Tang’s views and my critique of them are relevant to issues in contemporary discu…Read more
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89Psychological emptiness in the ZhuangziAsian Philosophy 18 (2). 2008.Three views of psychological emptiness, or x , can be found in the Zhu ngz . The instrumental view values x primarily as a means of efficacious action. The moderate view assigns it intrinsic value as an element of one Zhuangist vision of the good life. The radical view also takes it to be an element of the ideal life, but in this case the form of life advocated is that of the Daoist sage, who transcends mundane human concerns to merge with nature or the D o. The instrumental and moderate views a…Read more
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145Knowledge and Error in Early Chinese ThoughtDao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 10 (2): 127-148. 2011.Drawing primarily on the Mòzǐ and Xúnzǐ, the article proposes an account of how knowledge and error are understood in classical Chinese epistemology and applies it to explain the absence of a skeptical argument from illusion in early Chinese thought. Arguments from illusion are associated with a representational conception of mind and knowledge, which allows the possibility of a comprehensive or persistent gap between appearance and reality. By contrast, early Chinese thinkers understand mind an…Read more
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Action and Agency in Early Chinese ThoughtJournal of Chinese Philosophy and Culture 5. 2009.In this lecture, I present a sketch of how action and agency are conceived of in pre-Qín 先秦, or classical, Chinese thought, along the way drawing some contrasts with familiar Western conceptions of action. I will also comment briefly on how the ideas I present might affect our interpretation of early Chinese texts and how they might help us to relate early Chinese thought to contemporary action theory and ethics.
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44Two roads to wisdom? Chinese and analytic philosophical traditions (review)Journal of Chinese Philosophy 32 (2). 2005.
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130Skepticism and Value in the ZhuāngziInternational Philosophical Quarterly 49 (4): 439-457. 2009.The ethics of the Zhuāngzi is distinctive for its valorization of psychological qualities such as open-mindedness, adaptability, and tolerance. The paper discusses how these qualities and their consequences for morality and politics relate to the text’s views onskepticism and value. Chad Hansen has argued that Zhuangist ethical views are motivated by skepticism about our ability to know a privileged scheme of action-guiding distinctions, which in turn is grounded in a form of relativism about su…Read more
Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong
Areas of Specialization
Asian Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
1 more
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Asian Philosophy |