-
2932Hermeneutics: Schleiermacher and DiltheyIn Alan D. Schrift & Daniel W. Conway (eds.), History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 2; Nineteenth-Century Philosophy: Revolutionary Responses to the Existing Order, Acumen Press. 2010.
-
1534Heidegger and Dilthey: Language, History, and HermeneuticsIn Megan Altman Hans Pedersen (ed.), Horizons of Authenticity in Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Moral Psychology, Springer. pp. 109-128. 2014.The hermeneutical tradition represented by Yorck, Heidegger, and Gadamer has distrusted Dilthey as suffering from the two sins of modernism: scientific “positivism” and individualistic and aesthetic “romanticism.” On the one hand, Dilthey’s epistemology is deemed scientistic in accepting the priority of the empirical, the ontic, and consequently scientific inquiry into the physical, biological, and human worlds; on the other hand, his personalist ethos and Goethean humanism, and his pluralistic …Read more
-
1481Responding with dao : Early daoist ethics and the environmentPhilosophy East and West 59 (3). 2009.Early Daoism, as articulated in the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, indirectly addresses environmental issues by intimating a non-reductive naturalistic ethics calling on humans to be open and responsive to the specificities and interconnections of the world and environment to which they belong. "Dao" is not a substantial immanent or transcendent entity but the lived enactment of the intrinsic worth of the "myriad things" and the natural world occurring through how humans address and are addressed b…Read more
-
1358ĐẠO ĐỨC, NGHIỆP VÀ SỰ PHÁT TRIỂN BỀN VỮNGIn N. Từ (ed.), PHẬT GIÁO VỀ PHÁT TRIỂN BỀN VỮNG VÀ THAY ĐỔI XÃ HỘI, . pp. 19-31. 2014.
-
1311Religious Crisis, Ethical Life, and Kierkegaard’s Critique of ChristendomActa Kierkegaardiana 4 170-186. 2009.
-
1237Confucian Relational Hermeneutics, the Emotions, and Ethical LifeIn Paul Fairfield & Saulius Geniusas (eds.), Relational Hermeneutics: Essays in Comparative Philosophy, Bloomsbury. pp. 193-204. 2018.In paradigmatic Confucian (Ruist) discourses, emotion (qing) has been depicted as co-arising with human nature (xing) and an irreducible constitutive source of human practices and their interpretation. The affects are concurrently naturally arising and alterable through how individuals react and respond to them and how they are or are not cultivated. That is, emotions are relationally mediated realities given in and transformed through how they are felt, understood, interpreted, and acted upon. …Read more
-
1235Dilthey, Heidegger und die Hermeneutik des faktischen LebensIn Scholtz Gunter (ed.), Diltheys Werk und die Wissenschaften, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. pp. 97-109. 2013.
-
1215Schleiermacher on Language, Religious Feeling, and the IneffableEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 8 (2): 297-312. 2004.This paper is about the relevance of the ineffable and the singular to hermeneutics. I respond to standard criticisms of Friedrich Schleiermacher by Karl Barth and Hans-Georg Gadamer in order to clarify his understanding of language, interpretation, and religion. Schleiermacher’s “indicative hermeneutics” is developed in the context of the ethical significance of communication and the ineffable. The notion of trace is employed in order to interpret the paradox of speaking about that which cannot…Read more
-
1172Heidegger’s Failure to Overcome Transcendental PhilosophyIn Halla Kim & Steven Hoeltzel (eds.), Transcendental Inquiry: Its History, Methods and Critiques, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 159-179. 2016.
-
1109Technology and the Way: Buber, Heidegger, and Lao‐Zhuang “Daoism”Journal of Chinese Philosophy 41 (3-4): 307-327. 2014.I consider the intertextuality between Chinese and Western thought by exploring how images, metaphors, and ideas from the texts associated with Zhuangzi and Laozi were appropriated in early twentieth-century German philosophy. This interest in “Lao-Zhuang Daoism” encompasses a diverse range of thinkers including Buber and Heidegger. I examine how the problematization of utility, usefulness, and “purposiveness” in Zhuangzi and Laozi becomes a key point for their German philosophical reception; ho…Read more
-
1084The yijing and philosophy: From Leibniz to DerridaJournal of Chinese Philosophy 38 (3): 377-396. 2011.
-
1072Martin Buber's Phenomenological Interpretation of Laozi's DaodejingIn David Chai (ed.), Daoist Encounters with Phenomenology, Bloomsbury. pp. 105-120. 2020.
-
1033Heidegger and the Questionability of the EthicalStudia Phaenomenologica 8 411-435. 2008.Despite Heidegger’s critique of ethics, his use of ethically-inflected language intimates an interpretive ethics of encounter involving self-interpreting agents in their hermeneutical context and the formal indication of factical life as a situated dwelling open to possibilities enacted through practices of care, interpretation, and individuation. Existence is constituted practically in Dasein’s addressing, encountering, and responding to itself, others, and its world. Unlike rule-based or virtu…Read more
-
1027The Human and the Inhuman: Ethics and Religion in the zhuangziJournal of Chinese Philosophy 41 (S1): 723-739. 2014.One critique of the early Daoist texts associated with Laozi and Zhuangzi is that they neglect the human and lack a proper sense of ethical personhood in maintaining the primacy of an impersonal dehumanizing “way.” This article offers a reconsideration of the appropriateness of such negative evaluations by exploring whether and to what extent the ethical sensibility unfolded in the Zhuangzi is aporetic, naturalistic, and/or religious. As an ethos of cultivating life and free and easy wandering b…Read more
-
993Generativities: Western Philosophy, Chinese Painting, and the YijingOrbis Idearum 1 (1). 2013.Western philosophy has been defined through the exclusion of non-Western forms of thought as non-philo-sophical. In this paper, I place the notion of what is “properly” philosophy into question by contrasting the essence/appearance paradigm governing Western metaphysics and its deconstructive critics with the more fluid, dynamic, and participatory forms of encountering and performatively enacting the world that are articulated in Chinese thinking and made apparent in Chinese painting. In this herm…Read more
-
931Language and emptiness in Chan buddhism and the early HeideggerJournal of Chinese Philosophy 37 (3): 472-492. 2010.
-
913Impure Phenomenology: Dilthey, Epistemology, and the Task of Interpretive PsychologyStudia Phaenomenologica 10 19-44. 2010.Responding to critiques of Dilthey’s interpretive psychology, I revisit its relation with epistemology and the human sciences. Rather than reducing knowledge to psychology and psychology to subjective understanding, Dilthey articulated the epistemic worth of a psychology involving (1) an impure phenomenology of embodied, historically-situated, and worldly consciousness as individually lived yet complicit with its naturally and socially constituted contexts, (2) experience- and communication-orie…Read more
-
856The Question of Resentment in Nietzsche and Confucian EthicsTaiwan Journal of East Asian Studies 10 (1): 17-51. 2013.
-
776Against Liberty: Adorno, Levinas, and the Pathologies of FreedomTheoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 59 (131): 64-83. 2012.Adorno and Levinas argue from distinct yet intersecting perspectives that there are pathological forms of freedom, formed by systems of power and economic exchange, which legitimate the neglect, exploitation and domination of others. In this paper, I examine how the works of Adorno and Levinas assist in diagnosing the aporias of liberty in contemporary capitalist societies by providing critical models and strategies for confronting present discourses and systems of freedom that perpetuate unfree…Read more
-
773Chai, David, Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness: Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019, 216 pagesDao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 18 (2): 291-294. 2019.
-
766Naturalism and Anti-Naturalism in NietzscheArchives of the History of Philosophy and of Social Thought 58 213-227. 2013.Nietzsche has been associated with naturalism due to his arguments that morality, religion, metaphysics, and consciousness are products of natural biological organisms and ultimately natural phenomena. The subject and its mental life are only comprehensible in relation to natural desires, drives, impulses, and instincts. I argue that such typical natu-ralizing tendencies do not exhaust Nietzsche’s project, since they occur in the context of his critique of “nature” and metaphysical, speculative,…Read more
-
741Zhang Junmai’s Early Political Philosophy and the Paradoxes of Chinese ModernityAsian Studies 8 (1): 183-208. 2020.
-
727Moral and Political Prudence in KantInternational Philosophical Quarterly 44 (3): 305-319. 2004.This paper challenges the standard view that Kant ignored the role of prudence in moral life by arguing that there are two notions of prudence at work in his moral and political thought. First, prudence is ordinarily understood as a technical imperative of skill that consists in reasoning about the means to achieve a particular conditional end. Second, prudence functions as a secondary form of practical thought that plays a significant role in the development of applied moral and political judgm…Read more
-
707Recognition and Resentment in the Confucian AnalectsJournal of Chinese Philosophy 40 (2): 287-306. 2013.Early Confucian “moral psychology” developed in the context of undoing reactive emotions in order to promote relationships of reciprocal recognition. Early Confucian texts diagnose the pervasiveness of reactive emotions under specific social conditions and respond with the ethical-psychological mandate to counter them in self-cultivation. Undoing negative affects is a basic element of becoming ethically noble, while the ignoble person is fixated on limited self-interested concerns and feelings o…Read more
-
703Questioning Dao: Skepticism, Mysticism, and Ethics in the ZhuangziInternational Journal of the Asian Philosophical Association 1 5-19. 2008.
-
689Kant and china: Aesthetics, race, and natureJournal of Chinese Philosophy 38 (4): 509-525. 2011.
Clear Water Bay, Sai Kung, New Territories, Hong Kong
Areas of Specialization
19th Century Philosophy |
20th Century Philosophy |
Philosophical Traditions |