("Law" is my surname.) I am a Research Associate in the Department of Philosophy, as well as Associate Director at the Center for Comparative Philosophy, at Duke University. Previously, I was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows and a Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. I received my Ph.D. in philosophy from the Graduate Program in Classics, Philosophy, and Ancient Science at the University of Pittsburgh.
My areas of specialization are ancient Chinese, Greek, and Roman philosophy, moral psychology, and action theory. Taking a transcultural approach, I stay open to any sources that seem promising for each philosophical problem I deal with. My current research is centered on the transcendent nature of human existence. People with limitations, in a world largely not up to them, nonetheless try to get things perfect. Though they care about people and affairs in this world, intriguingly they also strive to rise above it. We may transcend in terms of what we value. The posture could be romantic – valuing perfect adherence to an ideal over worldly outcomes (e.g. à la the Stoics, Mengzi/Mencius, or Kant) – or empty – not valuing anything at all (e.g. à la a strand in the Zhuangzi/Chuangtzu). We also transcend when we connect our spectator minds with unchanging things (e.g. à la Plato, Aristotle, or a strand in the Zhuangzi).
In one project, Unity of Heaven and the Human, I compare the Stoic romantic posture with the Zhuangzian empty one, assessing whether these transcendent attitudes are compatible with having concern for others in a way that is ethically important. In another project, Dialogue between Dialogues, I interpret a mystic-sounding dialogue from the Zhuangzi alongside a readily comparable, but spirited dialogue in the Mencius. I make these dialogues converse with each other as a way to inquire whether the Mencian romantic posture can and should be squared with realistic considerations about our limitations, and to determine whether the Zhuangzian selfless posture is incompatible with that romantic one. In a third project, Mencius and Aristotle on Virtues, I investigate in what sense ethical cultivation toward an ideal is natural or non-natural, whether the two figures should accept each other’s reasons for their seemingly differing opinions, whether Aristotle’s model of virtue acquisition is re-formational or developmental, and in what sense habituation might play a role in Mengzi’s model. Lastly, in Cause in Aristotle, I construct a concept of causality as an unchanging object of the spectator mind, something we must get perfectly right to have scientific knowledge. Modern scholarly works either assume that Aristotle was operating with a non-disjunctive concept of “cause” that is purely metaphysical, or argue that he maintained a pluralist view. I avoid their difficulties with a non-disjunctive concept that is epistemic-functional – by resurrecting and fleshing out an account of “cause” reported but discarded by Francisco Suárez (who did not name its origin).
The profile picture is cropped from "Playing the Zither beneath a Pine Tree," an anonymous painting from the 16th or 17th century CE. It is currently part of the collection at the National Museum of Asian Art: https://asia.si.edu/object/F1953.84/
