Yizhou Sun

I am a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the Free University of Berlin and the Centre for Social Critique, supported by a DAAD scholarship. Before that, I received my M.A. from Fudan University, Shanghai. My dissertation, supervised by Robin Celikates, argues that “instrumental rationality” is a misleading construct in critical theory, one that conflates formal rationality with practical rationality and thereby distorts its accounts of economy and technology. The dissertation is now nearing completion. My research focuses on social philosophy and intellectual history, and I also dabble in STS and political theory. Besides academic papers and several translations from German and English into Chinese-Mandarin, my essays in Chinese have appeared in publications such as Initium Media, The Paper: Shanghai Review of Books, and The Economic Observer: Book Review Weekly. My anthology of intellectual biographies, The Kiss of Maecenas, is forthcoming from Shanghai Literature & Art Publishing House.