Research

I work on Chinese philosophy and ethics, broadly construed, with a particular emphasis on their intersection and extending to related issues in aesthetics. Overall, my research is guided by the hunch that the ideal figure which emerges from the literature on “how to live” is often too serious to be a genuine ideal—or at least to be the only sort of ideal. In search of a lighter vision of how to live, I turn to Zhuangzi, an ancient Daoist whose philosophy is often described as playful, especially in contrast to the tradition of Confucianism.