The ancient Chinese text the Zhuangzi raises a mix of epistemological, psychological, and conceptual challenges against the value and usefulness of philosophical disputation. But instead of advocating the elimination of philosophy, it implicitly embraces a broader conception of philosophy, the goal of which is to engage us to reflect on our limitations, question things we take for granted, and better appreciate alternative perspectives and possibilities. Philosophy thus understood is compatible with a variety of methods and approaches: fictions, jokes, paradoxes, spiritual (...) exercises, argument, disputation, and so on. Philosophical practices, on this view, also pave the way for an open‐minded, adaptive and flexible way of living that is at the core of the Zhuangist good life. (shrink)

While respect for persons is fundamental to many moral and political theories, its nature and ground remain controversial. According to the standard model of respect, respect is primarily a response to certain inherent features of a person or an object. Importantly, it is in virtue of the value, status or authority of those features that respect is justified or owed. This model, however, faces many serious challenges. Drawing on the classical Confucian notion of jing, I develop an alternative model of (...) respect, which construes respect as an expression of agent’s sense of the self and its place in the world. The emphasis is thus on the agent’s own self-conception and the corresponding attitudes and dispositions, as opposed to on inherent features of the objects of respect. To further illustrate this distinction, I contrast the traditional Kantian conception of respect for persons with the Confucian, jing-based, conception along three dimensions: the normative ground, the content, and the distribution of respect. The Kantian respect certainly has its merits, and perhaps is indispensable in some contexts, but there is much more to respect than what Kantians can offer. The Confucian conception of respect, on the other hand, has important theoretical and practical values such that it is essential to an adequate understanding of the role of respect in our moral and political life. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes three major themes in the philosophy of death of the Zhuangzi. It shows that, while these themes are often intertwined in the text, they offer different outlooks on the nature of death and, correspondingly, different arguments about the significance of death and strategies for coping with death. The first sees death as a natural and inevitable part of the process of cosmic transformation that we have to accept or embrace. The second emphasizes the unity, continuity and interdependence (...) of life and death, and advises us to appreciate death from this holistic perspective. The last strand of thought challenges our ability to know about death's nature and value. In addition, the paper reviews a few competing interpretations of the Zhuangzi in recent Anglophone literature and suggests that, first, they can be seen as attempts to articulate and develop different themes in the text, and second, they fail to offer a strong rational ground for the Zhuangist attitudes toward death, in part because they all rely on critical assumptions that are questionable or at least insufficiently defended. (shrink)

This paper critically examines Barclay’s conception of dignity proposed in her ‘Dignitarian Medical Ethics’. According to Barclay, a subject S enjoys dignity if and only if S is reliably treated as having equal social status. I argue that Barclay’s view faces a number of practical and theoretical problems. First, it is not obvious that failing to treat someone as a social equal is incompatible with respecting her dignity. Second, it is not always clear what treating someone as a social equal (...) amounts to in practice. To be more compelling, her conception of dignity needs to be supplemented with a more principled and substantive account of the content of equal treatment. (shrink)

The ancient Chinese text the Zhuangzi raises a mix of epistemological, psychological, and conceptual challenges against the value and usefulness of philosophical disputation. But instead of advocating the elimination of philosophy, it implicitly embraces a broader conception of philosophy, the goal of which is to engage us to reflect on our limitations, question things we take for granted, and better appreciate alternative perspectives and possibilities. Philosophy thus understood is compatible with a variety of methods and approaches: fictions, jokes, paradoxes, spiritual (...) exercises, argument, disputation, and so on. Philosophical practices, on this view, also pave the way for an open‐minded, adaptive and flexible way of living that is at the core of the Zhuangist good life. (shrink)

What it is to have a first person perspective? How do we come to understand our own perspective in the world? How do we take into account other people's perspectives in our social and linguistic interactions? This dissertation is an exploration of these issues. But instead of approaching them in the abstract, it aims to shed light on these difficult questions through a series of case studies. First, I examine the role of the first person perspective in our agency, and (...) explain the sense in which it is essential for action. Next, drawing on recent work in psychology, I propose an model of the development of temporal self-understanding in young children. Lastly, I develop a two-level pragmatic theory of epistemic modals. (shrink)