About me

I am Professor of Philosophy in the Eastern Michigan University Department of History and Philosophy, and I am Center Associate in the University of Michigan's Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies.

I research topics in Chinese philosophy, comparative philosophy, philosophy of action, aesthetics, and cognitive psychology.

My teaching interests include early Chinese philosophy, Asian philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, philosophy of life, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and American Pragmatism.

My training was in Chinese and comparative philosophy at the University of Hawai'i, the world's gravitational center for comparative philosophy. My advisor was Roger Ames, and my dissertation committee was composed of Eliot Deutsch, Arindam Chakrabarti, Graham Parkes, David McCraw, and Robert Solomon (University of Texas).

For the school year 2019-2020, I was Fulbright Senior Scholar and Visiting Professor at National Taiwan University's Department of Philosophy.

For the school-year 2018-2019, I was Visiting Scholar at Shandong University's Collaborative Innovation Center of Confucian Civilization.

For the school year 2012-13, I was Fulbright Senior Scholar and Visiting Associate Professor at National Taiwan University's Department of Philosophy.

For periods from 2005-2007, I was Templeton Senior Fellow at and then associated with the Medici II conferences at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Positive Psychology, where I worked with Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi and Jeanne Nakamura.

I began my philosophy career at the University of Washington, studying with Kenneth Clatterbaugh, Ronald Moore, Charles Marks, Karl Potter, Arindam Chakrabarti (visiting), and Vrinda Dalmiya (visiting).

My training in modern and classical Chinese was at the Stanford Center (located then at National Taiwan University), the Mandarin Training Center (National Taiwan Normal University), and the University of Washington (where I was initially introduced to Chinese and comparative philosophy through studies with Chun-chieh Huang 黃俊傑 (visiting from National Taiwan University), Karl Potter, Arindam Chakrabarti, Vrinda Dalmiya, Jerry Norman, and William Boltz).

In 2000, I was selected to attend a two-week Chinese paleography institute at the University of Chicago, studying under Edward Shaughnessy, Donald Harper, Qiu Xigui 裘錫圭, and Wang Bo 王博.

I nurtured a love for Chinese art during a year as resident translator of exhibitions and academic articles in the Antiquities Department of the National Palace Museum, Taiwan.

I also have an abiding interest in translation. My translations of C. C. Tsai's 蔡志忠 critically-acclaimed comic book series on Chinese philosophy have been published by Princeton University Press and Anchor/Doubleday.

From 2018-2020, I was chair of the American Philosophical Association's Committee on Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies.

And I am an occasional reviewer/referee for:

• Consciousness & Cognition

• Bloomsbury Publishing

• University of Hawai'i Press

• Frontiers of Philosophy in China

• Philosophy East and West

• Philosophy Compass

• Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy

• Sophia

• Lexington Books

• The Fulbright Scholar Program

• State University of New York Press

• American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology

• The John Templeton Foundation