Derek Lam [beta]

/ 林尚德

ABOUT ME, professionally & personally :) <click to expand>

I am an assistant professor in philosophy at California State University Sacramento since the Fall of 2022. I'm excited about everything related to the nature of action: the metaphysics of it, the epistemology of it, the cognitive science/psychology of it, etc. Right now, I'm working on several articles that interpret the Classical Chinese philosopher Mengzi's work as a philosophy of attention and agency.

I did my PhD in philosophy at the University of Virginia under the supervision of Ross Cameron.

To be honest, I have never been the kind of researcher who has a clear vision of where his intellectual home lies. As a philosophical nomad, I explored different areas of research on my journey. I worked on Husserl's phenomenology of science with a funding from the EU at Bochum (Germany), Wuppertal (Germany), and Luxembourg. I started my doctoral studies with a DAAD scholarship to study Kant, until I realized that's not where I belong and transferred to University of Virginia to work on contemporary metaphysics.

I'm owned by a cat named Bill Billson. I didn't grow up with video games but started gaming a few years ago. My favorites are Bloodborne (I have a thing for cosmic horror), The Last of Us Part 1 & 2, Life is Strange 1, and Horizon Zero Dawn (basically, lore-based games). Recently, I have started to sew!