Question: How was your first year at UW?
Overall, it’s been great being here, though it took some time to get used to Seattle, the rain, and how early it gets dark. It’s been a lot of learning, getting to know the faculty, students, and the new environment. I noticed there are a lot of people here in the Philosophy Department doing more engaged philosophy, like environmental ethics, medical ethics, and social justice, so it has been good attending those events and interacting with the faculty and students there. The community is more engaged than other Philosophy Departments I’ve been to, so it’s been great connecting my interests with others.
Question: What courses have you taught so far?
I’ve taught Introduction to Ethics, Moral Psychology, and a Graduate Seminar about the Social Dimensions of Virtue.
Question: Which course that you’ve taught was your favorite?
I love them all the same! But I have to say the Moral Psychology course was more special to me partly because it's a new class at UW and a class I hope to teach regularly if I can. In the class, we discuss issues about what motivates people to act in morally recommendable and morally despicable ways. We also discuss what moral characters are and if our emotions help or hinder our moral learning and the process. All of these questions are tied to empirical issues, so we read a lot of interdisciplinary papers. Some papers discuss neuroscience about moral motivations and psychological studies about virtue, character, and emotions. I got to teach some Chinese philosophy in that class, too. We also discussed more methodological questions about what we are doing as philosophers, and how this differs from what psychologists and historians do. I always enjoy getting to the more methodological questions. So it intertwined many of my philosophical interests, and I got to teach them in the same class, which was pretty fun.
Question: What sparked your interest in philosophy and how are you able to tie that into the classes that you teach?
The truth is, I don’t have a lot of fancy anecdotes about what interested me in philosophy. The true story is probably boring, but I liked reading as a kid, when you read you sometimes encounter philosophical readings, and gradually that got my interest. My interest came more from reading than from discussing philosophy with people. While they both play a role, for me, it came from my habit as a reader. During my time in high school in China, the expectation was that you were supposed to spend all your time preparing for exams and learning from textbooks. Fortunately, our high school had a pretty good library selection, so I got to read a couple of columns of philosophy books, pretending, of course, to read the textbook, but hiding the philosophy books beneath them. Historically, that was the beginning and I think that's part of why it still feels a little nostalgic when reading philosophy. The longer story is that when I started taking philosophy courses, again, it was the methodological questions about what philosophers are doing that motivated me to keep thinking about it. I realized first that there were a lot of methodological questions coming up, and then I realized that there is some room within the discipline to question the more dominant philosophical methodology, which I thought was kind of rare. If you think in business, you don’t just question the fundamental principles that justify what makes the discipline possible. When I did my Master's I did my dissertation about why we should rethink the philosophical method of using intuitions about cases as evidence, so I thought it was fun to think about and reflect on those methodological issues. That has been a continuing theme in my work, even when I don’t directly write about it.
Question: What courses do you have planned in the future at UW?
I’m teaching another new course on the later periods of Chinese Philosophy focusing on Chinese philosophers after the second century BCE. The most well-known Chinese philosophers in the U.S.—Confucius, Mencius, and Zhuangzi—were all in the earlier period and I thought it was interesting to track the later developments of these schools of thought over time. We will read articles with more theories and arguments in the later philosophical texts that are closer to what other people in different traditions of philosophy are used to. Another course I’m teaching is an honors seminar focused on the Ethics of Shaming. We will focus on what people mean when they say that something is problematic about the practice of online public shaming and what the problem is. We will also look at if there is any case where shaming can be powerful and effective. I’ve done a lot of work on shame as an emotion, but it's very theoretical. We can examine shame as a moral psychological phenomenon, but shaming focuses more on the practical question that comes up in a lot of contemporary discourse today. How you think about shame will shape how you think about the practice of shaming.
Question: What research are you working on and how could students get involved?
I’m working on a project on the topic of the Ethics of Shaming. I’m also working on a project about so-called intellectual virtues, the idea that certain character traits and dispositions are ways of being an excellent knower, are conducive to learning processes, and things we should value. I thought it was interesting that intellectual humility can be an example of this epistemic virtue, but there is very little discussion about intellectual pride, as its counterpart. This project is trying to understand why we should or shouldn’t have intellectual pride as a different virtue and how to think about the relationship between them. I think this project is one in which a lot of conversations I had with my students were really useful and I think there are a lot of ways to get students involved in this part of my research both inside and outside of the classroom. For example, I think a lot of times philosophers have theories about intellectual humility and theories about how to develop intellectual humility in their students. But, all of these practices of instilling humility sometimes do not feel good if you are on the receiving end of the instructions. Sometimes students report the feeling that the educator's attempt to instill humility is fake or patronizing. They want to make you humble, but they are not sincerely interested in learning from you. So we will examine how to develop virtues like humility and pride as educators. Beyond that, I am interested in interdisciplinary research, understanding emotions and virtues theoretically, while also being fair to the relevant empirical results. I can imagine some collaborations with students in the future, especially with students with empirical skills.
Question: What have you enjoyed about Seattle so far?
I love going to the Seattle Storm games, I’m a huge basketball fan and this is the first time I lived in a city that has a team, so I think I’ve been to 5 games in the past year. I’ve enjoyed going to games with my colleagues and watching games together. I also enjoy seeing how supportive the city is for basketball and women’s basketball, specifically. I’ve enjoyed the food here, I can get spicy Chinese food, and there are good dim sum places, and European grocery stores where I can get fresh bread. It’s been nice to revisit some of my nostalgia whenever I want.
Question: What was your favorite memory from your last year at UW?
At UW specifically, I’ve enjoyed all the events, especially ones organized by colleagues about medical ethics and punishment which tie together my theoretical interests with practical issues.
Conducted by Maddie Potter Lewis