Here’s a brief outline of my philosophical interest, which, as a caveat, shifts and develops much more frequently than I could hope to update here. But if anything interests you, feel free to get in touch here.
If you go by doctrines, I could tentatively call myself a pragmatist, or a (late) Wittgensteinian, though both labels have been associated with things that I don’t identify with (for example, the pragmatist theory of truth, and the so-called right-wing Wittgensteinian conversatism to leave everything as it is). I have a humanist and historicist conception of philosophy, in Bernard Williams’s sense in ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’. I see philosophy as a conceptual toolbox, rather than concerned with discovering deep truths about the (capital-R) Reality. I’m an anti-representationalist when it comes to language and meaning, and anti-Cartesian when it comes to the mind (though these are both very big-picture, hand-wavy things to say).
If you go by areas, I mainly work on philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, as well as philosophy of science, metaethics, and political philosophy. Conceptual engineering (and conceptual ethics) is a recent development in philosophy that catches my attention.
If you go by people, here is an incomplete list of important inspirations (in no particular order): Bernard Williams, Ian Hacking, Richard Rorty, Daniel Dennett, Robert Brandom, Wilfrid Sellars, Huw Price, Simon Blackburn, Stanley Cavell, Hasok Chang; for earlier philosophers, Frank Ramsey, the later Wittgenstein, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
And here are my main philosophical concerns at the moment:
- I don’t believe that there is a hard problem of consciousness (this is not to say that consciousness issues are not hard). I believe that concepts like qualia are very much misplaced. I believe that many instances of what’s been labelled ‘the consciousness science’ are mistakes. I’m interested in defending what’s (a little unfortunately, I think) known as illusionism, drawing resources both from deflationary philosophers like Wittgenstein, Sellars, Rorty, Dennett, and from cognitive science.
- I’m interested in expressivism and inferentialism and how they could give us an alternative from the standard representationalist account of language. I see representationalism as undesirable primarily because it comes with very heavy metaphysical baggages and it is very hard to believe that semantics tell us anything about what exists and what doesn’t, as answers to questions outside of language. I’m trying to make small contributions to make a use-theoretic account of meaning more available.
- I find conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics an interesting recent development, which might be fruitfully connected back to certain unfairly neglected philosophers, as a lens to view their philosophical achievements and a remedy to their shortcomings (notably Rorty, Cavell, and J.L. Austin). And ultimately, I find the literature in need of a dose of pragmatism, and to see conceptual engagements in terms of their downstream practical engagements. Here is an abstract for a paper tentatively named ‘Rortyan conceptual ethics’.