# Bojin Zhu ## Posts - [Liberation and Maturity: Rorty’s Anti-authoritarianism](https://zubergine.com/liberation-and-maturity-rortys-anti-authoritarianism/): Here is a late 20th century philosopher who works mainly within the canon of analytic philosophy. Sometimes he announces, not undramatically (self-consciously following Nietzsche), that philosophy is dead, and sometimes he falls back to a more ‘modest’ claim that most of contemporary analytic philosophy has gone bankrupt. Metaphysics and epistemology should have long been abandoned, because the former is infected with problematic Platonism, and the latter, Cartesianism. ‘Part of my ambition,’ he says, ‘to paraphrase Freud, is to help it come to pass that where epistemology and metaphysics were, sociology and history shall be.’ Instead of being the first philosophy, […] - [Review: The Right to Sex, by Amia Srinivasan](https://zubergine.com/review-the-right-to-sex-by-amia-srinivasan/): Karl Marx once criticised the idealism of his time by remarking: the point is not to understand the world but to change it.[1] Amia Srinivasan echoes in The Right to Sex, as a poignant reminder to contemporary feminism that risks becoming increasingly abstract and theoretical: At its best, feminist theory discloses the possibilities for women’s lives that are latent in women’s struggles, drawing those possibilities closer. But, too often, feminist theory prescinds from the particulars of women’s lives, only to tell them, from on high, what their lives really mean. Most women have little use for such pretensions. They have […] - [Review: Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers, by Cheryl Misak](https://zubergine.com/review-frank-ramsey-a-sheer-excess-of-powers-by-cheryl-misak/): A philosopher is only sincere when he lives as his philosophy commends, or, conversely, when his philosophy reflects who he truly is. By this criterion, Frank Ramsey is probably one of the sincerest philosophers ever lived. His pragmatic and humanistic philosophy is, to a great extent, a beautiful reflection of his vigorous and enthusiastic personality; consequently, some knowledge of the latter will corroborate an understanding of the former. This is what Cheryl Misak’s brilliant biography of Ramsey enables us to do: it delivers a delicate balance between the intellectual and the personal aspect of Ramsey’s life, situates his philosophical works […] - [Whims and Fate](https://zubergine.com/whims-and-fate/): Wei lights up when she catches sight of dolphins in the Bosporus. Look, she turns to Bo, dolphins again. Where? Bo lifts his gaze, casts it wide across the strait, where boats have been coming and going for millenniums. He was chewing on a line of ancient Chinese poetry that went, a thousand sails having gone past, none of them was. Was what? There! She shouts and points. He follows her gaze to find a fin, elegant, smooth, breaking out of water. Then another one, and yet, another, all southbound, none rushing, heading into the Sea of Marmara. They look […] - [Nostalgia about an as-yet unachieved greatness](https://zubergine.com/nostalgia-about-an-as-yet-unachieved-greatness/): He sits on the terrasse of a cafe, pondering what it would be like for him to become a writer. Henry Miller once thought about the same thing in Paris, but soon he stopped thinking about it because he became one. He was not Henry Miller (and would never be) and not a writer (yet) and not in Paris (yet). To be fair, he wrote about himself and his life and friends when he was younger, but then he stopped when it all became too much for him to put down on paper. At that time he realised that all […] ## Pages - [Light Burns](https://zubergine.com/light-burns/): ‘yet for better or for worse we do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colours and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them.’ (Jun’ichirō Tanizaki) ‘…whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet.’ (Ondaatje, The English Patient) ‘…hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence’ (George Eliot, Middlemarch) ‘Evening / you gather back / all that dazzling dawn has put asunder’ (Sappho, Fragment 104) ‘for you beautiful ones my […] - [Short stories](https://zubergine.com/short-stories/): <Gin for two>, 2022, published at Sine Theta Magazine, issue #26. <Whims and Fate>, 2023. <Nostalgia about an as-yet unachieved greatness>, 2022 - [Contact](https://zubergine.com/contact/): You can reach me at: bojin.zhu@univie.ac.at Or, for something less formal, my instagram handle is the same as this website: @zubergine - [Philosophy](https://zubergine.com/philosophy/) - [About](https://zubergine.com/about/): 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 (last updated 06/2024). But if anything interests you, feel free to get in touch here. (For a recent podcast chat that pretty well captured my latest interest, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKU6ENtwWVM) If you go by doctrines, I would tentatively call myself a pragmatist, or a (late) Wittgensteinian, though both labels have been associated with things that I don’t identify with (e.g. what’s been called the pragmatist theory of truth, and the more conservative strand of Wittgenstein to […] [comment]: # (Generated by Hostinger Tools Plugin)