Keynotes

Here is the list of the keynote speakers, who agreed to join and inspire our discussions:

Prof. Tao Jiang (Rutgers University, USA)

Tao Jiang is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Rutgers University (USA) and the Director of the Rutgers Center for Chinese Studies. He is the author of Contexts and Dialogue: Yogācāra Buddhism and Modern Psychology on the Subliminal Mind (Hawai’i, 2006), the co-editor of The Reception and Rendition of Freud in China: China’s Freudian Slip (Routledge, 2013), and the author of Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China (Oxford, 2021), which received Honorable Mention for the 2023 Joseph Levenson Prize for distinguished scholarship on pre-1900 China from the Association for Asian Studies. Jiang’s primary research interest is classical Chinese philosophy, Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy, and cross-cultural philosophy.

Prof. Yuan Ai 袁艾 (Tsinghua University, China)

Yuan Ai obtained her PhD from the University of Oxford in 2018 and is now a tenured Associate Professor of Chinese Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy of Tsinghua University. She is the author of numerous papers and chapters on Chinese thought in English and Chinese, recently co-edited Dao Companion to the Philosophy of the Daodejing (with late Liu Xiaogan), and has a forthcoming book, Nonverbal Communication in Early China. Her research interests include comparative philosophy, Chinese ethics, anthropology, and communication theory.

Prof. Graham Parkes (University of Vienna, Austria)

Graham Parkes is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Vienna. He received a PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1978 and moved to the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in 1979, where he taught Asian and comparative philosophy for almost 30 years. He has also been a visiting professor in the USA, France, Italy, China, Japan, and Singapore, and since 2008, Professor of Philosophy at University College Cork in Ireland. He is a comparative philosopher known for his works: Heidegger and Asian Thought (1987), Nietzsche and Asian Thought (1991), Composing the Soul (1994), and How to Think about the Climate Crisis (2020).