Education
Ph.D.: Duke University, North Carolina (2017)
I am an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. My work focuses on moral emotions such as sympathy, empathy, shame and related topics such as moral progress/discovery. I am particularly interested in understanding the role emotions play in moral deliberation, moral perception, and moral motivation in Chinese philosophy and moral psychology.
My work has appeared in journals such as Dao, Philosophy Compass, Comparative and Continental Philosophy, and the Journal of Chinese Philosophy. Here is a story on the Global and Mail on my study on the cultivation and expression of emotions in public lives.
Besides my research, I do freelance translation on topics that interest me. For example, my translation of Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology is one of the most popular books on amazon.cn in 2019 in China.
Roles and Virtues: which is more important for Confucian Women? forthcoming, in Alex Barber & Sean Cordell ed., Ethics of Social Roles, Oxford University Press, 2022. Email for Draft.
Women’s learning in the Confucian Tradition and Contemporary China—Learned Women, “Leftover” Women, and “The Third Sex,” forthcoming in Arvind Sharma edited volume on Women and Religious Traditions, SUNY Press. Penultimate draft.
Shame, Vulnerability, and Change, The Journal of American Philosophical Association. Link. Penultimate draft.
Constructing Morality with Mengzi: Three Lessons on Moral Discovery and Meta-ethics, with S. Robertson, in Lost Voice at the Foundation of Ethics, Routledge. ed. Colin Marshal, (2020). Penultimate draft.
Moral Motivation in Mencius Part 1—When a child falls into a well, Philosophy Compass. 2019; 14:e12615. Link
Moral Motivation in Mencius Part 2—When one burst of anger brings peace to the world,” Philosophy Compass. 2019; 14:e12614. Link
Empathy for non-kin, the faraway, the unfamiliar, and the abstract—an interdisciplinary study on moral cultivation and a response to Prinz. Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy. 2018. 17.3: 349-362. Link
Danvers A. F., Hu, J., and M. J. O’Neil (2018), “Emotional Congruence and Judgments of Honesty and Bias,” Collabra: Psychology, 4(1), 40. DOI: Link
Flanagan, O. & Hu, J. (2011). Han Fei Zi’s philosophical psychology: Human nature, scarcity, and the neo-Darwinian consensus. Journal of Chinese philosophy, 38(2), 293-316.
· Reprinted in J. D.Carlson & A. F. Russell, State of Nature in Comparative PoliticalThought: Western and Non-Western Perspectives (Chapter 2). LexingtonBooks.
Review:
Between Nature and Person: What the Neo-Confucian Wang Fuzhi Can Teach Us About Ecological Humanism, Comparative and Continental Philosophy. 2018;10.3. Link
"The Emotions in Early Chinese Philosophy." Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 97(2), pp. 421–422. Link