WORK
CURRENT RESEARCH
Doctoral Thesis
'The Politics of Belief in Hume and Enlightenment Scepticism' looks into the nature and status of belief in Hume’s religion, morality and politics as well as his place in the sceptical tradition from Pierre Bayle to the Kant-Jacobi debate. I am particularly interested in the question of how epistemic and ideational factors may influence political judgement and public opinion from a sceptic's perspective.
PUBLICATIONS
Refereed Articles
'The Role of Philosophy in Hume's Critique of Empire', International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2023, advance online publication, DOI: 10.1080/09672559.2023.2235580.
'Empire and Liberty in Adam Ferguson’s Republicanism', History of European Ideas, 48:7 (2022), 909-929, DOI: 10.1080/01916599.2022.2040045.
Postdoc Project
'The Sustainable Political Economy of the Stationary State in Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment Thought' looks into the C18th and C19th debates on economic, cultural and intellectual stagnation. I investigate how modern scepticism challenged conventional ideas of growth and prevailing faith in progress to show the ways political economists proposed reform plans supporting distributive justice and sustainability.
Review Essays
‘The Multifaced Hume’, New History, 32:2 (2021), 331–42.
‘The Role of Consent in Locke’s Theory of State’, Historical Inquiry, Journal of National Taiwan University, 66 (2020), 201–36.
‘The Political Ideal of the Enlightenment in the American Revolution’, Intellectual History, 9 (2019), 491–506.
‘The Historical Depth of Ancient and Modern Political Thought: On Melissa Lane’s Greek and Roman Political Ideas’, New History, 30:1 (2019), 167–78.
‘A Review of Alexander Broadie’s A History of Scottish Philosophy’, National Taiwan University Philosophical Review, 56 (2018), 177–202.
Other
Commissioned Article
‘Scepticism from the Pyrrhonian Crisis to Hume‘, Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 28th July, 2021.
Guest Editorship of Journal Special Issue
'David Hume and Political Epistemology', Cosmos and Taxis, 2023, forthcoming.
PRESENTATIONS
Conference & Invited Talks
'The Role of Philosophy in Hume’s Critiques of British Imperial Politics', Early Moderns on the Power of Philosophy, University College Dublin, 14–15 October 2022, Dublin, Ireland.
'Hume’s Political Epistemology and the Critiques of Empire', Histories of Knowledge: Political, Historical and Cultural Epistemologies in Intellectual History, ISIH Conference, Università Ca' Foscari, 12-15 September 2022, Venice, Italy.
‘History as the Ethics of Belief: the Case of Hume’s History of England’, Intellectual History Graduate Conference, European University Institute, 7–8 June 2022, Florence, Italy.
'Belief and Action in Hume’s Religion', Naturalizing Religion in the Scottish Enlightenment Conference, organised by the Center for Ethics, University of Antwerp and the Institute for the Study of Scottish Philosophy, 8–10 September 2021, Antwerp, Belgium.
'Adam Ferguson on Political Representation and the Liberty of the British Empire', Oxford Graduate Conference in Political Theory, 26–27 April 2021, online.
'Empire and Liberty in Adam Ferguson's Republicanism', Research Center for Humanities and Social Science, Academia Sinica, 21 August 2020, Taipei, Taiwan.
'Beyond Liberal and Conservative: The Third Way of Reading Hume', Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, 13 August 2020, Taipei, Taiwan.