Xuzhu

I am a Professor specializing in epistemology, philosophy of action and normativity. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor of the School of Humanities at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. I received my PhD from Tsinghua University in 2010, also within a joint training program with University of Pittsburgh, sponsored by China Scholarship Council.

I am also the Secretary General of China Society for Philosophy of Science and a Council Member of China Society for History of Western Philosophy. I was previously a Visiting Scholar at the Faculty of Philosophy at University of Oxford. I am now working on a research project “The First Personal Authority in Social Epistemology” (Grant No. 21BZX049) supported by National Social Science Foundation of China.

Epistemology, Philosophy of Action, Wittgenstein, Philosophy of Social Sciences

Teaching Summary

Introduction to Philosophy of Language (undergraduate)

Philosophy of Action (undergraduate & graduate)

As a philosopher working in contemporary analytic tradition, I study the relationship between knowledge, action, and social normativity. There are two approaches included in my research:

On the one hand, I employ the notions from philosophy of action to better understand epistemological issues. I have written about G. E. M. Anscombe’s philosophy of action, especially her conception of practical knowledge, the debates on self-knowledge in analytic philosophy, the first-person thought, and common sense realism from P. F. Strawson, G. Evans to J. McDowell. I have just finished a research project on theorizing self-knowledge from the perspective of knowledge-action relationship.

On the other hand, I examine how normativity and sociality bears on theoretical issues in scientific knowledge and understanding, which includes but not confines to issues such as testimonial knowledge, scientific understanding, group knowledge, and epistemology of institution. As a pragmatist, I also emphasize the practical turn in contemporary philosophy of science. In the book co-author with Tong WU, Returning to Scientific Practice (Routledge 2020), I argue that philosophy of science is supposed to be reconstructed from the practice-dominated view.

Recent Publications

In English

Returning to Scientific Practice: a new reflection on philosophy of science; New York: Routledge, 2020；

“Mechanism and Productive Event”, Scientific Explanation and Methodology of Science, G. Guo & C. Liu (eds). World Scientific Publishing, 2014

In Chinese

“Reasons for Action, Practical Reasoning, and Virtue Normativity”, China Social Science Review, 2023 (01)

“Self-Knowing and Acting: Joëlle Proust’s Theory of Metacognition”, Journal of Dialectics of Nature, 2022, 44(12)

“Defending Commonsense: From Practical Knowledge to Philosophy of Action”, Philosophical Research (Zhe Xue Yan Jiu), 2020, (7)

Understanding the Social: from normativity to mechanism, Beijing: Huaxia Press 2016