This series questions and complicates what ‘reporting from abroad’ can mean in a globalized world that faces interconnected and local crises alongside forces grappling with how to liberate our beings from oppressive structures rooted in past and present (neo)colonialism and imperialism. We can take this as a chance to collectively and constructively consider both broader and different conceptions of philosophy than those more widely studied within USA institutions and culture—and the conditions that shape such studies around the globe by APA-related thinkers. We can learn how local institutions and global contexts shape the possibilities of research, speech, and our visions of philosophy.
Hsiang-Yun Chen is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies (IEAS) at Academia Sinica. She received her Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin and works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophical semantics, and feminist philosophy. Before taking up the position in Taipei, she taught at Centenary College of Louisiana. Hsiang-Yun currently serves on the executive board of the Taiwan Philosophical Association and is a member of the APA’s Committee on International Cooperation. She is also a co-founder of the Eastern Hemisphere Language & Metaphysics Network, sits on the editorial board of the Asian Journal of Philosophy, and helps run the monthly feminist reading group in Taiwan.
Please describe the research that is your primary area while in this location.
I work primarily in philosophy of language and feminist philosophy. My research in philosophy of language centers on anaphora. Some of my works tackle the notoriously tricky donkey anaphora and discourse anaphora, involving more technical details; some of my works suggest that several classic problems over intentionality are intimately connected and that anaphoric resolution is at the heart of their common solution. I’ve also worked on linguistic forms that presumably express the self, with a special focus on the Chinese anaphora ziji. All these works bear on broader and fundamental issues in semantics and philosophy of language, such as theory of meaning, reference, quantifications, and conditionals.
My research in feminist philosophy, on the other hand, concerns social philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology. For example, I’ve argued that contextualist views about the semantics of women suffer from an unresolvable tension between a desire for flexibility and a desire for normative objectivity; moreover, disagreements over the meaning of gender terms can only be resolved, if at all, by grappling with the deeper and multi-dimensional debates on metaphysical, practical, and normative difficulties. In addition, I’ve written on epistemic injustice during COVID, and thought about how feminist theories can facilitate the amelioration of algorithmic bias.
How did you come to be doing research at The Institute of European and American Studies (IEAS) at Academia Sinica, in Taipei?
Before returning to Taiwan, I taught at Centenary College of Louisiana, a private liberal arts college in Shreveport. I was there first as a visiting faculty member, which later turned into a tenure-track professorship. Though my time in Centenary was short, I learned a great deal—from designing and teaching courses to non-majors, mentoring students, organizing campus-wide events, to teaching a course to a group of 16 first-year students in Paris. All these were made possible with lots of support from my colleagues, especially the chair of the philosophy department.
But then I was offered a position in Academia Sinica, the national academy of Taiwan. Fellows in this preeminent research institution have no teaching obligations. The two jobs have clearly different profiles, with distinct orientations and responsibilities. In the end, I decided to join the Institute of European and American Studies (IEAS), a multidisciplinary research unit within Academia Sinica. The move to Taipei was primarily motivated by academic reasons, but I was also delighted to be back and closer to my family and friends at home.
What has the experience of researching been like in Taipei and how has it contributed to or shaped your research with Academia Sinica?
For people who work primarily in the analytic tradition (setting aside the problem of demarcation), doing research in Taiwan is quite similar to researching in North America, the UK, Europe, Australia, or any other place where people work on mainstream issues in philosophy of language, mind, logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory. Many Taiwanese philosophers working in these areas were trained abroad, many departments run regular series of colloquia and organize themed events, and all of us are subject to the same publish-or-perish practices. In fact, most of us publish or aim to publish in well-established international journals in English because placing a paper in such venues is considered more prestigious. It also means better job security and the possibility of professional awards or extra funding. However, researching in Taiwan just isn’t the same as researching in the English-speaking world or institutions in Europe. There is no denying that overall we are marginalized in terms of location, visibility, and impact.
The physical and psychological distance between Taiwan and the ‘main stage’ where analytic philosophy takes place has forced me to reflect on the US/Eurocentric perspectives and practices that I had previously taken for granted. Thus, as much as I care about the proper semantic analyses of anaphora in English, I’ve become increasingly interested in the general mechanism that undergirds anaphoric interpretation, which I now believe is the collective need for coordination. I have also been curious to apply tools in philosophy of language, semantics, and pragmatics to everyday phenomena in my native tongue. I found out that, contrary to some received views, the notion of logophor and logophoricity as used by linguistics, at least in the case of Chinese anaphora ziji, is not equivalent to the notion of de se in which philosophers are interested.
Perhaps even more importantly, working in Asia, where societies in general are relatively more traditional and bureaucratic, I’ve become acutely aware of the complex of “constraints and enablement” (as Ásta articulates in Categories We Live By) of my various identities—e.g., as a junior member in the profession, someone whose job has no teaching requirements, and a woman, etc. I have been eager to understand and to make sense of my own situation, and naturally turned to what I know to do best: philosophy. This is how my investigation of meaning, reference, representation, and coordination branches out from the study of anaphora—moving from terms with apparently minimal information, to terms and concepts that have manifestly much richer social and political significance.
What interdisciplinary overlap and tools are involved in philosophy in Taiwan? What is the disciplinary layout at your Academia Sinica and how does that affect your work?
The philosophical community in Taiwan is often divided into 4 groups based on the practitioner’s primary area of research: Chinese philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, continental philosophy, or analytic philosophy. People who specialize in Chinese philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, and/or other Asian philosophies (such as Korean and Japanese philosophies) are often in close contact with researchers working in sinology, Chinese language and literature, Asian histories, and religious studies. Those who specialize in ‘western’ philosophy, including Greek philosophy and continental philosophy, interact more with scholars in cultural studies, western language and literature, arts, and sociology. Analytic philosophers also overlap or collaborate with a variety of disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, biology, STS (Science, Technology, and Society), mathematics, linguistics, law, and artificial intelligence.
The twenty-four Institutes and eight Research Centers in Academia Sinica are organized into three divisions: Mathematics and Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, and Humanities and Social Sciences. There is no independent Institute of Philosophy, however. Philosophers in Academia Sinica are scattered in the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, or the Institute of European and American Studies (IEAS).
My institute, IEAS, houses researchers who study ‘western’ culture, thought, and social systems. In addition to four other philosophers (who all work in analytic philosophy), I have as my colleagues an impressive array of literature researchers, legal scholars, sociologists, historians, and political scientists.
This organizational layout has both merits and disadvantages. While I benefit tremendously from conversing with and learning from colleagues who work in very different fields, I also long for more interchange of ideas with philosophers across the subdisciplines. For now, the current organizational arrangement assumes a certain way of boundary-drawing, to which research seems to be expected to conform. For instance, my study of the workings of anaphora, especially my investigation of the behavior of ziji and its relevance to de se attitude, has been met with some skepticism that it does not fall within the scope of proper European and American studies.
Has researching in Taiwan and with Academia Sinica changed the way you think about philosophy?
Yes and no. Certainly, if we understand philosophy as the quest for truth, the love of wisdom, the search for the ultimate answers, and so on, philosophy is the same no matter where people do it. But philosophizing doesn’t happen in the void. People who do it are embodied—with different abilities as well as visible or imagined biological features—and situated in a combination of social settings. Our questions are not asked aimlessly or answered randomly: specific sets of tools are developed to address specific inquiries, often with detailed criteria to evaluate diverse potential answers. There are just so many ways things could be different. Assuming the goal is to carve nature at its joints, as long as there are multiple joints, we have to decide where to cut first; and if our time, energy, or resource are limited, we have to figure out which dissection really matters.
Doing philosophy in Taiwan means, to eurocentric philosophies, that my standpoint is from the outsider, but working in a research institute here pushes me to examine my own biases and privileges from within. While what initially drew me to philosophy remains the same, the way I think about it, how I do it, and what I want to do with it have definitely evolved with my changing circumstances.
Please describe any difficulties you face or have overcome, any surprises you have encountered?
In retrospect, I think I had underestimated the implications of doing research outside the U.S. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many international workshops and conferences moved online. It can be very difficult, however, for those who do not work in North America or Europe to actively participate in these virtual events because of the time difference. Philosophers in Asia thus have been particularly marginalized within the larger academic community during this trying period.
Meanwhile, given the institutional culture here, I have had to carefully navigate the professional sphere, managing being both a competent researcher and a good junior member. Of course, social order exists everywhere, but the challenges are magnified in explicitly more hierarchical societies. Things are also complicated by gender. The gender ratio among professional philosophers (by whom I mean tenure-track assistant professors and above) doesn’t look so pretty. Despite the fact that women make up around 26% of the national average, that number drops to less than 15% for public universities. Public institutions in Taiwan typically enjoy considerably more resources, much higher standing, and have more students (both majors and non-majors), but as far as I know, there is only a total of 2 women who are at the rank of full professors in these places (and only 6 others at private universities).
Interestingly, women philosophers make up nearly half of the faculty at private institutions; they also chaired 2 out of the 6 departments in our surveys. Although the numbers we have are not exhaustive, they are nevertheless quite representative (due to lack of information, my assistants and I had to survey each institution manually; therefore philosophers in departments other than philosophy, such as digital humanities, centers of general education, medical schools, and programs in creative writing, are not counted). The gap between public and private institutions in terms of gender ratio is simply striking.
I’m still learning to cope with these challenges, but there are signs of good progress. For one thing, the region now houses many more collaborations, e.g., the Conferences on Contemporary Philosophy in East Asia (in 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018), the Asian Epistemology Network, the Eastern Hemisphere Language & Metaphysics Network, as well as the Asian Journal of Philosophy. For another, feminist and women philosophers in Taiwan are now meeting regularly—in the form of social gatherings, reading group discussions, and feminist philosophy panels at the Taiwan Philosophical Association’s annual meetings. Moreover, through the Asian Association of Women Philosophers (AAWP) and its biannual conference (at Ewha Womans University in 2017 and Kyoto University in 2019), academics in the region with common interests and similar concerns have become more closely connected. I’m thankful for the opportunities to take part in several of these collective efforts. My overall hope is to be not only a good citizen in the profession, but a good citizen with her own voice that, together with the help of like-minded individuals, can change things for the better.
What are the dynamics and forces that have led to public institutions’ higher standing and greater resources?
That public institutions are in general more prestigious has a lot to do with Taiwan’s colonial history. During both the Japanese rule (1895-1946) and the Martial Law era (1949-1987), education was under tight control. Almost all institutions were strategically established or reestablished and funded by the government (e.g., National Taiwan University was formerly Taipei Imperial University, founded by the Japanese; National Tsing Hua University was re-installed in Taiwan, following the retreating Nationalist government in 1949 after the Communist takeover). The few exceptions were those with international, missionary ties (such as Tung Hai University, Soochow University, and Fu Jen Catholic University). Heavily regulated by the state through policy-driven funding, Taiwanese higher education operated as an elitist system. Since the ‘90s and the end of the Martial Law era, democratization has led to an era of massification and privatization–there are now more than 150 institutions, compared to fewer than 10 in the early 50s.
Philosophy departments and graduate institutes remain small in number despite this rapid expansion. Part of the reason is that many of the newer institutions are upgrades from junior or technical colleges, whereas standalone philosophy programs are housed in either public research universities or older, well-established private institutions. Because philosophers are a compact community, opportunities for interaction are abundant. Common venues include workshops, guest lectures, departmental colloquium talks, joint graduate conferences, and events organized by associations such as the Taiwan Philosophical Association (TPA) or the Taiwan Association for Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science and Technology (LMPST Taiwan). That said, philosophers working in private institutions often shoulder heavier teaching loads and responsibility for student recruitment, so individual participation varies.
How does Taiwan’s particular hierarchical ordering affect the challenges you experience within and the shape of the professional sphere compared to your time elsewhere, like in the USA?
While a vibrant democracy, Taiwan is a society with deeply entrenched Confucian ideas. We’re liberal, progressive, and the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage; at the same time, emphases on propriety and deference to superiors, for instance, continue to play prominent roles in social relations.
Having grown up in this cultural setting, I had to adjust to the American way of addressing professors when I studied at UT Austin. I recall vividly how Hans Kamp asked me to “do him a favor” by speaking to him not as “Professor Kamp.” Well-aware of the cultural difference, Hans understood how conversing on a first-name basis might make me feel out of place, but explained that not doing so, given where he is from, seems too serious and detached. That was for me a transformative moment when what had previously been unthinkable became a real possibility.
All societies have ways to discern what they consider to be a person’s important social features, such as gender, age, or race. But some linguistic practices, together with what Sally Haslanger terms a cultural techne, call attention to particular traits in such a way that they dominate how we act and think. Ranks mark individuals’ significant professional achievement, but when prioritized in interactions, they could hold people back from expressing disagreement for fear of being judged as disrespectful and aggressive. I don’t think Taiwanese social practices are essentially oppressive, yet hierarchical ordering can be so ubiquitous that it goes unnoticed. I’m confident, however, that reflection on the alternatives helps one recognize what is taken for granted, prompting reconsideration of its function, justification, and potential revisions.
With which subdisciplines do you wish you could interchange more, and how does subdisciplinary interchange look different from disciplinary interchange? What might be your ideal vision for interchange?
I definitely wish I could interact more with people working in Chinese philosophy, though I’m ambivalent about whether Chinese philosophy ought to be labeled as a subdiscipline. Problems in Chinese philosophy range from the social and the political, logic and language, to metaphysics as well as epistemology. Questions concerning these domains in the European tradition, however, are not subsumed under the category of European philosophy. The same point goes for African philosophy, Latinx philosophy, Indian philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, etc. Dominant conceptions of philosophy and its subdisciplines evidently presuppose a eurocentric perspective.
To my mind, demarcation between disciplines or subdisciplines within a particular field is a function of many factors, including theoretical and practical demands, available resources, and differential powers. Given the dynamic nature of our inquiries, it is no surprise that research doesn’t always fit into an existing structure; sometimes we really have to look at multiple fields—especially at their blind spots—all at once.
Whether or not inter- and intra- disciplinary interchanges are intrinsically different, with the increase in specialization both in and outside of (what we currently call) philosophy, exchanges of ideas pose varying degrees of challenge depending on how much common ground collaborating parties share. Further, the objective—in many cases defined by measurable outputs—of any interaction shapes the amount of engagement to which we overworked academics can commit. Getting philosophers together with data scientists, psychologists, legal scholars, political scientists, and sociologists to discuss AI ethics during workshops, and having them co-teach a course, or publish a book, are very different matters.
The sort of interchange I aspire to is bottom-up and organic, something perhaps best captured by the daoist concept of wu-wei (literally ‘non-doing’): spontaneous, non-striving, and unforced. It is admittedly paradoxical to seek purposeless interaction, and, realistically, interesting professional exchanges (such as this) are made possible through meticulous planning. In my wildest imagination, I would work on a project in connection with capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian cultural practice that fuses music, fight, and dance. I envision this research to be about coordinated communication through bodily movement in apparent opposition, along with discussions on games, skills, ownership, and identity negotiation. It would be an open-ended dialogue between dance and martial arts studies, research in African/black diaspora, embodied cognition, social and political philosophy, and philosophy of language, among others.
Hsiang-Yun Chen
Hsiang-Yun Chen is an assistant research fellow at The Institute of European and American Studies (IEAS) at Academia Sinica and works primarily in philosophy of language and feminist philosophy. In addition to the formal and the technical, she also thinks hard about the social and the normative. Other than philosophy, she enjoys art, capoeira, and vegan cooking.
alicehank winham studied BA Philosophy and Theology at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, where ze is now pursuing an MPhil Buddhist Studies at Lady Margaret Hall through the Faculty of Oriental Studies soon to be renamed the ‘Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.’ Ze focuses on philosophy of logic and language and social epistemology across traditions, including classical Buddhist philosophy and its modern interpreters, feminist philosophy, and the Black Radical Tradition. alicehank is also dedicated to critical pedagogy, philosophies of transformation and liberation, and social and environmental activism, such as through mentoring programmes, publishing journals, and direct action. In philosophy, ze works on expanding our disciplinary and interpretative horizons for a more caring and considered world through oxfordpublicphilosophy.com and Philiminality Oxford. Ze also works to reflect and act upon zer values through Biblionasium, environmental activism, and Lift Economy’s Next Economy MBA.
