ZHONG Zheqi (鐘喆琦)

Well, my name is Zheqi. I am pursuing my PhD in law and philosophy at City University of Hong Kong. I earned my degrees in law and engineering at Tianjing University and National University of Singapore.

My philosophical interest, which I hope to investigate in my dissertation, can be summarized in three questions: (1) How is our notion of truthfulness related to our view of history and politics; (2) How does a revisionary notion of truthfulness change our notion of mentality and causality; (3) Why do positivists and anti-positivists about social rules, like languages and laws, disagree, given their distinct notions of truthfulness and views of history.

I am now working on two papers. First, I attempt to further develop Blackburn's modern version of Humean anti-metaphysical, naturalistic and projectivist semantics, namely semantic quasi-realism, with an emphasis on how semantic quasi-realism accommodates both mentality and causality in the world. Second, I attempt to further examine Dworkin-Williams debate on our notion of political freedom, in light of a comparison between our notion of personal persistence and our notion of political (legal) continuity.

I am interested in using philosophy to analyse some prominent social and political problems, such as homosexual marriage and nationalism.

Well, you perhaps see I always use the pronoun "us" and "our". This is not because I want to be pronoun neutral. This is, instead, because I take even a biological person is composed of many social persons. So, I take a person (myself, for example) is of no absolute distinction from a polity.

My favourite "philosophical quotes" are by Marx, both from Theses on Feuerbach:

(1) The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question;

(2) The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

Ethics; Metaphysics; Political Philosophy; Jurisprudence; Epistemology