Meng Zhang

Photo: Meng Zhang

Contact Information

Area
Religion, Ethics, and Philosophy
Postdoctoral Fellows
Office Location
128D DIF
Resume / CV

Background 

Meng Zhang (Ph.D. Indiana University Bloomington) studies comparative religious ethics,  focusing on early Confucian ethics, Hume’s and Humean philosophy, and Confucianism in the contemporary People’s Republic of China. Her research examines the strengths and difficulties in purportedly naturalist forms of ethics and the degree of their reliance on faith as an affectively endorsed representation of reality and challenges the boundary between “religious” and “secular” ethics. Her book project, Faith in Human Nature: Sentimentalist Virtue Ethics in Mengzi and Hume, compares Mengzi’s and David Hume’s efforts to offer an account of virtue anchored in the constitutive role played by interpersonal relationships and emotions, argues for the advantage of their views compared to the Aristotelian and pragmatist alternatives, and contrasts their ways to resolve the uncertainty about the standard of virtue introduced by a leap of faith in the approach of each. Beyond this project, she is interested in the mutual influence between the Confucianism and the post-revolutionary discourses in contemporary PRC. Her next research project will examine the revival of Confucianism in PRC by analyzing the diverse phenomena from the emergence of Confucian educational centers in urban China to the permeation of Confucian themes in the official normative discourse under the cloak of the “Sinicization of Marxism.” She has two articles published in Comparative Philosophy (2020) and Dialogue and Universalism (2021) and an article forthcoming in Asian Philosophy (2022). Dr. Zhang has taught courses on Asian religions and ethical theory in the analytical tradition. Before coming to FSU she taught at Huaqiao University in Xiamen, China. At FSU she teaches courses on Confucian Ethics and Ethical Self: East & West.