In Fall 2018, Dr. Sonya Özbey will be teaching a course on ancient Chinese discourses of warfare and war ethics. The course will focus on topics such as the ethics of deception in warfare, the complexity of the concept of “power,” and the compatibility of engagement in warfare with classical Chinese ideals of “sageliness.” Dr. Özbey also usually teaches “Introduction to Chinese Philosophy” every Winter semester.

 

In her research Dr. Özbey is interested in comparative approaches to philosophy. She is currently working on a book project about conceptions of humanity and animality in Spinoza’s corpus and in the Zhuangzi, an ancient Chinese text. The project aims to do two things at once: bringing certain historical figures to intervene in our contemporary debates on human and animal identities, and bringing together works from culturally different philosophical streams to betray the complex machinery behind the human/animal binary.