Research Highlight: Gus Law

Can you tell us a little bit about who you are, how you came to Duke, and what your role looks like here?

I am a Hong Kong-born southern Californian who got his Ph.D. in philosophy at Pitt. I answered the call of the Center for Comparative Philosophy for an associate director and was hired also as a research associate. So, I have the double role of a philosopher and a community person who helps organize things related to comp phil. Please reach out for anything philosophical or organizational!

How would you describe your research program?

In my natural habitat that is ancient texts, my characteristic activity is to uncover insights through painstaking exegesis. My research is driven by the idea that a difficult and ambiguous source-text is often worth our while because it is reflecting the many difficulties and ambiguities of this world. Overarching theme: How we cope with, defy, and transcend human limitations, ideally speaking.

What issues or questions in philosophy are you most excited by?

How may we rise above the ebbs and flows of history while carrying on with the day-to-day? How may we strive toward an ideal, remain unfazed, and avoid naïveté? How is it possible that our attitudes and actions arise in the space of reasons even if they are empirically explained, subject to both “rational causation” and “empirical causation”?

What got you first interested in philosophy? How did you get from that initial spark to the subject of your recent/current work?

A classmate in secondary school took an interest in me and absorbed me in conversations. After almost a year of staying after school, pacing around campus everyday, he revealed that this is called “philosophy” and I could puruse it in college. I think my gravitation toward passages that take the form of dialogue, as well as my current experimentation with the “interview” format for writing history of philosophy, might have to do with the fact that philosophy for me began in discourse.

Who is/are your favorite philosopher(s)? Why?

I do not have favorite philosophers, but if I could take only two volumes of philosophy with me to live on an isle, I would probably pick the Zhuangzi and Plato’s dialogues. I will never get bored because they challenge us not only through the mouths of characters and narrators, but also through figures and literary devices, which always seem to resist settled interpretations and final analyses.

What are you currently working on?

An ”interview” with Mengzi and Aristotle on whether it is our “nature” to become good. An attempt to envisage the elusive way of being implied in a dialogue in the Zhuangzi by modeling responsiveness after improvisational poetry and other activities of creativity.

Do you have any particular work habits, like working at a specific coffee shop, or listening to a particular type of music, or rewarding yourself with a specific snack or workout? (In other words, how do you specifically work best?)

I don’t know if I would have finished my dissertation had I not learned to use the pomodoro technique. Coffeeshops work very well for me in two ways: I am not distracted by things to do around the house, and I am more disciplined because someone could be watching me (even if in fact nobody knows me and nobody is watching me). However, lately I work at home more often, so that I can have multiple documents and texts open on two big screens.

What's the holy grail, pipe dream project? (This doesn't have to be in your AOS, of course, and may even be more fun if it's not.)

I plan to write a book on how best to remain unfazed in the face of threats and challenges and how to make best use of opportunities for social change. That will be done through constructing a dialogue between dialogues: one from the Mengzi and one from the Zhuangzi. Beyond this book, I wish to eventually write about literature and creativity, as well as explore the idea that there is something “beyond” ethics, through the Zhuangzi and Nietzsche.