Bio

I am an assistant professor in philosophy at Peking University, which is also where I received my BA in Law, MA in Philosophy and PhD in Philosophy.

Research Interests:

I work primarily on metaethics, with a focus on topics such as the possibility of naturalism about normative facts, error theory and its consequences, the relativity and plurality of the practical ought, and the nature of, and relations among, various normative systems such as morality and rationality. Outside metaethics, I have two secondary research interests, one in metaphysics, where I am drawn to topics bearing on human existence, such as personal identity, the mind-body problem, and free will; the other in the history of philosophy, mostly early modern philosophy and Chinese philosophy, which I treat as resources to inform analytic work.

Recent Publications:

“Disagreeing with Opaqueness,” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (2026) 31: 627–634. https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v31i4.6242

“The Normativity Objection and the Coloring Strategy,” Synthese (2024) Online First. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04726-5.

“Engineering Human Beauty with More Caution,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy (2024) 102: 777-782. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2024.2314154.

“Folk Metaethics and Error,” Philosophical Psychology (2024) 37: 2262–2284. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2022.2139231.

“Understanding Dao in Methodological Terms,” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy (2022) 21: 197-211. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11712-022-09825-z.

“The Goal Problem in the ‘Now What’ Problem,” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (2022) 21: 452–458. https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v21i3.1401.

PhilPeople Page：https://philpeople.org/profiles/xinkan-zhao

Email：zhaoxinkan@pku.edu.cn