Wei Cheng
Thesis: Pathê tês Psychês in Aristotle: A Physiological and Psychological Research in Context
My research project aims at a systematical and historical reconstruction of Aristotle’s conception of the pathê of soul and body. Systematically, I intend to make the connections and interactions among Aristotle’s psychology, biology and ethics explicit by explaining his unified ideas about pleasure, pain and emotions; historically, I attempt to shed new light on the immanent dialectical structure of Aristotle’s discussion by reconstructing his conversation with the Platonists and the physiologoi. I do not attempt to trace every point of view back to its original founder or mouthpiece by means of so-called “Quellenforschung”, but through the contextualization of different traditions (corpus Aristotelicum, fragments and doxography), I will try to illuminate a complicated constellation of philosophical discussions on the topic “pathê” at Aristotle’s time and finally to illuminate how Aristotle finds a way between the Idealists and Naturalists.
CV
Wei Cheng was born in China, where he graduated in Chinese Literature at the Peking-University (Beijing, 2004). He continued his studies in Philosophy and Classics at the University Tübingen (Germany) and received a degree of Magister Artium in 2011 under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Otfried Höffe and Prof. Dr. Michael Franz. During his studies in Tübingen, he worked as tutor at the Department of Philosophy (Dr. Ina Goy, 2008-9) and gained a scholarship from the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (2008-11). Since 2011 he is a PhD-student of the APSN-Program at the Graduate School for Ancient Philosophy at the Humboldt University. He is also a research fellow in Prof. Dr. Philip van der Eijk’s research program “Medicine of the Mind, Philosophy of the Body” at the Department of Classics at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
Contact
chengwei@hu-berlin.de
