Hi everyone, and welcome back to your favorite segment Global Village. 欢迎回来你们最喜欢的板块【小酒馆·大世界】.

Actually today in our studio welcome back an old friend, some of you probably remember we had this philosophy segment called Let's Philosophize?

可能还有一些小伙伴记得原来你们很喜欢的一个板块叫做【知乎哲也】，是讲哲学问题的, 当时就有很多人喜欢这个板块的嘉宾主播TJ, so TJ, welcome back.

Hi, Lulu. I'm very glad to be back with you after a long hiatus.

I mean you have been really busy, right?

I thought the reason why I invited TJ to this segment rather than Let's Philosophize is because he has some interesting life updates to share. Like before in this segment earlier this year, if some of you still remember, we talked to Brad about his move to Japan. And TJ, you were in China in Beijing before COVID and during the COVID years you were back in the UK, and now you're in America.

Right, O’er land of the free and the home of the brave as they call it.

I'm just trying to get used to the culture shock of being in another place. I call it my third childhood. I had my first childhood in England, my second childhood in China. Now I'm learning everything again, right?

Completely different environment. I'm sure this is going to be a very interesting talk. But first things first, let's start with where exactly are you? I mean the United States is a big place. Where are you?

The area that I'm in is called the Midwest. The Midwest is the area that's seen as almost like the suburbs of America. It's lots of corn. People are supposed to be very friendly and they've been very nice to me so far. And it's somewhere that seemed to have a community and family values.

Which state are you in?

So the state that I'm in is called Indiana.

Indiana, okay. Are you in like a big city at least or are you like really in suburbs or even countryside of America?

So it's one of the strange things really that I'm in a town called Bloomington, which has under 100,000 people. So it is quite small.

It's like a village in China.

Right. You can bike around very easily. And the interesting thing about Bloomington to me is that its almost half of the entire population is to do with the university, right, its teachers, students or staff.

This is my next question and I'm sure a lot of you want to ask this question. Why are you in America?

It's a good question, right? Especially as I focus on early Chinese philosophy. So it's a strange place. It's essentially it's because my supervisor in China told me to come here. We have some of the best researchers that focus on early Taoist thought and early Confucian thought in all of the western world.

Let me get this straight. You now move from China or from the UK to America to study Chinese philosophy?

Yes. That is true. I know it seems very strange.

But the degree you're doing right now is your PhD right, your doctorate?

Right. I'm doing a PhD.

For those of you who don't really know TJ’s really interesting educational background, Let me fill you in.

TJ has got two master’s degrees, right? One from the UK one, from China, from Fudan university.

Yes, that's right.

Can you tell us a little bit about that like what degree did you like, what major did you do it in what field?

My undergraduate degree I did in Leeds in England that’s philosophy. Then I went to Beijing Normal university and did some language courses at Beijing Normal University.

After that, I did my teacher training. It was in Manchester but it's the Cambridge certification, right? That's not as impressive as it sounds for the listeners that are easily “fooled”. And then a master at Birmingham and then as another master of Fudan, now a PhD in America.

So you're just one of those like perpetual students.

Right, right. I think I do grow up slowly. It takes a long time for me to grow up.

Yeah, but I've known you for years. You do strike me as the academic type if that's your environment, why not? But you still haven't answered my question. Was it always Chinese philosophy that you were majoring in both in Fudan and in Birmingham?

No, I started off as a normal English student, studying English philosophy, not all English, but very focused on the methodologies that are used in England, which is mostly analytical philosophy.

But over time, I think it's just curiosity. I think the reason I did philosophy is because of curiosity. And you think this is what all the English people say, but what about the Indian people? What about Chinese people? Right? There's a lot of people in the world and history is very long.

So surely there must be some other ideas than the ones that we learn about in these courses. So you start to read and then you become more and more interested.

My first master's degree, I focused a lot on Buddhist thought, especially...

Buddhist thoughts.

Especially Nagarjuna, who is in Chinese is called 龙树菩萨.

That's so much beyond my realm of knowledge.

I won't go into too much detail, but it's all about Buddhist thoughts about emptiness. So everybody knows the 空不异色，色不异空. This kind of Buddhist thought is focusing on this kind of, as called Madhyamaka,《中论》 .

So I've just done a little bit of just crash course research, 龙树菩萨是吧?

That's the one, yeah.

I see, 大乘佛教，论师. Okay and then you went to Fudan, you actually went to Fudan on a full scholarship.

I was very lucky. In fact, it's the English that are the most stingy actually. The English they don't give me the good scholarships, but the American schools and the Chinese schools have all been very kind and giving me full scholarships and paying for everything.

In Fudan, did you continue to focus on Buddhist thoughts or have you changed?

No, I’m still very interested in Buddhist thought in general, but my research focus moved over to Taoism. Yeah. Especially have you heard of the 马王堆?

马王堆.

Right. This is an archaeological site where they recovered a lot of documents and some of those documents are to do with Taoism, especially there's a type of Taoism called Huang Lao. The Huang is like Huang Di and the Lao is like Lao Zi.

This type of Taoism is a little bit more socially engaged. So like Zhuang Zi, he tends to be more like okay, we don't really want to pay too much attention to society. Maybe he thinks we have some duties to other people, but he tends to be a bit more individualistic focused on himself.

Whereas the Huang Lao is very focused on like how can we be a good leader, right? Like the Huang Di, right? How can you be a good leader? How can we organize society?

(It’s) More pragmatic, probably more pragmatic, more socially relevant.

Okay, before you drift off to very philosophical debate about your interest your major, let me bring you back to what are you doing your PhD in? Is it still Taoism now or have you moved over to another field?

So I'm very interested in Chinese 杂家, you have these books like the Huainan zi, where they mix things together. And I think that this is something I really love about, this Warring States period of Chinese history is the people they disagree, but they really talking to each other in a lot of details about why they disagree. And they're building new ideas from those disagreements.

So I think that's really...

... sort of very vibrant debates.

Exactly. And that's what I would like to do in the modern world. I would like to have this kind of global philosophy where you are putting these different ideas into conversation with each other, whether they're from the west or from India or China or somewhere else, right? Really...

The clashes of thoughts, sort of . Sounds great.