Shame and Happiness: A Philosophical Dialogue Across Ancient Greece and Early China

Dr ZHAO Jingyi is ISF Senior Research Fellow at the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge, and Needham Research Fellow, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. She is a 2024-25 Berggruen Fellow at the Berggruen Research Center at Peking University. Dr Zhao completed her BA, MPhil and PhD degrees in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge. Her research takes a cross-cultural comparative perspective on the ancient Greek and early Chinese philosophical traditions. She is contributor and co-editor of Ancient Greece and China Compared (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and author of Aristotle and Xunzi on Shame, Moral Education, and the Good Life (Oxford University Press, 2024). Dr Zhao has worked extensively in public outreach, having filmed for the BBC Documentary Story of China, been interviewed by the Guardian, and published a series of interviews with leading thinkers via her WeChat public account (jing yi fang tan “静一访谈”) and via journals and magazines.

Dr YUAN Ai is an associate professor at the Department of Philosophy at Tsinghua University. She received her D.Phil from the University of Oxford. She has been interested in Daoist philosophy and comparative philosophy. Yuan’s article was awarded first place in the ISCP Charles Fu Young Scholar Award and the SACP Young Scholar Award. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Early China, Philosophy East and West, and Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. She is currently working on three projects: her manuscript Nonverbal Communication in Early China; Dao Companion to the Philosophy of the Daodejing (Ai Yuan and Xiaogan Liu eds. forthcoming 2025) and Beyond Mohism: Logic in Early China (Fenrong Liu, Jeremy Seligman and Ai Yuan eds., forthcoming 2025).