Wei Cheng received his Ph.D. from the Humboldt University in Berlin and is currently a (tenured) Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Peking University. His research interests include Plato, Aristotle, the Old Academy, and the ancient commentary tradition, as well as modern German philosophy (early Romanticism, Nietzsche, etc.), contemporary philosophy of mind, and moral psychology. Outside of philosophy, he is also interested in ancient Greek tragedy, the interaction of medicine and philosophy in antiquity, and the history of classical scholarship (for more information, see his homepage).

As a Berggruen China Center Fellow, he will work on the project “Genealogy of Negative Affects: Ancient Philosophy, Neuroscience, and Future Ethics”. This endeavor seeks to examine the properties, values, and meanings of negative affects—such as pain, suffering, distress, depression, and anxiety—from an interdisciplinary perspective, thereby reflecting on conceptions of the mind and ethical norms in both the ancient and contemporary worlds.