Philosopher; Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Peking University. Zhan received academic degrees from Leipzig University, LMU Munich, and Peking University. Before joining Peking University, he served as a Lecturer and later as an Associate Professor in the School of Philosophy at Beijing Normal University.

His research lies at the intersection of the philosophy of artificial intelligence, formal epistemology, and the metaphysics of science. His broader research interests include modal metaphysics, group ontology, plural logic, the semantics of conditionals, and conceptual engineering.

His recent work examines philosophical questions concerning inquiry, decision-making, and epistemic and practical rationality. He extends these questions to generative AI and machine cognition, with particular attention to consciousness, agency, goal formation, and value orientation in artificial agents.

As a Berggruen Fellow, Zhan will investigate the nature and future of human agency in the age of artificial intelligence. His project develops a theoretical account of “vision” as a mid-level structure of human normative agency. At its core, the project asks a broader question: as intelligent systems become increasingly involved in how people understand themselves and plan their futures, how should we rethink, protect, and expand the human capacity to form, sustain, and revise visions of what is worth pursuing?

Zhan will also pursue a project exploring the present and future roles of philosophy and the humanities in AI research and industry. The project seeks, on the one hand, to encourage the AI sector to reassess the potential value of philosophical and humanistic inquiry and, on the other, to identify realistic directions for the transformation of university-based teaching, research, and training in philosophy and the humanities in the age of AI.