Wu Yi

Research Areas

PUBLICATIONS

Book

The Sea as Mirror: Essayings in and against Philosophy as History. Zürich: Diaphanes, 2021.

From reviews:

This is an astonishingly brilliant first book by one of the world's best new philosophical talents. Prepare to enter an entire world of watery pleasures by a mind that has the fluidity, tidal mobility and dread abysses of the oceans. Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research

When Nietzsche, in his Gay Science, urged: “Aboard ship! ye philosophers!” he held up a mirror to Western thinking … In her impressive study, Yi Wu embarks a whole crew of great thinkers, as well as of epoch-making politicians and poets, from Plato to Augustus and Shakespeare, from Kant to Heidegger and Woolf. Rather than merely providing metaphors, her book is an essay in the very best sense of the word: the methodologically unmethodical exploration of what might be called the maritime latency of philosophy. Burkhardt Wolf, Professor of German and Media Studies, University of Vienna

Rarely have I read such an original and beautifully written book that overflows in fresh insights on every page. Yi Wu takes us on an exciting philosophical and literary sea journey … Richard J. Bernstein, Vera List Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research

As Kafka once said, “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Yi Wu’s study is that kind of book. This brilliant book maps an unconscious history of the sea of the mind from which, suddenly, the oceanographic philosopher emerges. For what is at stake in Yi’s book is a new, androgynous type of philosophical writing and analysis. As Yi Wu’s book magnificently displays, writing a work of philosophy on the ocean turns into a philosophy spoken by the sea. Klaus Mladek, Associate Professor and Chair of German Studies, Dartmouth College

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

“Concept of the Maritime, or How to Decolonize the Uncolonizable with Hegel and Coleridge,” in Essays in Romanticism, VOL. 33.1 (2026), forthcoming.

《海上的查拉图斯特拉：永恒轮回与历史虚无主义之辩证法》同济大学学报（社会科学版），2023年第34卷第一期（CSSCI）

“Abyss or Khora: The Sea, Eternal Recurrence and Zarathustra’s Hospitality,” Filosofia, VOL. 67 (2022), Special Issue: The Sea, 55-68. https://doi.org/10.13135/2704-8195/7244.

“Mimesis as Poiesis: The Production and Reproduction of Likeness in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, VOL. 36, No. 3 (2022), 378-398.

“Arendt’s Historical Modernism: The Constitutive Role of the Historical for the Political in Hannah Arendt,” in Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History, VOL. 48, No. 1 (2020), 103-121.

“The Voyage of Human Reason in and beyond Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason,” in Idealistic Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, VOL. 50, No. 1 (2020), 73-91.

“The Historical and Its Discontents: Nietzsche and Benjamin against ‘Historicism’,” in The

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, VOL. 34, No. 1 (2020), 49-68.

“Philosophy as Memory Theatre: Plato’s Odyssey,” in POLITEIA: International Interdisciplinary Philosophical Review, VOL. 1, No. 3 (2019), 28-44.

“The Maritime Modernity of Hamlet,” in Coriolis: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Maritime

Studies, VOL. 8, No. 1 (2018), 33-49.

Book Chapter

“Heidegger’s Dialectical Image: The Work of Art as Stasis,” in Phenomenology in China, ed. Guang Yang. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, forthcoming.

“维米尔的寂静剧场”，《寂静的重量：西方艺术名作细读》沈语冰、鲁明军编，生活·读书·新知三联书店，即出

Book Review

Review of Simon Critchley, Tragedy, the Greeks and Us (Pantheon, 2019), in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, VOL. 40, No. 2 (2020), 605-609.

Works in Progress

“Tonalities of Hope: Variations on an Anthropological Theme” (under review)

“The Weight of Silence: Vermeer’s Theatre of Stillness” (under review)

“Stasis and Ek-stasis: Spatial Intentionality in Edward Hopper” (under review)

The Concept of the Maritime: The Sea as Theory (current book project).

SCHOLARSHIPS, GRANTS, AWARDS

2022 “In the Wake of the Plague: Eros & Mourning,” collaborative project with Klaus Mladek and James Godley, Dartmouth College. USD $90,000

2021 Speakers’ Fund, Society of Fellows, Dartmouth College (awarded for the speaker series, “Memory and Medium: After-Lives”). USD$7,497

2021 Venture Fund, Society of Fellows, Dartmouth College (awarded for the symposium, “In the Wake of the Plague: Eros and Mourning,” co-organizer with Klaus Mladek and James Godley). USD$3,500

2021 Speakers’ Fund, Society of Fellows, Dartmouth College (awarded for the speaker series, “No Places: Frontiers, Passages and Impasses”). USD$7,497

2020 Postdoctoral Fellowship, Society of Fellows, Dartmouth College.

2019 Stavros Niarchos Foundation Scholarship, The Graduate Center, City University of New York (withdrawn for health reason). USD$2,000

2018 Alfred Schutz Memorial Award for Best Dissertation in Philosophy and Sociology (awarded for the dissertation “The Sea and the Mirror: Essayings in Deterritorialization and Mimesis”), The New School for Social Research.

2018 NSSR Conference Fund for Kierkegaard as Educator: Paideia, Seduction and the Ways of the Negative, Department of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research. USD$1,900

2014-2017 The Alexander Onassis Family Foundation Fellowship in Ancient Greek Studies.

2016-2017 NSSR Travel Fund (awarded for the research trip to the Bosporus, the Cow’s

Crossing, as part of a larger research project on geo- and mytho-poetics). USD$328

2015-2016 NSSR Travel Fund (awarded for the research trip to the Straits of Gibraltar/Pillars of

Hercules as part of a larger research project on maritime modernity). USD$300

2014-2015 NSSR Travel Fund (awarded for the research trip to southeastern coastal China as part of a larger research project on maritime modernity). USD$300

2011-2012 NSSR Tuition Scholarship.

2011 M.Phil. thesis awarded Li Ka Shing Prize (The Best M.Phil. Thesis in the Faculties of Architecture, Arts, Business & Economics, Education, Law and Social Sciences), The University of Hong Kong. HKD$10,000

2009-2011 Postgraduate Studentship, The University of Hong Kong.

TALKS, CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS & ORGANIZATION

“Plato’s Memory Theatre: The Sea as Spirit” (柏拉图的记忆剧场：作为亡灵的海洋), School of Philosophy, Inner Mongolian University, May 2025.

“Eye of the Storm: Turner’s Haptic Vision and Maritime Modernity,” public lecture for the exhibition Dialogues with Turner: Evoking the Sublime, Museum of Art Pudong, May 2025.

“Maritime Khora: Errancy and Rhythm in Plato’s Timaeus,” Interality and Chorology in the Age of AI Symbiosis, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, April 2025.

Abstraction and Aura: Forum on Guangle Wang’s Exhibition “Dao,” Fosum Foundation, April 2025. Discussant.

“Husserl’s Pharmakon: Dialectic of Sedimentation and De-sedimentation,” What is Sedimentation? Consciousness, History, Language, Department of Philosophy, Chinese University of Hong Kong, December 2024.

“Mimesis and Its Others,” International Summer Program on Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, Fudan University, July 2024. Organizer. Speakers include: Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Klaus Mladek, Kejun Xia, Mingfeng Fu, Mingjun Lu.

“Stasis and Ek-stasis: Spatial Intentionality in Edward Hopper,” Fudan University Annual Forum, May 2024.

“From Inwardness to Infinity: Hammershøi’s Strandgade 30,” Space of Art Forum, Fudan University & Peking University, December, 2023.

“Sea of Fold: On Laurent Nogues’ Paper Art,” Sinan Mansion, August 2023.

“The Weight of Stillness: Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance,” Fudan University, July 2023.

“Traces of the Spirit: Hegel and Coleridge on the Maritime,” Fudan University Annual Forum, May 2023.

“Light and Interiority: Weltinnenraum in Hopper’s Room by the Sea,” Fudan University, March 2023.

“Fug and Becoming: The Political Theology of Porcelain China in Jianhua Liu’s Work,” Fosun Foundation, October 2022.

Comment on Yuk Hui’s Art and Cosmotechnics, Fudan University, October 2022.

“Memory and Medium: After-Lives,” Speaker Series with Geoffrey Bennington and Caroline van Eck, Dartmouth College, Spring 2022.

“Quarantine Spatiality: A Topography of Eros,” Panel: Eros, War and Threnody, In the Wake of the Plague: Eros and Mourning, panelist and co-organizer (with Klaus Mladek and James Godley), Dartmouth College, April. 21-24, 2022. Other speakers include: Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič, Simon Critchley, Arlene Saxonhouse, Rebecca Comay, Andrea Nightingale, et al.

“Plato’s Memory Theatre: The Sea as Spirit” (柏拉图的记忆剧场：作为亡灵的海洋), School of Philosophy, Fudan University, Oct. 12. 2021.

“The Woman from Whom I Wanted Children: Eternity, Maternity and the Übermensch,” September 2021, 26th International Conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society: What if Truth Were a Woman? On Nietzsche, Women, and Philosophy.

“The Birth of Values out of the Depths of the Ocean: Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence and the Dialectics of Historical Nihilism” (价值由海底升起: 尼采的永恒轮回与历史虚无主义的辩证法), School of Philosophy, Fudan University, June. 21. 2021.

“Guiltless though the guilt is still mine”: The Impotentiation of Truth in Euripides’ Helen,” Panel: Antigone & Co., Tragedy and Philosophy—Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought Annual Conference, Goldsmiths, University of London, June 4, 2021.

“On Absentees: Comment on Daniel Heller-Roazen, Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons,” Speaker Series: No Places: Thinking on Frontiers, Passages and Impasses, Organizer and Discussant, Comparative Literature Program & Society of Fellows, Dartmouth College, April. 13, 2021.

“The Concept of the Maritime, or How to De-colonize the Un-colonizable with Hegel and Coleridge,” Panel: Reconsidering Romanticism: A Transnational Perspective, American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Annual Meeting, Jan 11, 2020.

“Philosophy as Memory Theatre: Plato’s Odyssey,” The 14th Annual International Conference on Philosophy, Athens Institute for Education and Research, May 27, 2019, Athens, Greece.

“On Being Seduced: Response to Daniel Berthold, Kierkegaard’s Seductions: The Ethics of Authorship,” Symposium: Kierkegaard as Educator: Paideia, Seduction and the Ways of the Negative, Organizer and Respondent, Department of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research, May 4, 2019.

“Zarathustra’s Hospitality: To the South of Politics,” Panel: Race, Subjectivity, and the Other: Hamman, Hegel, Schlegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Annual Meeting, Jan 9, 2019.

“From the Republic to the Empire: Augustan Strategies of Re-territorializing the Mediterranean,” Panel: Uncertainties, Conference: Flux: State(s) of Change—Anthropology Graduate Student Conference, The New School for Social Research, April 29, 2017.

COURSES TAUGHT & OTHER TEACHING EXPERIENCE

Graduate course Contemporary Western Philosophy of Art” 《当代西方艺术哲学》，Fudan University, Spring 2024.

Undergraduate course “Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art,” Fudan University, Fall 2023.

Graduate course “Frontiers of Art Theory”《艺术理论前沿问题研究》, Fudan University, Fall 2023.

Graduate course “Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Aesthetics” 《现象学、诠释学美学》，Fudan University, Spring 2023.

Undergraduate course “Tragedy and Philosophy”《悲剧与哲学》, Fudan University, Spring 2023.

Undergraduate course “Ein Meister Aus Deutschland”: Heidegger, Arendt, Benjamin and Gadamer. Fudan University, Fall 2022.

Lecturer for undergraduate course “Seas and Empires,” Dartmouth College, Winter 2022

Guest lecture on Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (B) for undergraduate course “Kierkegaard and the Modern World,” Department of Philosophy, Eugene Lang College, Fall 2018

Instructor for undergraduate course “Existentialism,” Department of Philosophy, Purchase College, State University of New York, Spring 2018

Research Assistant for Prof. James Dodd, Department of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research, Spring 2018

Research Assistant for Prof. Simon Critchley’s book manuscript on Greek tragedy and philosophy, Tragedy, the Greeks and Us, Department of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research, Fall 2017-Fall 2018

Teaching Assistant for Prof. Simon Critchley’s graduate course “Tragedy’s Philosophy,” Department of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research, Spring 2017

Teaching Assistant for Prof. James Dodd’s graduate course “Philosophy and the Great War,” Department of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research, Fall 2014

Research Assistant for Prof. Joseph C.W. Chan on the nature of the political in classical Chinese thought, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Hong Kong, 2008-2009