Please welcome Alexus McLeod as a member of the Asian/Asian American Studies Institute’s core faculty. He returns to the University of Connecticut as Assistant Professor in Philosophy and Asian/Asian American Studies, and will teach Classical Chinese Philosophy and Culture (AASI 3998 – section 6 / PHIL 3264) that is scheduled to meet MWF 1:25pm -2:15pm.
Professor McLeod specializes in Early Chinese Philosophy and Comparative Philosophy, and his research interests include Indian Philosophy, Mesoamerican (Maya) Philosophy, Philosophy of Language, Metaphysics, Ethics, and History and Philosophy of Science.
His most recent book is a monograph forthcoming with Lexington Books: Philosophy of the Ancient Maya: Lords of Time, a comparative work on Pre-Columbian Maya Philosophy and Early Chinese Philosophy. His other books include: another monograph, Theories of Truth in Chinese Philosophy: A Comparative Approach (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2015), on the concept of truth in early Chinese thought from the Analects through the philosophers of the Eastern Han period; an introductory textbook, Understanding Asian Philosophy: Ethics in the Analects, Zhuangzi, Dhammapada, and Bhagavad Gita (Bloomsbury, 2014), in which he focuses on self-cultivation, right action, and thriving in the Chinese and Indian philosophical traditions; and Astronomy in the Ancient World: Early and Modern Views of Celestial Events (Springer, 2016), which discusses philosophical presuppositions of astronomical systems in the pre-modern world in China, India, the Americas, and Europe.
He is currently in the process of finishing two books, a monograph on the Eastern Han Dynasty Philosopher Wang Chong, and a monograph based roughly on his dissertation, on the issues of individual and communal agency and moral responsibility in early Confucianism and Daoism. He is also editor of the forthcoming volume Bloomsbury Research Handbook in Early Chinese Ethics and Political Philosophy (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2017). And, with Joshua Brown (University of Dayton) he is working on a monograph on the issue of transcendence and naturalism in early Chinese thought.
Alexus McLeod has published numerous articles in Philosophy East and West, Dao: A Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Comparative Philosophy, International Communication of Chinese Culture, and in other journals and books. He is the series editor of the Critical Inquiries in Comparative Philosophy book series (Rowman and Littlefield International), which publishes volumes in Chinese and Indian Philosophy as well as Comparative Philosophy more generally. He served on the organizing committee of the 2013 Midwest Conference on Chinese Thought, hosted in Dayton, where Dr. McLeod spent 5 years following completion of his doctoral studies under Joel Kupperman (Emeritus, UConn – Philosophy).