Hi, welcome to this site. My name is Huaping Lu-Adler. I am an associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown University. I specialize in 17th- and 18th-century western philosophy (especially John Locke, G. W. Leibniz, Emilie du Chatelet, and Immanuel Kant). The areas I focus on include philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophy of logic, and epistemic agency. Nowadays, I am writing a book on Kant’s views about race. Here is a video that I made to introduce myself to the students in my Fall 2020 classes.
Although as a scholar I specialize in Western philosophical traditions, my worldview is deeply rooted in my very traditional Chinese upbringing and especially in Chinese Buddhism (one of my favorite classes to teach at Georgetown is Classical Chinese Philosophy). The metaphor Indra’s Net, as explained in the following video, captures the core of that worldview, namely the belief that everything is interconnected.
I have taught History of Modern Philosophy to our philosophy majors at least once a year since I came to Georgetown in 2012. My syllabus has evolved over time. It has become ever more inclusive in terms of the philosophers we cover. One thing I’ve learned from the students I’ve taught is that they greatly appreciate many of the women philosophers studied in this class–especially Margaret Cavendish and Emilie du Chatelet–for their intellectual might and philosophical imagination. The students sometimes wonder: what if these women had not been ignored by historians for so long?
I have always wanted to build a website for this course, where I can deposit resources and feature my students’ work. There is no better time to start it than now, in the midst of a worsening Covid-19 pandemic, when we (professors and students alike) rely on a supportive virtual community more than ever. Let this site be my and my Fall 2020 class’s way of bearing witness to history from the vantage point of our lived experience, then.
