Eric Sheng

DPhil Student (Faculty of Philosophy)

College: Merton

Thesis topic: Gassendi on Pleasure and Happiness

Supervisors: Professor Roger Crisp and Sir Noel Malcolm

Research interests: European philosophy, and certain aspects of intellectual history more widely, from ca. 1500 to ca. 1940; political theory; metaphysics; social and moral philosophy (including social ontology, meta-ethics and the ethics of AI); the history of ethics.

My thesis is a study of the interpretation and defence of Epicurean hedonism – the view that happiness or the ultimate end of action consists in (a kind of) pleasure – by the seventeenth-century French philosopher, scientist and scholar Pierre Gassendi, in the form of an edition and English translation of, and commentary on, relevant sections of Gassendi’s Animadversiones (1649). A wider question of interest, as a contribution to answering which the thesis is in part intended, is how hedonism, still a marginal view in sixteenth-century Europe, became widely assumed by the eighteenth century.

I have also worked on other topics in the history of ethics, on theories of knowledge and belief in early modern Europe (thus far especially on Locke on testimony), and on 19th-century British philosophy. I also have wide interests in contemporary philosophy.

Background: I was an undergraduate at University College, Oxford reading History and then History and Politics (prox. acc. Gibbs Prize in History joint schools) and a postgraduate at Corpus Christi College, Oxford reading Philosophy (Gilbert Ryle Prize for best performance in the B.Phil.). I have also studied at the University of Sydney, the École normale supérieure and the École pratique des hautes études.

Website (listing publications, current research, and teaching): https://shengee.wordpress.com.