Alina Wang

I like Kant and the phenomenological tradition and tend to be influenced by their ideas. Currently, I’m thinking about language use. What are phenomenological and functional differences between perceptual experience and imaginative experience enabled by language use? For example, it seems that objects disclosed by perception typically show up involuntarily and as part of reality, but that doesn’t seem to necessarily be the case for those disclosed by language. How else do these kinds of experience differ? I’m interested in the implications such questions might have for our understanding of freedom and creativity.

Buddhist philosophy and the history of science (especially of psychology, psychiatry, and medicine) are also important to me. I’ll happily draw your portrait if you ask, although there is no guarantee it’d look like you!