Hon-Yin and Suet-Fong Chan Professorship in Chinese

Professor Christopher Fraser is a leading figure in both the historical interpretation of Chinese philosophy and the study of its relevance to contemporary philosophical discourse.

Educated at Yale University, National Taiwan University, and The University of Hong Kong (HKU), Professor Fraser is the author of six books and some seventy book chapters and journal articles.

His work is distinguished by both its scope and its originality. He has published research on classical, medieval, and late imperial texts and thinkers, covering topics in ethics, politics, metaphysics, logic, language, epistemology, and psychology. His 2009 article “Action and Agency in Early Chinese Thought” was the first to point out the implications of classical Chinese logic for models of action and agency. His 2011 study “Knowledge and Error in Early Chinese Thought” presented a seminal account of how early Chinese thinkers understood the relation between mind and world. His 2013 work “Distinctions, Judgment, and Reasoning in Classical Chinese Thought” followed up with a groundbreaking interpretation of pre-Han models of perception, thought, and reasoning. He has also been a leader in the study of early Chinese philosophy of language and logic, with contributions including a new edition of the Mohist dialectical writings and several pioneering studies of the concept of truth in Chinese philosophy.

Professor Fraser’s recent monograph Zhuangzi: Ways of Wandering the Way (Oxford, 2024) proposes a new approach to understanding the ethics of the Zhuangzi. This work is the first of a planned three volumes exploring the implications of Daoist thought for contemporary discussions of agency and ethics. Another recent book, Late Classical Chinese Thought (Oxford, 2023), offers a magisterial tour of key issues in metaphysics, politics, ethics, psychology, epistemology, and philosophy of language and logic in the last century before the Qin unification. An earlier work, The Philosophy of the Mozi: The First Consequentialists (Columbia, 2016), presents a rigorous account of the influential but widely misunderstood Mohist movement, which shaped the shared conceptual framework of classical Chinese philosophical discourse while advocating influential ethical, social, and political ideals.

Professor Fraser sits on four editorial boards and has been a reader for some four dozen journals and presses. He has been invited to lecture in Amsterdam, Beijing, Budapest, Geneva, Leuven, Los Angeles, Montreal, New Brunswick, Sapporo, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney, Taipei, Thessaloniki, Tianjin, Toronto, and Vancouver.

Professor Fraser rejoins HKU from the University of Toronto, where he was Richard Charles and Esther Yewpick Lee Chair in Chinese Thought and Culture. In 2023–2024, he was Vice Chancellor Visiting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Previously he taught at CUHK from 2001–2009 and HKU from 2009–2021.