FRANKLIN PERKINS

Professor

Sakamaki Hall B-302B
t: 956-7288
e: perkinsf@hawaii.edu

Ph.D. Pennsylvania State University
Classical Chinese Philosophy, Early Modern European Philosophy, Comparative Philosophy

Franklin Perkins received his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University and has been a professor at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) and at DePaul University (Chicago), where he was also director of the Chinese Studies Program. His main teaching and research interests are in classical Chinese philosophy, early modern European philosophy, and in the challenges of doing philosophy in a comparative or intercultural context. In the past few years, he has been focused particularly on the philosophical significance of recently excavated Chinese texts that were buried around 300 BCE.  He is the author of Heaven and Earth are not Humane: The Problem of Evil in Classical Chinese Philosophy (Indiana, 2014), Leibniz: A Guide for the Perplexed(Bloomsbury, 2007), and Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light (Cambridge, 2004), and he was co-editor (with Chenyang Li) of Chinese Metaphysics and Its Problems(Cambridge, 2015). His books have been translated into Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese. He is editor of the journal Philosophy East and West.