Sonya Özbey

Sonya is a scholar of early Chinese thought and early modern European philosophy. Drawing on methods developed by sinologists, philosophers, intellectual historians, and literary critics, her research revolves around questions of difference, identity formation, and power in diverse philosohical works. She is particularly interested in the conceptual and rhetorical tools that thinkers in different times and milieus have deployed to imagine, explain, and justify their social worlds and in the possibilities and limitations such texts present to us today in regard to the ways we envision our own world.

Sonya's first book, Different Beasts: Humans and Animals in Spinoza and the Zhuangzi (Oxford University Press, 2024) studies the human-animal distinction as articulated in the ancient Chinese text known as the Zhuangzi 莊子 and in the works of the seventeenth-century European philosopher, Benedict de Spinoza. The book brings together philosophical works from distant and different pasts to bear on contemporary debates regarding the human-animal distinction in its many constructions. By demonstrating how, in these two very philosophies, notions of humanness and animality intersect with ideas of human unity and solidarity, social order, and categories of difference, such as gender, descent, ability, Different Beasts aims to open new paths for understanding Spinoza and the Zhuangzi, while also developing methodological insights into the practice of cross-cultural comparative philosophy. 

Apart from this monograph, in recent years, Sonya has completed several smaller projects. The article "Undermining the Person, Undermining the Establishment in the Zhuangzi" (Comparative and Continental Philosophy, 2018) explores notions of personhood in the Zhuangzi, situating them within the text's criticism of apparatuses of governmentality, rather than connecting them, as commonly interpreted, to a goal of uncovering a "natural" or "authentic" core of self. The chapter, "On Beastly Joys and Melancholic Passions: Cross-Species Communication of Affects in Spinoza and the Zhuangzi" (Dao Companion to the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi, 2022), introduces a theme later elobarated in her book, focusing on anxieties related to connecting with animal affects. A third article "Unmaking Roles in the Zhuangzi: Performances of Compliance, Defiance, and the In-Between" (Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, 2024), calls attention to the politically ambivalent layers of the Zhuangzi, in contrast to the prevailing interpretations that emphasize either the politically defiant or apolitical layers of this composite text.