Ying Yao holds an MA in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Prior to that, she studied philosophy, psychology, and the visual arts at Boston University.
Ying’s main philosophical interest lies at the intersection of philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, and phenomenology, and has revolved around experience, temporality, and normativity. She is particularly interested in the examination of the structure of experience through the lens of temporality, on the one hand, and how experience could be illuminating, expressive, or generative of normativity, on the other. During her previous studies, she has done work examining the structure that distinguishes and demarcates various experiences and mental processes, including visual perception, the phenomena of absence in perceptual and non-perceptual experience, the prospect of death, the experience of grief, pain, and the process of conceptual formation. Most recently, she has been examining how grief, when proactively evoked by a practice of imagination of possible but unanticipated loss, could reorient the temporal viewpoint of our attention and subsequently cultivate one's attentiveness to morally relevant facts and moral reasons.
Ying is drawn to investigating attention for attention structures experience over time and underlie acts in general and reason-responsive action in particular --- bringing together both strands of her philosophical interest. Her PhD project with GOODATTENTION and SalientSolutions at UiO delves into the relationship between the temporal dimension and the normative implication of attention. Her investigation will be along the following interconnected lines:
(1) Are there norms of attention pertaining to the temporal dimension of attention? In other words, are there temporal parameters of attention that are of normative significance?
(2) How does attention, as it temporally structures our experience over time and figures into our perception of reality, capacity for reasoning and action, serve as a source and expression of normativity, possibly across domains?
(3) How are norms of attention and norms as attention, as examined in (1)&(2), related; and how can we cultivate such normative attention and normatively-enabling attention through time, individually and collectively?
Relatedly, Ying is particularly interested in how certain experiences (moral emotions, limit-experience, aesthetic and religious experience) could temporally restructure and reorient our attention in distinct ways that are of normative significance and, in so doing, how they could be adopted as practices of attention. These lines of investigation will inform how certain infrastructure of salience, as curbed and channelled by technology, public space, language, art, could be conducive to or disabling to the kind of attention that embodies certain temporal features, which safeguard or undermine the normative sight and motivational structure that instantiate and protects autonomy and humanity.
In between her philosophy lives, Ying has been an avid dragon boater and a community organizer in Vancouver, a practitioner dwelling in Zen Centre and a bookstore keeper in Boston. When not contemplating at her desk, you can find her contemplating through walking, cooking (among other creative practices), and listening to (--- at times through playing) Bach.