January 29, 2027

Early China Seminar Lecture Series

The seminar will be in a hybrid mode. Remote attendees will be able to access seminar presentations online via Zoom. The Q&A sessions, however, will only be available to those who attend in person.

Title: “All Things Act: The Collective Character of Action”
Speaker: Mercedes Valmisa, Gettysburg College
Time: January 29, 2027 (4:30-6:30 PM EST)
Venue: Faculty House and Zoom

*Please check the announcement board in the first floor lobby for room information.
**Please use the ‘Request Pre-circulated Paper’ link to RSVP by January 23 . All visitors without a CUID are required to receive pre-authorization to gain access to Morningside campus as per guidelines of Columbia Morningside campus access. Attendees must present a government-issued ID with their name matching exactly the name registered for the event, along with an one-time QR code (via email), for entry.

This lecture reflects on how my study of early Chinese texts and material culture led me to develop the metaphysics of agency presented in All Things Act. Rather than approaching early Chinese thought primarily as an object of historical reconstruction, I treat it as a partner in contemporary philosophical inquiry: a source of concepts, arguments, and models that can transform the questions we ask about action and agency. All Things Act (OUP, 2025) reconceives action as something that is never performed by an individual alone. Actions emerge through relations among heterogeneous human and nonhuman actors, while agency names the distributed sociomaterial processes through which they become possible. This metaphysics does not simply extract a theory already contained in early Chinese sources. It develops through a dialogue between early Chinese texts and material culture and contemporary work in philosophy of action, metaphysics, and social ontology, with each reshaping how the other can be understood. As one example of this method, I show how the Xing zi ming chu and the Mengzi, read alongside contemporary theories of powers and dispositions, suggest an ecological conception of what things can do: powers emerge through contingent encounters between particular features and particular environments. I conclude by considering some consequences of this relational and ecological model, particularly for thinking about ability and disability and, if time permits, attribution and responsibility.