Welcome to the website of Bryan W. Van Norden!  

Bryan W. Van Norden is James Monroe Taylor Chair in Philosophy at Vassar College (USA), and Chair Professor in the School of Philosophy at Wuhan University (China).  Van Norden has published ten books on Chinese and comparative philosophy, including Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy (2011), Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto (2017), Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy:  Han to the 20th Century (2014, with Justin Tiwald), Classical Chinese for Everyone: A Guide for Absolute Beginners (2019), and most recently the third edition of Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy (2023, with P.J. Ivanhoe).  Van Norden’s video lecture series on Chinese philosophy is freely available online, as is a Ted-Ed video on Confucius he wrote, which has over a million views.

Van Norden has published a number of essays as a public intellectual, and is a two-time winner of the American Philosophical Association Public Philosophy Op-Ed Prize. Among his most discussed essays for the general public are “Confucius on Gay Marriage” “If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is” (co-authored with Jay Garfield), “The Ignorant Do Not Have a Right to an Audience,” and “Was This Ancient Taoist the First Philosopher of Disability?” (co-authored with John Altmann). Van Norden was recently the host of a documentary for China Central Television (CCTV): “Wisdom of China: Laozi” (中国智慧。老子篇). One of Van Norden’s recent public lectures was on the benefits of studying philosophy: “Studying Philosophy Is Useless: Except to Scientists, Businesspeople, Attorneys, Physicians, Clergy, Artists, Activists, Influencers, War Heroes, and Citizens of a Democracy." Some of Van Norden’s other popular essays may be found on his substack, “The Doc Talks.”

A recipient of Fulbright, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Mellon fellowships, Van Norden has been honored as one of The Best 300 Professors in the US by The Princeton Review. From 2017-2020, Van Norden was Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.  (He wrote about his experience and the fate of Yale-NUS in “The Global Fight for the Humanities.”) His books and articles have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Estonian, Farsi, German, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish. His hobbies are poker (he has played in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas) and video games.